i.am.alive.with.pleasure.

a quick one.

2007-11-21T14:13:00.000-05:00

...about filesharing.
I'm for it, to a degree. I have several gigabytes of music on my hard-drive, and I would say I'm passionate about music. I also buy CDs, T-shirts, patches and pins, and go to shows regularly. I consider music to be 'shareware', I download albums, and if they begin to reverberate emotionally with me, I'll go and buy the album.
If I bother to learn parts of the lyrics, I'll buy it.
If I create a long-term memory that somehow includes that music, I'll buy it.
If I feel a vibration, somewhere in my chest, around sternum-level, or if it feels in one blessed moment that my sinus cavities have turned into cathedrals, then that for me is an emotional connection, and I'll buy your album.

Erm, disclaimer.
By 'buy', I actually mean I'll put it on a short list to buy when I actually have disposable income. Sorry. Also, if I'm living out of a backpack on somebody's couch, I might just procrastinate before I commit to lugging the tangible copy of your song around on my back. Sorry.

Now, I also play music. And I also record music, and that becomes little mp3 files that slowly dribble around teh interwubs. We've given our music away for free mostly. And the whole 'making a living at it' is something that we don't discuss with seriousness.

So how would I feel about filesharing if I was poor old gene simmons?

I doubt I would feel differently about it.

For me, the purpose of music is a tool, to promote community cohesion. My background is punk. In my self-aggrandizing daydreams, I look forward to the day that my music has an audience that is consistent, believes some of the same things that I do, and participates with us in larger projects. Also, it would be cool if there was enough to fill a basement, and they danced. In the daytime, we build our bikes or teach each other strange and wonderful things. We get dirty. At night, we feed ourselves and play music to each other. I know their names, they know mine. We can agree or argue, but never doubt our abilities or intentions. Like I said, it's a daydream, but there have been worse ways to live, no?

Notice how some parts of that daydream are as problematic as the model of music as 'commodity.' As participants in a community that I in some small way define, I expect a certain amount of common interest and participation. I also assume that they would feel compelled to buy a tangible form of the music, rather than to take advantage of the free copies floating around in ether. They, like me, would create an idea of community based on the free-floating and utterly unrealistic poetry of culture. They would commit to participation in said community partly in terms of buying.

Music as definer of community, and music as mere commodity. These two conceptions of music are in conflict, though not always mutually exclusive. After all, we do live in a world with price tags on everything, and I don't think it's purely a commercial act to buy an album or patch, any more than it's a capitalist act to offer your couch to a musician on tour. I don't think turning your back on all forms of tangible music makes you more 'pure' in an anti-consumerist sense. But there always exists a tension, because culture is in some ways a poor substitute for true community, and needlessly divisive, and can quickly become distracting.

I've long since given up thinking that the totality of 'punk' can maintain this semblance of community. They may go to the same shows as I do, may dance to the same words and music, and while for me those words ask questions of the world that demand answers, I might quickly find that for them, those words are a distraction and mean nothing. Or I may play a show, and find that for the audience, the songs were about finding 'pure chakrahs' or that 'masons control the world.' Or that it was a distraction from getting drunk and high. Poof! Back to reality, back to work.

Is it because the consumerist mentality has infiltrated so deeply, that it's difficult for people to really involve themselves in music and culture as anything more than a commodity? Or is it because the punk mentality has taught me to put too much faith in something that, ultimately, really isn't that important?

this may be of interest...

2007-09-05T23:11:00.000-04:00

...to punkers and lovers of 'zines.

Archives of Maximumrocknroll, Heartattack, Suburban Voice, etc.!

There goes my free time...

enjoy

culpability.

2007-08-27T01:54:00.000-04:00

I thought this was good.

Gee, now that the blog has become the default form for most info on the web, what with comment boxes and Digg buttons everywhere, I have new ways of getting myself enraged. For example, I know all I have to do is find an article or opinion piece on Iraq, scroll down to read messages, and there'll be some meathead there spouting the same old crap. I really think somebody is paying these guys.

But wait-

All I want to do is ask how in the hell they expect to be forgiven. But for what? Obviously they're not the ones fighting. They pay taxes, yes. Most Americans do. And what's clear is that public opinion does not matter to those in power. Even overwhelming opposition causes them no obstacles, because Americans are beset by ideas of futility.

Why get angry at someone who's powerless?

They have emotionally attached themselves to the destiny of a murderous occupation. That is a psychological construct, it isn't real. They overcome the truth of their powerlessness this way. Powerlessness is indeed a sickening feeling.

more later, I'm late for work...!

HA!

2007-08-23T00:29:00.000-04:00

Well, look who finally got caught with their hands in the cookie jar:
Undercover cops tried to incite violence in Montebello
youtube

I dunno, is all this Web 2.0 revolution crap finally paying off? When I caught this article on CBC, I was excited. For years they've pulled this stunt.

More likely, however, is that Canadians in general will respond with their characteristic passivity. I was a little disappointed to hear the 'estimated' protest numbers coming from the media. A safe calculation is to take their number and double it. Even so, not very compelling, considering that the SPP is something that presses a lot of nationalist buttons. You can count on Canadians being proud of not being American, and not much else. (Geeze, I'm sounding judgemental... it's because I've away for too long.)

Meanwhile, in Korea, the famous South Korean protester has been keeping a low profile. The media here is even more controlled than in my native land, and I was away during the last big anti-FTA demo. The good news there is that the Korean regime was able to extract some concessions from the Americans, due in no small part to the influence of the street. Still, I've been keeping my eyes open so I can participate in some activist tourism.

I've been pondering a long 'Korea vs. Canada' comparison, but I become all too aware that I probably don't understand either place very much. Every time I come across a 'cultural observation' in a tour guide or messageboard, it gets deflated once I encounter it myself. Countries are only people, fenced off, minding their own business. How do you translate that into thoughtful observations? You don't, obviously. You twist it into shitty stand-up comedy.

exhibit A.

2007-07-01T00:04:00.000-04:00

Now, I don't remember seeing goofy pictures like these in the newspaper when the Olympics are on. And yet: goofy faces. Crotch. It's immature to be amused by these. Or is it?

Humanity loves ourselves, and we love the myth of beauty through physical prowess. And it's pretty impressive to drive to drive your meat through the air half an inch higher than anyone else ever. And the natural result of this: funny exertion faces. I'd like to see funny exertion faces sculpted onto all the Greek porno sculptures in all the porno museums.

It stands to reason that pictures with funny exertion faces and crotch contact are censored from newspapers and magazines. Such a trivial thing, isn't it? But it makes all the difference in the world. We're still in love with beauty myths. Editors will say it's to maintain the dignity of 'our brave atheletes.' Dignity is one thing we can't afford anymore.

It's all random, but it's surprising how well they match up.

2007-05-14T00:38:00.000-04:00

Family Circus and Nietzsche

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T07:19:00.000-04:00

Eerily, just as I was re-reading Breakfast of Champions.

"...can't happen here..." / 4am homesickness.

2007-02-13T22:48:00.000-05:00

...think again. The 'counter-insurgency' tactics never seem to change much; this reminds me a lot of the paramilitaries in Oaxaca, but it comes from my parents' generation, concealed in an obituary for an actor...
who's afraid of Peter Boyle

On May 4, Ohio National Guardsmen shot four students at Kent State. On May 8, in a spring rain, students from colleges all over New York City gathered at Federal Hall on Wall Street to remember them and protest the Cambodia invasion. Suddenly, from every direction, 200 construction workers bore down on them. In their identical brown overalls, they looked like some sort of Storm Trooper battalion. They carried American flags, of the sort that topped off construction sites. They started berating the police: why weren’t there flags on the flag poles in front of Federal Hall? Had the hippies stolen them? (Actually, per federal regulations, flags were not flying due to inclement weather.) The hard hats then burst through the line of police, who didn’t seem particularly anxious to stop them. The hippies who didn’t manage to melt away were beaten mercilessly, some with building trade implements wrapped in American flags.

This snippet of information came as a surprise to me, obviously. As much as I've liked to berate the hippies as being a revolution of narcissism, well, I guess there's a lot about that time I don't know.

I always hated the opium-white remembrances of the 'sixties' from aging baby-boomers... 'those were magical times...' peace and love..... Oh Wait:

This was a wise observation—wiser than Slater’s, or the makers of Joe, who fantasized the left-wing reaction to bourgeois alienation was purely innocent. It wasn’t. A perverse pleasure can be had in seeing the characters one identifies with depicted as enlightened apostles of peace and love, then watching as they are mowed down as the victims of sadistic know-nothings. Indeed, Pauline Kael came up with a label for this particular neurosis: “liberal masochism.” That explains why legions of countercultural youth flocked to see Joe—and stood up at the end, shrieking almost joyfully: “I’m going to shoot back, Joe!”

Being in Korea has been like an unintended vacation from everything I know, except for food and sleep. I intended it to be a shock to my system, not because I was feeling tired or restless, but because my life was feeling too right, and too comfortable, and I had a horror of humming along content for another five years before realizing I had suddenly become too old to do anything new. I guess that sounds ridiculous from somebody in their twenties.

Congruent to that is the fact that I had become too complacent about political action. As long as the social network of activists, anarchists and fellow-travellers was accessible, I could keep showing up to the parties and putting off any significant investments into projects... I could 'wait for the perfect project', the one that lacked any perceivable flaws whatsoever. In the meantime, I could get drunk with people I liked and respected. Now, sitting in an apartment away from all that, I realize that I don't just miss the people, I miss the struggle. Or rather, I don't just miss the people in the context of getting drunk and playing music, but also from the joys and agonies (and occasional drudgeries) of political activism. Yeah, drudgeries too, because 80% of folk war is peeling potatoes, just like any other kind of war. And we can't all be travelling musicians... no wait, scratch that... we can't all be travelling musicians all the time. Somebody's gotta tend to the gardens, and children, and stills.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly wasting my time here feeling sorry for myself... it's been a blast. Every couple of weeks, even now, I get a shot of utter joyful shock.... waitaminute... I'm-- me-- I'm in Korea right now! Holy shit! Most of the time, the kids wipe me out, and I sleep like a log. Then, homesickness builds up inside me and waits for the right night to keep me awake until 4am.

And the thing that scares me the most is this: I promise myself that I am coming home. But memories of the city and the people I love, and the adrenaline of political action-- they all come out feeling like nostalgia. They feel like my halcyon sixties, and I'm not ready to become that crotchety old rememberer who bores everybody around him with the 'good ol' days o' struggle', as if the youth aren't struggling at this very minute. Fuck nostalgia. I am in horror not of getting older, but of getting old.

...It's a good healthy sensation to be thinking these things, and feeling this way about them. Because none of these things are dead, and absence is making the heart grow fonder. I promise myself a lot of things at 4am on a school night, and those promises turn the nostalgia into things alive, hope and excitement for the future...

...in the meantime, Holy shit, I'm still in Korea!

what he said.

2007-01-21T00:04:00.001-05:00

...yeah.

The failure of image management is no trivial matter. We might go so far as to say that this alone indicates the final failure of the Neo-Conservative project, which, after all, was supposed to be about generating popular images and myths. No image which the US military-industrial-entertainment complex has produced in the last half decade can compare even remotely with the TV pictures of the twin towers collapsing, which remain - by some distance - the most significant semiotic event of the century. Instead of countering 9/11, indeed, the images of US bombing raids on Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to belong to the same symbolic moment. Rather than some succesfully stage-managed US photograph, it is the improvised Snuff of Abu Ghraib which has come to represent the campaign in Iraq. Saddam's execution may have been intended as a moment of closure, but it signalled quite the opposite: the horrors continue. The images of Saddam being taunted by hooded figures horribly rhyme with the Abu Ghraib pictures.

"against america..."

2007-01-08T11:56:00.000-05:00

...ever notice that concepts that are fossilized are suddenly under more threat than dynamic ones?

For example, if you are opposed to the tenets of situationism, you are simply not a situationist. It is either a part of an identity that are you claim, or it isn't. But being 'anti-american'... is what exactly? What is its definition?

Racism is doubly tragic, for it is steeped in meaninglessness. Say what you will about fascism, at least it is an ethos. But to be a self-described anti-semite is to oppose a concept-- racial identity-- that is so utterly ossified, that it can only be identified by the barest of visual cues. Or, if you saw any of those Howard Stern skits where they goaded that klansman scumbag into trying to guess the 'famous jew', not even that. They are at war with a concept of a human being that they can't even pick out of a crowd.

It is a characteristic of all human identities, flawed or otherwise, that you either embrace your values, or you don't. It is the characteristic of all tyrannies that they be selected by default, that they be identified by their concrete fixtures and by their institutional signifiers, ie. big fuckin' ugly statues and bureaucracy buildings. It is the characteristic of all tyrannies that they only be defined by their absence. The Straussians craved war, because they believed it would give the lives of Americans meaning... and thus their meaning is death. Death of 'heroes' motivates a continuation of hostilities, concealing the pretexts for war. It this will suffice only because the living are exempt from 'hero' status. Similarly, the persecution of the 'anti' gives meaning to the home front, and that meaning is murder for its own sake.

I beg of you, don't be like me, and call yourself 'anti-capitalist' for years and years. Be something. The Marxians can't even agree on a solid definition of capitalism, and I would argue that the history of colonialism is not evidence of capitalism, but of its absence, and the existence of something much worse. (see also: communism)

The institutions of the future will resemble the spaces in which punk bands rehearse: they will exist for moments that will be glamorized for decades, and they will collapse into confusion and infighting. This is the way of nature; for in the time that they were right and justified, they existed. And when their reason for existence was forgotten, they ceased to exist. No greater glory can occur. And when their glory is recalled and properly understood, another generation will take on the responsibility. These are the shabby institutions of humanity. All else are concrete walls that do carve the synapses of coerced existence.

We must be the ones that say yes...

'Common Sense' is to be distinguished from ideas shared by most

2007-01-02T08:47:00.000-05:00

Something you've already read, probably: digital maoism. Snip:

It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual.
I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. I have even been part of a wiki about wikis. What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization. Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.

When I came across this essay when it was first written, I dismissed as yet another smear piece on Wikipedia, which seemed to be very fashionable. A second reading has revealed it to be a lot more thoughtful and nuanced than I thought.

I think it's important to distinguish between varying shades of aggregator: you've got on one hand experiments like fark and indymedia, that rise and fall with the strength of the personalities behind them. Even then, an unspoken consensus seems to emerge according to 'traditions' of humour or commentary. On the other hand, you have emergent forms of aggregators, based not on commentary but on constant evaluation. For example, Amazon, which begun offering only reviews of books. Then, it was necessary to review the reviews, and the reviewers themselves. Most 'aggregators' now conceal actual human words behind another link, leaving only an aggregate numerical evaluation. It's an important distinction, if only for aesthetic reasons: one form of aggregation celebrates the conflict that characterizes our shrivelled commons, while the other conceals it and integrates it into a sleek facade.

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too "Dead White Men."

Really? The faux-authoritative voice of 'dead white men', proven to be just as (sometimes more) counter-factual on average than wikipedia, is somehow more infused with authorial voice, and thus meaning, and thus objectivity? I mean, it's been awhile since I picked up the Britannica, but... I do not recall there being much of an authorial voice. Or context.

Objectivity is a term that is noticeably absent from 'Digital Maoism', even though it lies at the crux of the argument: the author is arguing against the postmodernist idea of the Death of the Author, and arguing that a human voice is necessary to maintain a semblance of objectivity. In some ways, that is certainly a refreshing argument. But by necessity the argument must fall back onto reactionary ideas about the site of collectivism versus individualism, and the nature of authority.

Yes, there have been plenty of scandals in government, the academy and in the press. No mechanism is perfect, but still here we are, having benefited from all of these institutions. There certainly have been plenty of bad reporters, self-deluded academic scientists, incompetent bureaucrats, and so on. Can the hive mind help keep them in check? The answer provided by experiments in the pre-Internet world is "yes," but only provided some signal processing is placed in the loop.

So we have started from a passionate criticism of 'collectivism in large organizations', to a wholesale defense of a 'pre-internet' order. Reread the first quote:

We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member... I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization.

Are these not the defining characteristics of the institutions themselves? In his rush to declaim the rise of a more efficient aggregation of 'common sense', the author has adopted rather quaint notions about the 'good old days' of the free market, and the objectivity and democracy industries. Thus demonstrating a comfortable awareness of 'common sense', but not truth.

The truth is that 'common sense' is neither an aggregation of the collective will, or the product of co-operation between hive-mind and individuals. 'Common sense' is a product, manufactured... the author's conception of the free market is a dangerous abstraction, a mirage of something that has never existed in any concrete form. When capitalism was being conceived, it was a time of great state involvement in trade, and... well, actually, most people call it genocide. Capitalism existed first as an alibi for theft. And it continued in that regard for five hundred years. And it continues today. Europe's development cannot be understood correctly without also simultaneously understanding colonialism. And not just in vague, handwringing, bleeding-heart terms; in bloody-fistful-of-dollar terms. We decry slavery but who knows the actual number of people killed? We know the number of Jews killed by Hitler, that is common sense. We do not know the numbers of Africans killed, or the amount of wealth taken from Africa and used to fuel Europe's 'development.' That is not common-sensical. It is not a useful number.

See, if I were to post this on a news-aggregator, I would come off as 'shrill.' This is an epithet for excess emotion, and an unwillingness to lapse into faux-objective euphemism. And so I do have sympathy for the author's skepticism towards internet collectivism. But this form of filtering is much, much older than the internet or wikipedia. People have long ago learned to imitate the 'authoritative voice' in order to 'be taken seriously' in discussion. Faux-authoritative voice is a mode of monologue that is anything but individual, whether it originates from 'wikitopians' or 'dead old men.' It is jargon that invites or excludes. It is mainstreamism.

Unfortunately, these filters of 'common sense' do not originate with the supremacy of mass media, and they are not abolished by the emergence of user-based or hive-mind media. Common sense is not defined by the masons or by overt conspiracy. But it is defined by what is and isn't politically expedient, and they incorrectly quantify perceptions or manage them to realms of pre-arranged possibility. And yet, at midnight somewhere in America two strangers will have a conversation where they both agree that leaders are monsters, that their lives are driven by outside forces, that 'things are going to hell', and that there's not much that either of them can do about it but take another hefty pull from the bottle in front of them. I know that occasionally the conversation between me and 'normal people'-- a court officer in one case-- makes me question whether or not my anarchist tendencies are truly considered 'inappropriate' to most... often my beliefs seem to be quite palpable to them.

These are concerns shared by a large number of people, but they cannot be 'common sense.' People manage their thoughts into 'opinions', as dictated by the forms of communication around them. People play into the 'mainstream' with a certain amount of awareness; they go through the motions but do not take it seriously. But institutions don't mind if you are singing passionately or just mouthing the words, as long as they define the public consensus.

So what to make of the fact that a third of Americans are so drastically outside the public consensus that they believe that 9/11 was an inside job? How can society continue to function if a third of Americans are believing things that should make widespread disobedience a moral imperative? Or, like, do they believe the conspiracies ironically or what? To answer that, maybe it's time to let somebody else do the do the telling...

vvvvvvvvvvvv.....

2006-12-25T11:20:00.000-05:00

...let's see if this thing will turn over. cough, sputter... got some ideas to talk about, but not much time and I'm outta practice. Oh yeah, happy solstice everyone. Here's to new beginnings.

Speaking of which: America is insolvent.
Y'all are going to love this: my little brother is majoring in business and economics, two aspects of human devolution that I consider wholly irrational, and indeed psychopathic. So it's a good thing he's learning them in school! ;) It takes determination to be able to learn to see that mass hallucination, that 'invisible hand', that perfect alibi of all crimes: 'it's just business.' Jail a man and he'll break out eventually. Starve and tell him it's just business: he will wait to die before he will steal his life back. Sometimes he won't, but usually he will.
*ahem*.. so anyway, my brother and I have interesting conversations... he keeps me on my toes, and I, him. So far noone's thrown the knockout rhetorical punch.

Here is a late essay on the life and death of an economist, but it touches on something I hope to write about later (always later!)

The elevation to pre-eminence of an unholy but convenient alliance of technical and ideological imperatives has produced a disciplinary core in economics that is elaborate yet weightless. There has been no consensus on a project to understand the economic system in the large. On the contrary, there has been an implicit consensus that no such project will be contemplated.
The attack on Galbraith by his detractors highlights that he had broken the unspoken rules on the consensus. The attack also highlights how significant has been the ideological imperative in the economic discipline’s channeling of ‘credible’ academic research. Criticism of the prevailing socio-economic system is deemed unpalatable, and inhibition of criticism is enhanced by the maintenance of a project that declines to identify and understand the essential character of that system. The life’s work of Galbraith’s contemporary, Milton Friedman, who died in November 2006, is a testament to that vacuum (Jones 2006).

We seek out the safety of a ordered universe, and as such, we structure our knowledges into self-contained universes of abstraction that cease to pitch and buck with the tides of change. The structure of epistemology becomes its own universe, contemplation of that artificial becomes the end in itself. It's institutional insanity; when structured thought becomes unattached to reality, and mumbles to itself in corridors that might as well be an asylum. That's economics.

'kay, I think the motor's running. Now to clean up the dead links on the sidebar. Oh, linebreaks, R.I.P...

wiped clean.

2006-10-26T08:36:00.000-04:00

I'll keep it quick because I have about a million things to do.

I had to learn about the Jeju protest from Bombs and Shields. We get the Korea Herald sometimes in our staff room. Take a look at the online version.... nothing. I switch on cable (which I didn't ask for, and can't unsubscribe for) and channel surf... all I see is a brief scrolled message saying that the FTA talks have broken down over the usual divergence between toxic neo-liberal rhetoric and toxic corporatist deed. Not one image like this. Not one. It's a complete whitewash. On the teevee is all it's ever been: preachers, soaps, starcraft and anime.

Today I took the bus to Suwon to apply for my 'Alien Registration Card.' Between their town and ours is a gap of maybe fifty yards, and in those fifty there are slums and farms, piled right to the margins of the highway. I ask my co-worker about them, and she looks over them and tells about the gravestones on the hill. We get into a taxi and I flinch a little bit as American fighter jet scream overhead. The cabbie and my co-worker share a laugh at my naivete.

I wonder what the illiterates have been noticing about my country.

problems.

2006-10-18T21:34:00.000-04:00

IMG_0108
Originally uploaded by molly_chucker.

How do I wash my clothes

funny-ass picture, just because i can.

2006-10-01T17:52:00.000-04:00

Can you see the optical illusion?

The band is Career Suicide.

addicted to boredom.

2006-10-01T00:11:00.000-04:00

An essay that could have come straight from Crimethinc. canon, if such a thing wasn't a contradiction in terms:

The idea that people are addicted to boredom seems ridiculous, but let's consider it for a moment. Boredom is an unpleasant sensation that occurs when your mind is unoccupied. Supposedly, repetitive and predictable activities are boring, while novel and unpredictable events are exciting. Given this understanding of boredom, the way people act seems a little strange. Consider the phrase: "we are creatures of habit". We get up at the same time every day, go through the same rituals, go to work, do much the same thing at work as we did yesterday, come home and watch the same old television shows.

This behaviour doesn't sit well with the notion that people dislike boredom. One thing people genuinely dislike is sitting around doing absolutely nothing. This induces the unpleasant sensation that people think of as boredom. However, give them a mindless repetitive task to do, eg playing solitaire, watching television, or working on a checkout line, and they're content. Not necessarily happy, but not extremely uncomfortable either.

As I read those words, I shit you not, I had a game of spider solitaire in progress. Oops. I read on:

...The increased levels of dopamine enabled humanity to function efficiently as farmers, but this came at a cost. High levels of dopamine significantly impairs the minds ability to think creatively. Worse yet, the dopamine is highly addictive. Recent research shows that almost by definition, addictive drugs are ones that raise dopamine levels. This explains why people object so strongly to having their routine distrurbed. It triggers exactly the same resentment that you observe in junkies when they are denied their fix. The more ritual dependent people become, the more easily they become irritated by upsets to their routine. In extreme cases people actually become angry when presented with a novel idea. They ridicule the person presenting the idea, but provide no arguments saying what is wrong with it.

In the text, there's a whole theory about dopamine being more prevalent in farmers than in hunters, and I don't know if I buy that. From what I gather, there's a whole lot of waiting involved in hunting and fishing. A larger influence on the human mind would probably be nomadic versus sedentary lifestyles. A significant portion of the world's population is now fixed, and there's no reason to believe that this state of affairs is unwanted. 'Unnatural' it may be, but should we define the 'proper' existence of humanity by its earliest form?

That's my only criticism of the text. We shouldn't romanticise the past, nor let it define the possible. But here's something I want to explore soon: majority opinion, or 'common sense.'

So...

2006-09-30T02:33:00.000-04:00

The news is that I found a job contract, and I'm leaving for a year to teach English. This is maybe not a big deal to some, for whom migration and travels are not a big deal. For me it feels like a big deal, probably because I have no idea what the future holds, and such things are always bigger and scarier when you dream them. But it's a good feeling, to be terrified... I wouldn't know. I'm only anxious at this point, and excited. The terror will probably happen before my first day in front of a class of children.

You can be there, to catch that feeling...

Alivewithpleasure. is going to continue to be a purely political, impersonal blog. Its irregular schedule will continue. I'm going to start another journal online to post pictures, daily minutae, and other stuff that will probably interest immediate friends and family but not the anarchoblogs community as a whole.

Another issue: at this point, I'm fairly certain that alivewithpleausure has been anonymous. The 'other' blog will certainly not be anonymous. So I'm a little hesitant to name it here. Probably nobody gives a shit. I haven't taken any steps to conceal my computer's IP address. I haven't gotten any hateful comments in a long time, and any security agency worth its largesse probably already knows that I pose no threat. But still...

That's partly why I haven't posted my band's webspace here.

Anyhoo, feel free to drop me a comment if you think i should just link the blog from here. If I know your email address, I'll be sending it anyways.

stay tuned, more to come very soon...

a helpful graphic.

2006-09-25T17:22:00.002-04:00

Confessions of an Economic Hitman is an excellent book, if you can get past Perkin's bluster... plus the introduction to the book is off-putting in its paranoia and inflated self-importance. But as soon as you dive into the body of the book you get embroiled in fascinating vignettes of exotic locations, and Perkins' own struggle towards self-awareness. Parts of the book dealing with Iran and the Middle East read like a real-life spy potboiler.

DISNIHIL

Clinging to!
Clinging To The Mast!!
CLINGING TO THE MAST OF A SINKING SHIP!!!

Fuck yeah, I just got the demo from these guys in the mail. Crusty, downtuned hardcore in the vein of Tragedy and Catharsis, and I really really dig some of the pirate-themed lyrics.

Big news coming this way soon. I'll keep ya posted... take care friends

the war on intent.

2006-09-16T14:44:00.000-04:00

Is the cynical manipulation of reality even fucking funny anymore? The Torture Debate

Again and again, the spectre of 'future attacks' is raised. Here's a quote:

"If we capture bin Laden tomorrow and we have to hold his head under water to find out when the next attack is going to happen, we ought to be able to do it."

-- Rep. Peter T. King, chairman of Homeland Security Committee

Of course, what we've learned about the domestic aspect of the 'terror war' is that it has not focussed on defensive measures at all. More often than not, it has been necessary to manufacture threats in order to thwart them, or at least aid and abet lonely cranks until they can become scary enough to arrest. I'm thinking specifically of Toronto's own 17 suspects, whose only access to explosives was the police operation that set them up for prosecution, or the so-called 'liquid bombers' who didn't even possess passports when they were snatched up, as per a special request from the Americans.

And then there's torture, whose only accepted capability is not to extract truth from prisoners, but to ensure the prisoner's complicity in a wholly manufactured truth. In other words, torture victims don't tell the truth, they only tell their interrogators what they think they want to hear. Can anyone remember the farcical 'confessions' of the Stalinist regime?

The objective of torture and counter-terrorist efforts is not to thwart existing opponents, but to manufacture an adversary that can be beaten-- repeatedly, dramatically, and yet, never completely. Remember that apparently now empires... create their own reality. States have essentially set up their own cottage industry of terrorist threat in order to more conveniently wage war against it. And with the eventual normalizing of torture, the authorities will have even more power to create realities... through coerced confession.

The actual threat posed by dissident groups is no longer important. Did the arrest of the 'liquid bombers' stop security forces from barring bottles of water from flights? No, it did not... it's almost as if the act itself is irrelevant. The intent is what is prosecuted and what is reacted against. The intent-- however vague and ill-defined, however constricted it is by the lack of resources-- is what exists outside of modern society's capacity for control. The intent to harm is taboo in our society, and the source of endless fascination.

It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.

And so, our modern notions of morality have developed loopholes of thought and understanding. What's implicit in Georgie's little diatribe here is that the intentions of America are good, a priori. The intent is benevolent. The violence which results is nothing but mechanical oversight. Abu Ghraib was an 'accident', for example. The grunts insist that they were ordered to humiliate prisoners, 'take the gloves off', so to speak. The generals insist that they had 'discipline problems.' Neither knew what the other was doing. When it suits them, institutions can become as senile as your grandmother. When we drop cluster bombs on a village, and a kid get's blown up stepping on a bomblet, there are literally millions of avenues through which to assign blame: the wind was off, the informant was corrupt, the pilot was asleep, the dispatcher was drinking nyquil, the bomb was defective, the map was out of date, the president was drunk. Any one of these will do, see, because what's beyond reproach is the intent. It goes without saying that our intent was not to kill a child.

In our judicial system, intent is weighed very heavily in calculating punishment. To a certain extent, and I really regret saying this, the terror war is indeed a clash of civilizations. We both use mental motivators to orchestrate the horrific. Al-Qaeda types can steep themselves in a nostalgic-religious view of morality, where ancient wrongs cry out for vengeance. In this case, the intent to do harm is normal, natural, and sanctioned by the righteousness of revenge as a moral obligation. Americans too have 9/11 to fuel their own deluded sense of retribution. But overall their sense of righteous bloodlust is outside of the mainstream: American troops using ethnic slurs are not shown on television, and avenging warcries scrawled on missiles are presented with some trepidation. They are part of the public discourse, and they are held in sympathy, but mainstreamism requires that we view them with distaste.

No, our real enabler in orchestrating the horrific is our good intentions. This sort of morality has its roots in utilitarian thought: in that the ends will, in time, justify the means. Adherents to this school of thought have claimed for themselves the label of 'realists.' But since the ends can never truly be anticipated, a new axiom has to be created: that the intent will justify the means. Adherents to this school of thought can probably be better described as 'magical realists', since the invocation of benevolence, of the Iraqi people's 'best interests', is usually sufficient to continue destroying the village in order to save it. Like warriors dabbing themselves with cow's blood to deflect the bullets, realists believe that the noble intent will save them from the consequences of their actions.

The rest of us are being locked into an escalating conflict with two clashing views of morality, both self-perpetuating and self-justifying. Revenge by its very definition must condone the inevitable inverse reaction perpetrated by the adversary. And noble intent, because it is wholly subjective, can never truly be repudiated. Bush's brain is as classified as a Pentagon document. Like 9/11 vengeance, questioning the intent can't quite occur in the mainstream. Jon Stewart can dance around the issue, sarcastically denying that it was 'all about the oil', but to flatly state the obvious remains taboo. After 3,000 Americans dead, it's simply not allowed that "we" should not "get the job done"... it's unacceptable that "they died for nothing", etc. When the current situation looks more and more hopeless, the appeal to benevolent intent must be proclaimed ever louder.

As war deepens, the opposing populations must find comfort in their camps. Terrorist cells are self-motivating, alienated from community, inwardly-drawn. No coincidence that the human desire for destruction is also the drive for self-annihilation. Meanwhile, the magical-realists flock to speeches rife with bad metaphors, queueing at the security checkpoints, undergoing the cold etiquette of strip searches and questions. Terrorist bombings are orchestrated for maximum emotive power... they are, after all, a means of communication. And the airstrikes continue, a distant thunder, and then the efficient obliteration of life.

failing the sandwich test.

2006-09-07T23:15:00.000-04:00

So...
Here at I.am.alive.whatever. headquarters, we are preparing a masse emigration to greener pastures to South Korea, in order to teach the English language to kiddies. Now, I have heard a lot about English (capitalised, as per proper grammar instructions) being the parasite language of international hegemony, but keep in mind this-- English is one language where no one grammar rule makes an inch of sense of without a thesaurus full of exceptions. Vagueness and interbreeding composes 95%* of the English language. In fact, most things that strike us as hilarious in English won't make a lick of sense in any other language.
For example, try to translate any standup routine into, say, German. Come on. I dare you. It won't work. Why? Most of the past tenses of German put the acting verb at the very end of the sentence. Result: a complete neutralisation of the suspense and irony that makes most jokes 'work' in English. I don't know if the same holds in Korean. I intend to find out. My point is this: if humour isn't the most anarchistic tendency in humanity's bandolier of rebellion, I don't want to be an anarchist.
This blog's translocation was predicted by rob and krystal at loveescstacycrime and tiny stars respectively, and in a very complimentary fashion i must add. If you're wondering where I've been, here is the answer: I've been packing, and preparing to leave the continent. The band is on hiatus, but the blog is not. I foresee plenty of opportunities to blab my way out of boredom.
Now, on to the story:
One of my things is that I don't like supporting the drug trade. I'm sorry, I see drugs as the Ultimate Commodity. Crack, say, tears away all illusions of commodities' healing and redemptive power, laying bare the mechanics of capitalist pursuits. So if I see someone begging for change, my first thought is, "gee, I wonder if I should change professions", but the second thought is, "gee, I wonder if he's buying drugs with whatever money I can afford to throw him."
I hope I won't get piled on as a class traitor if I'm writing this. Here it is guys: I don't like to give money if it's only entrenching a form of chemical oppression. To back me up: I must admit that I live with former and current panhandlers and junkies. I don't like it when people close to me fall off the wagon and find their actualization at the bottom of a syringe; why would I approve of it if it was a stranger?
The approved (by me, and former panhandlers) form of 'handout' (ahem) is the 'sandwich test.' If a dude asking for money will instead accept a sandwich, then she or he is approved for meals, change, showers, sleepovers, etc. If not, then they are an asshole and they're probably buying crack.
We probably have a crack dealer operating in the alleyway beside our co-operative. I pay attention to who enters the alley, and who exits, and how 'fucked up' they look before and after.
So there's this dude outside our LCBO. (the place to buy liquor, for those outside of Ontario) Always asks me for change. For the first three months, no problem... I was on welfare, but whatever... share and share alike. One night: heyy... isn't that--? Yeah, it is. It's him. LCBO dude.
Tonight, he failed the sandwich test.
"Spare some change, sir?"
"No, uh... hey, I got a sandwich! I made it today, but I wasn't hungry. Want it?"
"Yah got change, though? Come on, come on! Spare some change!!"

If you're keeping track, and you happen to be homeless, no disrespect. But keep this in mind, consider it a 'tip.' Always ALWAYS accept donations of food. If you refuse them, you look like an asshole, and people will consider you a junkie, even if they don't see you skulking into a certain alleyway. Accept the food like it was the best thing you ever got. If you do, the world is your oyster. If not, you're fucked.

This is the way it is on the big streets.

*even this number is a little iffy.

D.I.Y. music... not just punk!

2006-08-31T19:51:00.000-04:00

I know you'll get a kick out of this.

In the years after World War II, Stalin attempted to extirpate every aspect of American culture from Soviet life. Jazz, which had been played publicly in the USSR as recently as the war years, was now officially regarded as decadent capitalist filth; to even speak of jazz during this period was a criminal act...

But the stilyagi managed not only to hear jazz, but to assemble collections of recordings too. How? They had turntables, but they certainly couldn't buy jazz records in record stores (there weren't any). They couldn't tape what they heard on the radio. Even assuming they could get access to a reel-to-reel recorder, where were they going to get enough blank tape? The solution was a piece of genius. A jazz-loving medical student realized that he could inscribe sound grooves on the surface of a medium that was actually plentiful in the Soviet Union: old X-ray plates.

The tenacity of these Do-It-Yourselfers humbles the hell outta me. Check it out:

I can imagine some hardcore kid being really enthusiastic about getting a 7" that looks like that.

Q: what distinguishes hardcore shows in Toronto?

2006-08-12T03:11:00.000-04:00

(listen to Cobra Noir)
recommended: track called 'eucharist.'

A: there is only one microphone at a venue, and it doesn't work!

talk to you soon...

2006-07-22T15:57:00.000-04:00

i suppose it was inevitable...

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) has claimed responsibility for three major arsons in the town of Guelph over the past two months and is suspected of sabotaging equipment at five construction sites in nearby Brantford during this past week alone.

If you've ever taken the greyhound to Guelph, you will notice that the so-called 'gated communities' have been gobbling up space at a prodigious rate. The city has literally been creeping south every year. It has never failed to stir bitterness in me, every time I see billboards with foxes on them, proclaiming 'heritage living', poised high over the churned mud and garbage. Guelph is also pretty unique, in that it has a viable urban core (unlike Hamilton, say) and a pretty vibrant community. Plenty of dedicated activists and good friends, suurounded by urban sprawl of the worst kind. Guelph kept Wal-mart out of city limits for over twelve years. That battle was just recently lost. And so direct action was probably inevitable.
I dearly hope whoever was responsible for the arsons is exercising every possible precaution against getting caught. Interesting times for a smallish town...

overheard at my house in the morning

2006-07-07T11:25:00.000-04:00

"...yeah he's notorious for having a horse-cock and he's got tattoos of flames on it."

Public Service Announcement

2006-06-26T14:52:00.000-04:00

For example, we all know that there were an alarming number of suicides in the human trials of pretty much every SSRI. This is generally explained away as being the natural behaviour pattern of depressed people, as though you couldn't get 100 depressives in one place for a few weeks without some of them topping themselves. Yet they'd managed to live their entire lives up to that point without killing themselves, so it's odd how their eventual suicides coincided with ingestion of a drug that is supposed to treat depression, and that the suicide rate among these "treated" depressives suddenly rose to 500 times the suicide rate for untreated depressives, in the space of six to eight weeks. The fact that in some of the test results these suicides were marked as having "dropped out" of the experiment - thus removing them from the final data - is odder still. And of course, in clinical drug trials you don't just use a group suffering from the ailment the drug is intended to treat (in this case depression), you also have a healthy volunteer group, who are there to test the toxicity of the new drug, rather than it's efficacy. There were also unexplained suicides in the healthy volunteer group. For one of the SSRIs, there were actually more suicides among the healthy volunteers than the depressed ones.

Bloody scary and fascinating read, a firsthand account of SSRI withdrawal...
Whoa! What with rain days, I just might have time to post tomorrow as well. I'm sure y'all are riveted to your seats.

time for an update...

2006-06-22T22:40:00.000-04:00

okay, so i'm working twelve-hour days.
Don't expect too many updates until August.
Cheers!

toronto terrists! pffft....

2006-06-10T22:22:00.000-04:00

Um, so... terrorism.
Anybody who doesn't want to behead the PM, raise your hand.
What were these kids, sixteen? At sixteen I had a plot to dip the prime minister (Jean Chretien) in a vat of sulfuric acid. The details of the plan were scrawled on the margins of my Geography notes. I guess that's worth a headline in the National Post. Also, I am the owner of various incriminating flashlights, a camouflage jacket, a soldering iron... um, an old cellphone that doesn't work... here I am serving the Crown* an 'ironclad' case. Plus I have been known to listen to punk rock. That's gotta be worth a couple snipers on the courthouse rooftop, right?
All joking aside, I am highly skeptical of the recent arrests of a 'terrorist cell' in Toronto. The suspects who were attending a flight school, except they weren't; attending a training camp in Northern Ontario, except they don't have guns... witnesses recall hearing 'gunshots'... you don't say. During hunting season, perhaps?
Except we have this 3 tonnes** of ammonium nitrate. That's spooky, I admit it. It was however, bought from cops as part of a sting operation.
I know better than to comment on a case before all the facts are in. I will anyway. Does anybody remember a group arrested just before the FTAA meeting in Quebec City? There was a table of evidence at the police press conference, eerily similar to the most recent press conference. Five people were accused of bringing bombs and baseball bats to the protest. It later emerged that the bats didn't belong to them, and the bombs were smoke bombs. The plan was to set off smoke bombs as a diversion, in order to break through the perimeter and 'read a manifesto.' Still later, if I'm not mistaken, it was revealed that this plan was proposed by an undercover cop, posing as a member of the group. That's called entrapment. By this time very few people were paying attention. The 'bomb and bat' press conference was held some forty hours before the protest. To this day, some people will try and convince me that protestors had all brought baseball bats, ball bearings, tennis balls full of poisonous gas. I assure them I saw none of these things in Quebec City. Excuses are found for this discrepancy, or the issue is quickly dropped but not refuted. This is the power of media.
If I can propose a chain of events, based on the small amount of information available to me: a couple angry muslims buy some ammonium nitrate. Probably enough to blow up some mailboxes, and maybe stifle the Toronto economy to a degree comparable to your average transit wildcat strike. Cops discover this. The decision is made to 'sex up' the terrorist threat, from Basque-ETA minor league to Al-Qaeda major league. Whaddaya know, it works! International headlines. Promotions all around for the top brass, and a press conference that the Toronto Star compares to the Academy Awards. Long-winded acceptance speeches.
Caveat: I don't know if I can believe that these people are devoid of malign intent. Y'know what? After Abu Ghraib, it doesn't surprise me in the least that people are pissed enough to set off bombs. This doesn't shake my belief system to its core or anything. My point is that a limited and inexperienced group of people, who, left on their own, would do a very superficial amount of damage, are now being 'sexed up' to be a serious group of people who would be killing hundreds of people. How much Ammonium Nitrate did they have before the sting, before the 'three tonnes' came into the picture? How much diesel fuel did they have? How many detonators? Silence speaks volumes: I'm guessing none. These guys were rank amateurs. In other words, without a little help from CSIS et. al., these guys couldn't have hoped to kill as many people who die every year as a result of air pollution in this city. Y'know what? That doesn't qualify for the same amount of hysteria as 'three tonnes' of Ammonium Nitrate. It certainly doesn't worry me as much as the state's bold plans to 'address' the issue of national security. A city besieged by Islamofascists(sic)?! Whoa... perfect timing... what with a tory administration eager to cozy up to losers in D.C., and with an electoral majority as their ultimate goal... and a bunch of 905*** voters who will whore off their liberties when confronted with a bunch of fucking chump wanna-be 'terrorists'...
It's been my experience that since the radical mobilization before the war in Iraq, activism has been in a holding pattern both in Canada and South of the border. The brute reality of war has been doing all the work for the peace camp. There is no need to further articulate just how fucked up all this shit has become. Indeed, protesting gives the right wing a target when in the absence of scapegoats they come off as just more ludicrous than ever. I think this state of affairs is about to change quite rapidly, at least in Toronto. Ha... just as I was about to get bored. See you on the streets!

*replace with 'prosecution' for you yanks out there.
**figure it out, with a measure converter!
***'905ers' are denizens of surburban areas around Toronto, notorious for voting conservative in Federal elections.

Copied for our band myspace.

2006-06-04T02:47:00.000-04:00

read this. Then this. Discuss.

Please keep in mind that I can only pretend to speak for myself, and not for the sum of the falling trees collective:
Perhaps civilisation moulds us more than we care to admit. Perhaps the role of the subculture 'other' is just as important as that of the preacher, politician, or police. In activist circles, the following is a common observation: 'what if we threw a protest, and nobody came?' The alternative would be, of course, 'what if we threw a war, and nobody came?'

What we're getting at here is that our commonalities and our identities are to a great extent forged in opposition to an existing social force. Left wing/right wing dichotomies are pretty much meaningless: pure socialists and pure libertarians have much more in common than libertarians with the corporatists who claim to be 'laissez faire' to further their own profits.

I guess the real question is: is real freedom even possible in a society like ours anymore? Oh yes, it is true we have consumer choice. But true freedom demands opportunities for autonomy, for spontaneous action and self-actualisation, and not just a choice between two compromises. Our highly-developed and industrialised society offers us nothing but preconceived 'identities' to be filled at our leisure: worker or parasite, politician or activist, businessman or artist.

All these dichotomies are artificial. For example: before mass production, any worker who was producing a commodity was considered an 'artisan', in that they were producing something with the help of their skills and creativity. Every piece of furniture, to a certain extent, was a work of art, and its creator could enjoy the satisfaction that is now reserved for an elitist class of 'artist.'

Consider our band name, 'the falling trees.' The zen koan goes like this: 'if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?' This is absolutely the wrong question. It suggests that the natural world has no essence outside of society's attempts to define it. The real question is: 'if a society falls, and there is no tree to hear it, does it make a sound?' And that, for me at least, is a far more interesting question. Another interesting question (trying to link this post together in a somewhat coherent manner) is this: 'if you fall, and society isn't there to catch you, what grows in your absence? Who do you become? Here it is, friends. We are defined by our site within society, for better or for worse. But this is not a natural or an inevitable state of affairs. We are defined by what we do, not by the pre-packaged identities that wait for our allegiance. 'The falling trees' exists to try and answer that question, for us and maybe for you. We seek to define ourselves by who truly are, by our essence and not merely by our social context.

We will most surely fail, because it is a massive undertaking, and because we, all of us, are prisoners of history. There is nothing special about the products of music-making; in a better world, the satisfaction that we feel making our songs would be felt by any worker who produces a similar commodity. Musically, and politically, we define ourselves by what has come before us. We are not especially talented or disciplined or anything else. We don't possess the unlikely genius to break free of our world. We are just like you. But the glory is in the attempt, and in nothing else.

All power to the people! Humanity forever!

anthem in engrish.

2006-05-30T14:23:00.000-04:00

I don't know why, but I find this awesome:

Japanese who object to being forced to sing their country's national anthem have a secret weapon: the English language. Kiss Me, an English parody of the
Kimigayo, has spread through the internet and was sung by teachers and pupils at recent school entrance and graduation ceremonies, local media reported yesterday.

The song, whose composer remains a mystery, takes the syllables of each word of the Japanese original and turns them into phonetically similar English words, allowing non-conformist singers to escape detection. For example, "Kimigayo wa" becomes "Kiss me girl, your old one".

full story.

Consider the whole 'engrish' phenomenon, or its equivalent in North America. In both cases, language is used incorrectly, causing humourous nonsense. Some cases of 'engrish' are simply elementary mistakes; the use of the language is meant to portray meaning.

More often, however, the meaning of language is drained and the form of language is co-opted for its exoticism. That's not to say that all those Chinese character tattoos that were popular a few years ago didn't have a meaning per se, but the communication of that meaning was purely a secondary concern. Considering how little effort was put into getting these things right, both the form and content communicate little more than artful nonsense. (off-topic: has anyone seen any of these 'permanent' tattoos lately? Did they all dry up? Can all these rich kids afford laser treatment or what?)

You can imagine the howls of protest that might have arisen from the Frankfurt school: capitalism and subjectivized reason, having conquered all comers, having transformed science into the development of new pills, having undermined religion and relegated it to the realm of a 'lifestyle commodity', has razed the final frontier: it has innoculated language against meaning, in order to create a commodity. When our shirts say nonsense, and we communicate only in pop-culture references, what chance does liberation have? In Orwell's 1984, the objective was to manipulate language until there could be no word for 'Freedom.' Without a word, how can freedom be imagined? Our own totalitarian state, once again, has laid bare the primitive nature of the Stalinist authoritarianism... a centralized bureaucracy, manufacturing and actively enforcing a new language is far too inefficient. Not when the masses can be compelled to participate in the destruction of meaning...

But it's not quite so simple as all that... now we have this anthem, which 'blesses the emperor for a thousand years', converted stealthily into nonsense. It's an act of ingenious subversion. Respect for state power, enforced by law and punishment, is reduced to white noise. But wasn't it white noise all along?
I was enrolled in French immersion from Kindergarten up until the end of high school. In grade one, we started learning the anthem... in French. We didn't know what those words meant. We learned them phonetically. It was like a practical joke for us, a game...

English Translation of the French Version of the National Anthem

1. O Canada! Land of our forefathers
Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
As in thy arm ready to wield the sword,
So also is it ready to carry the cross.
Thy history is an epic of the most brilliant exploits.

Ch.
Thy valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights.

What?!?
Without knowing, we were following the example of these Japanese rebels: without changing the form of the sounds emanating from our mouths, we denied them their meaning. This was good enough for bored teachers, and for the state. But now that people are doing it willfully, actively and with awareness, the situation changes-- nonsense becomes a tool of rebellion. Traditionalists cannot bring themselves to admit that all these anthems have been white noise all along, and so there will be howls of protest, and calls to punish those singing 'kiss me' instead of 'kimi.' But how do you tell the difference? Through parody, some enterprising Japanese have illuminated their anthem's true nature. Through nonsense, meaning is created where there was none before...

^^ the anti-irony t-shirt

great games...?

2006-05-22T12:41:00.000-04:00

So Jeff Vail thinks we need to be watching events in Georgia and Azerbaijan. Read all about it. Congruent to his post is yet another good background article from the eXile.
Taking these two sources at their word paints a different portrait of international affairs, one where Iraq is a gory sideshow that enables America's rivals to make strides in controlling oil wealth. Putin is one sneaky fucker, and being the underdog seems to prioritize one's ambitions. You get the feeling that the Bush regime has been on top for so long, they don't really take international jockeying for power very seriously. Or at least, they're not very good at it. Now American power is effectively hamstrung in Iraq for the forceseeable future, and look at just how quickly the political universe has shifted. John Perkins wrote a very good book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman (very highly recommended, btw) in which he bleakly predicts a coup against Chavez. Of course, we saw how that turned out. Suddenly, with its power and attention directed elsewhere, an entire continent has swung out of American influence.
I tend to look at these developments, yeah even the ascension of an execrable spook like Putin, as a positive development. Any shift in international politics that gets us away from such a harmful power imbalance such as the once that has existed will hopefully open pockets of opportunity for genuine change.

I think that there's far too much attention paid to visions of a 'great game' in international politics. Self-described 'realists' tend to revise history as the rich man's parlour game: all world events are seen as nothing more than the gambits of world leaders. There's definitely something happening in Central Asia, however. If you want to characterize it as a game, I recommend that you always bet on the hungrier human.

damn

2006-05-21T23:05:00.000-04:00

When Cat and Girl is on, it is on.

2006-05-19T23:03:00.000-04:00

I wanted to re-ignite the pleasure.house with words of my own, but this is too good to leave unnoticed.
What if Hitler were a monetreme?

As for me, I'm back by Monday, hopefully with a report from Caledonia.

2006-04-28T01:19:00.000-04:00

i swears, that i gots some more smarts somewhere inside me, or something. instead, i revel ya'll with more music talkin.'
one of the first few posts in this blog was about Isis, and how they came to my town to play the musics that we all enjoy. on that bill was mare.
Isis came back tonight, and so did mare.
I disremember if i have paid mare any dues. The first time I saw them, i wasn't into it. Since then, i have warmed up much to their brand of jazz-doom. (THAT'S RIGHT! I SAID IT! JAZZ DOOM!!!) I got to interact with the singer/guitarist.
says me: "do you have this shirt in medium?"
says he: "nope. just large and x-tra large."
does me: quietly seethes.
Keep in mind, the dude is smaller than me, and large shirts fit me like a hospital gown. What in the hell? punker kids are usually pretty small-boned.
dammit. now i'm gonna be shirtless this summer.
Also, i learned a very good tip whence i stared at the contents of his back-pocket.
Toothbrush and toothpaste! in his back-pocket! That's a good idea; really, it's all you need. If I'm ever touring, check out the contents of my back pocket.

Isis were awesome. Moreso than the last time they were here. Apparently Jesu were supposed to be on this bill. That would have been the greatest. (Jesu is a new project by the guy behind Almighty Godflesh) Jesu is some of the best stuff that Justin Broaderick has ever done, in my opinion.

breaking radio silence...

2006-04-16T22:20:00.000-04:00

Me versus the finals: 5 down, 3 to go.
By tomorrow morning it should be 6 down, 2 to go.
Then we get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Or maybe pictures of cats.

in other news, the U.S. military brass is getting nostalgic:
US plots 'new liberation of Baghdad'
First time i saw the headline, i thought they were going to leave Baghdad, wait a few hours, and then re-invade it retro-style.

The sources said American and Iraqi troops would move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, leaving behind Sweat teams — an acronym for “sewage, water, electricity and trash” — to improve living conditions by upgrading clinics, schools, rubbish collection, water and electricity supplies.

Are they fuckin' serious? It's the same tactic that has failed them every single time. The last offensive they launched-- complete with its cock-in-hand macho codename; i forget what it was exactly-- ended without them firing a shot. The guerrillas will disappear as Americans shell empty buildings, the 'Iraqi army' (read: militias) will terrorize families, and then the guerrillas will reappear to kill off the... ugh... "Sweat Teams."

Strategic and tactical plans are being laid by US commanders in Iraq and at the US army base in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, under Lieutenant- General David Petraeus. He is regarded as an innovative officer and was formerly responsible for training Iraqi troops.

oh piss off.

This is a strategy that might have made some sense three years ago, when the chief grievance against occupation for most Iraqis might have been the lack of water and electricity. Guess what: after countless checkpoint shootings, misplaced bombs, abu ghraib.... no, picking up litter isn't going to settle this bill.

whoa... awesome!!

2006-03-29T16:48:00.000-05:00

ghostbike.org

what a great idea for remembering cyclist fatalities.

sigils... everywhere!

2006-03-10T16:52:00.000-05:00

So.
I've been thinking about sigils lately. That is, whenever I'm not completely occupied with schoolwork. Interest was sparked, of all things, by a punk band. Fucked Up mentions them in an interview. In their words:

When we lived together I would wake up in the morning and find these weird symbols all over the fridge and in the bathroom on the mirror and shit. [Guitarist]Camp put a huge one on his wall when the Leafs ran for the Cup 2 season ago. We put them up all over a crucial intersection as sort of a pre-victory ritual for this OCAP action that happened there. The idea behind sigils is that you think of something you want to happen, write it down, make a monogram of it, and then drill the monogram into your brain while forgetting the meaning. That way the meaning gets detached from the symbol, so its no longer in your waking mind. Your subconscious goes to work trying to make the outcome happen, and presto in a few days it does.

Now, previously I've characterized much of political struggle in terms of team sports, in that 'our team' raises its (black or red) flag, and makes a display of power against 'their team.' The age old rhetorical question we keep asking ourselves is, 'what if we had a protest and nobody came?' The idea being, the expensive display of power created by the authorities would be cancelled out and subject to humiliation. The converse of that question is: 'What if they held a meeting and nobody showed up?' This question was kicked around by editorials awhile back, after Seattle. There is no real reason why all these bureaucrats have to physically gather in one place. They could sit all sit at home in their jammies and sell away the world via conference call. Where would the protest be held?

All of that, though, is for another post. The existence of the flag, of the symbol, exists as a shorthand for a whole long discourse on the proper way of organizing society. But does it really? Looking at the Nazis, it becomes obvious just how fucking ridiculous they were... they poached their symbols from a bunch of occult books, and pasted that onto the concept of total state integration and manipulation of the public. What does A have to do with B? Not much.

What does Stalinism have to do with Marxism? Not much. In fact, Marxist ideals of individual self-actualization compare more favourably with the classical liberal ideals. What does John Locke have to with our current corporatist oligarchy? Not fucking much.

And yet here's how we define our political identities: left vs. right. Symbolology. The symbol is vested with meaning, the meaning is forgotten. The symbol is charged with our energies. It becomes our focus, or of commonality. Dropping all the magickal connotations of the sigil, I find this theory very hard to disprove.

Or look at it another way: I stand on the corner with the black flag in my hand, a circle-A pin on my hoodie. You ask me what these things mean. I'm not going to tell you that they stand for dividing the world between communal tribes of between 10-50 people. I'm going to tell you (maybe with some difficulty because I don't express myself very well vocally) the traits of a good anarchist society, what it stands for, and leave the practicalities of achieving such a thing up to your own imagination.

My questioner, I notice, is wearing a Maple Leafs jersey. This is key. Notice the power of the sports sigil, and the excitement that runs through the city when the Leafers make the playoffs. What does it mean? Does the Maple Leafs jersey represent an adoration of a civic space? Does it represent respect for any one of the players or coaches? Or does it merely represent 'We Won!'? A vague aspiration, just like mine.

Why is the Nike 'Swoosh' so powerful? By any definition, corporate Logos do not have any overt political representation. The 'Swoosh' represents our previous experience with it, which if luck should have it is an action-packed tv commercial rather than a sweatshop. It is a sigil, one whose meaning is probably just visceral excitement. It does not represent the commodity.

Where does this power come from? Magick, or something inside us? Another example: Christ (the guy/or perhaps the fictional character), in his own words, represents poverty, compassion, pacifism to the point of martyrdom. Christ becomes represented by Crucifix. Crucifix becomes carved out of gold, affixed on Cathedrals, painted on shields and implements of torture and whatnot. Has Christ (the guy) been liquidated?

Is it the sigil that liquidates it? Or us? Why?

All too often, activists are defined by A. the flag and B. the opposition. Very seldom have I heard the shape of the culture to come discussed at any length at a demo (usually because there is so much to do, and so many cops to worry about). If the cops disappeared, and if we refused the flags, what would exist to keep us together? Would it be better or worse?

whoa!

2006-03-01T21:57:00.000-05:00

for those of you who just can't get enough of commodities, check out this refused fansite for info on some refused DVD. It actually looks compelling, in that it could tell a story. I might have to buy a DVD player now.
shit.
If you liked refused, but you want to feast on contemporary sounds, check out the spectacle. Their first e.p. is floating around somewhere in cyberspace and I played that thing to death while housepainting. The newer stuff sounds even better.
By and by, crimethinc releases an embarassment of riches in the form of mp3's. My only complaint is: 'What? No Ire?'
until soon.

and now for something completely different.

2006-02-28T19:06:00.000-05:00

cockeyed
Originally uploaded by molly_chucker.

alright, alright... something about cats and blogging.
This is Nayong.
All I did was fill the eyes in with black to get rid of the green eyes caused by the camera flash.

all i gotta say about a certain religion

2006-02-25T02:19:00.000-05:00

Let's have an update.
I'm kind of drunk but that will do.
It's not like drunken updates have come back to haunt me, have they???!???
(yes they have. I have deleted several of them.)
This shall be one I'll try not to delete.
On CBC radio recently they had a report about one Dorothy Day, that got me thinking very much.
Dorothy Day, if you will point your interrogatives at wikipedia, founded the Catholic Workers movement.
She, according to my understanding, is up for sainthood, in that warped and esoteric way that the catholic church does basically anything.
Only thing is, her surviving followers don't want it.
She is in many *below* sainthood, having had an abortion in her youth.
In every other way, she is *above* it; sainthood could only disparage her memory.
Events worthy of sainthood are created by individuals, swallowed up and claimed by the frantic masoleum of organized church institutions. (All that marble, clicking and echoing into eternity...)
As a young child a babysitter tried to convert me to Baptism. One day, I remember distinctly, all the Berenstein Bears books disappeared, replaced by those religious Archie comics. That was the first week.
The second week, I went to Sunday school for the first time in my life. And flunked, I guess, for pissing off the teacher. I almost got beat by the babysitter's hubbie. (He beat her a lot- we heard through the walls, as we blew on our lunchtime meal of macaroni and cheese and ketchup.)
The third week my parents came home from their vacation, and I returned to agnosticism and never asked another question 'bout Jesus. I wanted, as early as eight years of age, to fucking beat the shit out of my babysitters' hubby. This would not have solved anything.
They say that the crucifix is a symbol much older than christianity itself. The horizontal represents the earth, flat and finite. The vertical represents the spiritual, bisecting the animal existence and tracing itself from perfection to abomination. (you are either with us or against us) It, too, if you look carefully, is finite. The margins are bare. The possibilities remain untold.
The pentagram is infinite. Its boundaries are forever deflected by the roundness of the earth. Life ends, becomes earth, earth ends, becomes fire, or water, or whatever... Everything rests in relation to its foils.
As Bill Hicks once put it, 'd'you think that the first thing jesus wants to see 'round your neck is a crucifix?!? Why not wear a sniper pendant when you meet Jacqueline Kennedy?'
A neat punchline, but it bears analysis. I still do think that the symbolisms of modern life speak volumes more than most academics.
What do christians feel and see, when their every orfice is confronted with the cross? Is it not a symbol of death?
Confront a bible thumper. What is the refrain? 'Jesus died for your sins.' It is an imperative call without any possible satisfactory response. The lessons are lost. I got the death of jesus thrown in my face when I was eight years old and I rejected it.
Christianity, thus, became a religion of despair for all but some. The defining moment of jesus, of a workable template of virtuous life, was in its destruction. This is christianity's perverted message.
I reject any philosophy that is defined by its ending. Socialism, without realizing it, has its own armageddon in the form of the worker's paradise. Now, books end, but history goes on. Are we so selfish that we will deny our children their right to history, to good fights? I can't believe it. Any book that promises an end to history is the work of a hack.
Is the definition of christianity the culmination of jesus' life, or of his death? if you see someone wearing a cross, they've already given up. Nothing to do but wait for armaggedon. Moreso, they've defined their possibilities by the culmination of life, by its restrictions rather than its possibilities. They've defined virtue and good work in relation to some other heavenly reward, rather than by its ends on the earth. It's nothing but adding another number onto a wholly abstract equation that's going to add up to their worthiness for paradise. In this way, it's another slimy liberal sham, another individualistic act you do to add to your own ethical capital. What if it isn't enough, christians?
Is the challenge to us as humans that jesus died for our sins, Or, that for a moment, he lived? Is he the historical proof of a closing of our possibilities as a species, or is his life a challenge that all but a few of us have yet to live up to?

Actually, according to all historical evidence, there never was such a thing as a jesus. But whatever. If you speak all this to one of those religious salesmen on your doorstep, I guarantee you some tears, or a really fun conversation.
alright. stay loose, y'all

2006-02-22T01:47:00.000-05:00

this has officially made my day.

In September 2003 OCAP Member Gaetan Heroux was witness to Intelligarde
officers harassing a man at the corner of Dundas and Sherboune. Metro
police arrived at the corner, arrested and assaulted Gaetan, who was
simply observing the situation.  Police did no investigating before
arresting Gaetan who was well known to them for his decades of OCAP
organizing in Toronto's east end.

Gaetan and the OCAP legal team filed suit against the Toronto Police for
false arrest and negligent investigation and assault. Today the cops
offered a cash settlement for their heavy handed tactics- not wanting to
go through with a lawsuit that was bound to expose their illegal actions.
Gaetan was arrested for being a long time and well-known OCAP organizer at
Dundas and Sherbourne and for asserting his right to defend his community
from police and security guard brutality.  This money will be going into
the daily work of OCAP and the continuing defense of poor communities
against police brutality and racist police practices.

The lawsuit was scheduled to begin tomorrow, Wednesday Feb 22- the trial
will not be proceeding but we are asking people to join us at 10am 47
Sheppard St E. to watch the police write Gaetan a cheque.

www.ocap.ca
I just might try to wake up bright and early to watch the 'cheque-writing ceremony.' Don't know if it covers their funding woes, but I'll bet it won't hurt.
As for me, friends, I've been writing my midterm essays and, while not doing that, trying to come up with basslines for a project that i'm in.
Can I indulge? I very rarely post stuff about my whole situation.
This musical project is very open-ended. I'm not (yet) participating in songwriting from scratch, just listening and trying to come up with something appropriate. I've frustrated myself to no end, playing along to a CD, second-guessing myself, tinkering, tinkering... in the first rehearsal i'm like 'is this okay?! does it fit?!' the dude is very accepting... lo and behold, in rehearsal the song is something completely different. i end up flying by the seat of my pants.
this is a challenge for me. i don't have my sea-legs yet, i want lots of criticism.. to get a grip on what works. i've never done this before. i want a song to start and end the same way it did yesterday. i'm not complaining, but it's like in those dreams where you're flying. exhilarating until you start second-guessing the whole physical logic behind it, then you start losing altitude. i'm out of my comfort zone, which is a positive development. When the gig kicks in, the songs all start going faster and louder, and i'm plucking on strings faster and harder than i ever did at home. last time we practiced for six hours and then gigged.. i had to keep away from the bass for two days after that just to give my hands a breather.
we've had an equal number of gigs and rehearsals. at least three songs each time have been worked out on stage... good thing they're pretty easy... just 'A7, E, C... chorus is A C E.' then i'm left intently watching the dude's hands prance over the fretboard to figure out the rhythm. whoa... I haven't heard any recordings from these gigs. At the time i can't hear much over my bass and the drummer, and b'sides my mind is occupied.
This is helluva fun, i gotta admit. i was pleased that i have never choked onstage. this was a lingering concern for me. The hour or so before i get phantom disabilities... like my lower back aches like i've done eight hours of factory work, or the long cold walk to the bar has frozen my fingers but good this time. By the end of our set i don't wanna get off. People borrow my bass and i get jealous.
The dude has an established fan base, real small but tight-knit. have I mentioned that i haven't what it all sounds like onstage? I have gotten some compliments, that's cool. it's a leap of faith. I have to trust their reactions, because there's not a whole lot of evidence that i can dissect by the end of the night. phew! I learn my parts from the record, i take it to rehearsal, have fun, take it to the bar, get nervous, and it all comes out in a rush. get my free drink, relax, get some compliments, wake up tomorrow and remember all the parts that went wrong. cycle continues.
i think too long about it... whoa! i live in toronto. there's practically a fifth of the population who are musicians around here. and here's the thing: we're not very tight, the guitarist is honestly no virtuoso, we are flying by the seat of ours pants, etc. etc. I've seen a lot of very good musicians playing (imo) mediocre songs in this town. I have to trust, finally, that other people are hearing the magick that i heard in this guy's songs when i popped in his CD for the first time. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a career move and i'm NOT placing myself on the established musical ladder in hogtown. we are playing solely for the handfuls of people who might get off on what we are doing. this isn't mainstream stuff. i joined the band b/c i really like the songs. now i'm too close to 'em. i have to trust that whatever it was is still there... plus bass.

also...

2006-02-08T20:43:00.000-05:00

Hugo Chavez has apparently joined Public Enemy.

I for one, welcome the move.

current events...

2006-02-08T20:24:00.000-05:00

i didn't want to get involved, i really didn't.

So you have your typical right-winger newspaper in Denmark, who-- surprise, surprise-- tend to score political points off provoking the 'opposing team'... so they publish cartoons... basically suggest that 'the other guys' are completely unreasonable and hate us and are probably evil. Unfortunately for them, other right-wingers, this time in Iran, pick up on that, see a chance to score political points by suggesting that 'the other guys' are completely unreasonable, and hate us, and are probably evil. All they wanted were some cheap political points, instead they got an international incident, which leads right-wingers, this time all over the world, to pick up on the chance to show how 'the other guys' are completely unreasonable and are probably evil and totally hate our guts. It's a transcontinental right-winger circle jerk, it's the Sam Huntington version of the special olympics. Fuck those guys.
Any body got anything else they want to add?

In that case, I'm selling tickets to the 'Transcontinental Right-Winger Circle Jerk' on ebay for $1200. Each ticket comes with airfare to Iraq, a Danish flag (suitable for waving or burning), a holy book of your choice, and thirty rounds of ammunition. No refunds.

are we 'fisking' yet?

2006-01-26T13:40:00.000-05:00

I want to respond to something I read... on a blog.

Fuck! I still hate that word. But 'scrawlie' didn't catch on, especially with me.

This is coming from friend linebreaks, who got it from Shawn Ewald.

I never bought into the whole blog-as-grassroots-democratic medium hype and that notion never played a factor in the creation of this blog. I’m still amazed that people take that shit seriously. I’ve been using the internet since 1994 and I’m pretty sure they said the same thing about, well…the internet and e-mail and the web and so on and so on. The “blogosphere”, both its readers and its “content producers”, are a small segment of the American public who generally come from a larger small segement of the American public which constitutes what’s left of the American middle class. Sure, the occassonal poor person will get themselves a blog and maybe complain about the man if they’re the thoughtful type, but generally speaking the political “blogosphere” is mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly professional, mostly under 40–same old stuff, same old intensive internet user demographics that have been consistent since the internet boom. What’s perverse about the blogging phenomenon is that now, the media can pluck some middle class white suburban shmoe with too much time his hands who has managed to build a following of other privileged nerds and throw him in front of a camera and present him as the voice of the people. I mean who needs democracy when you’ve got the “blogosphere”, right? It’s just too easy. Take a minute to flatter the bland, timid soul of the middle class suburbanite or the self-absorbed urban hipster (the same creature really only at different stages of development over time) and you can go right back to the important business of ruling the world with no muss or fuss. It’s the political equivalent of shutting up a child by giving him a few bucks and sending him to the candy store. If you really think that any kind of truly serious change is going to come from blogging, you must be a Daily Kos reader.

Can I compress the argument, as I see it? The most generous thing you can say about blogging is that it is not mass media. The harshest criticism you can direct at it is that it is not real life. To a certain extent, this is all a zero-sum equation. There are only twenty-four hours a day, and precious little time left in life. Blogging is revolutionary inasmuch as it erodes the hegemony of television, and it is a negative force inasmuch as it complements the traditional media and keeps people from interacting with the outside world. Shawn, as I see it, is opposing blogs when they parrot the entrenched middle class perspective, and when they lend and receive legitimacy from the established mass outlets of 'news.' I question whether the demographics of blogging will always be so static and uninteresting as they are now: surely we'll run out of boring white people eventually, right?
right?
Any discourse, including the old stalwarts like talking and flipping the bird, are only useful when they expand the realms of possibility and create human connections. Talking, for example, is widely abused as a means of reproducing televised catchphrases and sitcom plotlines. That blogs tend to reflect current media hegemony is a sad sign of the times, but not of the limitations of blogging itself. The internet has been successful in rupturing mass media mythologies in the past, and it also functions as an obscene waste of time.
The (small-'r') revolutionary potential of blogging is entirely subjective. If we all abandon electronic discourse, then we revert back to Mass Media vs. Reality. Of course, it doesn't help to be inspired by something you read on the internet if you don't go and do something with that inspiration. It doesn't help to read about bad news if you don't prepare a response to that stimuli. If you abandon televised atomization in favour of 'virtual community', that's a positive development but it doesn't surpass 'real' community in terms of potential agency or personal satisfaction.
Personally, I get a kick from doing these posts because it gets me writing and thinking. I really like reading the stuff that my friends produce. I like going on Anarchoblogs and finding out what people are excited about, or railing against. I get surprised by new viewpoints. In this way, my conception of what is possible is expanded. At the same time, I am aware of the fact that the whole 'community' is just a bunch of people punching keys at each other. We can't be living if we're doing this. I will be the first to admit that my internet usage is excessive. On that note,

hodge podge of thoughts and fireballs.

2006-01-18T21:39:00.000-05:00

Sorry I'm a little inundated with... occurences. How's that for vague. Heh.
Nothing dramatic, just some deadlines.
This shit I'm linking to is all worthy of a fat gumbo of smart words, which I am in no position to create.
So this week (real fast weeks these days, eh?) is 'write your own damn essay in the comments section' or something. As always, the best comment gets a 'pep talk' from me, delivered by phone, to a locker room of your choice.

13 Things that Don't Make Sense in science. Not to taunt anyone for not knowing the secrets of the Universe or anything, but why is it that when cosmological equations don't add up, theorists create a 'dark something' that explains everything but we just haven't discovered it yet. 95% of matter isn't accounted for? It must be Dark Matter. We just haven't found it yet. Because it's Dark and kinda hard to see. Dark Stuff is the mathematical Deus Ex Machina. And they call the poets irrational.
The Punk Rock Approach to Weapons Program Management... I throw up a little in my mouth every time I think about it. Thanks, thanks a lot Living on Less. I think that's a sign: if weapons program managers can cite the Clash in their struggle to keep the war machine productive, it's about time that we had another riot. Shit like this reminds me of assholes who think that Dockers and buzzcuts really reflect how they feel inside. Edgy, but not 'thrown off the squash court' edgy.
By the way, I have a story that's along similar thematic lines to this one, and it involves the Clash. It's not a shit-talkin' story like Rob's tho. It'll just make you feel dirty and betrayed.

Finally, pursue serenity with the Falling Sand Game. Actually, whenever I play with this java toy, I just end up filling a giant tub with oil and then blowing it up. Oh yes, I Am too Male by Far.

2006-01-13T18:24:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Rob, for the International Noise Conspiracy story.
Too bad I was so intent on finishing an essay that Shit-talkin' Week kinda fell by the wayside.
You know what? Screw Shit-talkin' Week. That week sucked.
New week starts now, and it's hella better than lame old Shit-talkin' Week.
Write a Caption Week!
ready... set... GO

(image via boingboing)
Write a Caption! Do it!

text.

2006-01-03T16:42:00.000-05:00

okay so we're back. hi.

I'm probably going to catch shit for this, but Refused is at this point the Beatles of anarcho-punk rock. They spent their time in the trenches, playing along genre lines, surpassing expectations in that regard (see 'fanning the flames of discontent'), then they go and take a giant leap forward in terms in technical prowess and sheer visceral inspiration. And, in ultimate anarchistic style, break up at the peak of their influence. No need to kill your idols if they take themselves out of the picture, right? Plus, um, they had those matching black clothes... okay, enough of the Beatle analogy. Point is, Refused cast a long shadow. To this day 'The Shape of Punk to Come' still strikes me as one of the most optimistic albums; at the time it aroused in me desires and emotions I didn't know I had. Especially, 'tanhauser/derive'. Somewhere in my skull, that scream is still echoing:
alive... living... aannnddd ssseeeaaarrrccchhhiiinnnggg!!!!!!!!!!
but i digress.
So then Refused break up, and Dennis goes to the International Noise Conspiracy, and the others, well, hmm... all the legends seemed to point to a less-than-amiable breakup; even the liner notes indicate this to a degree. A falling-out over politics? Perhaps. But Dennis is still into it, right? I mean, with that whole retro-1968 thing he's got going with the T(I)NC...
'kay, I never much enjoyed that band. It seems like they were trying to fly under the radar of mainstream culture: they had the whole 'retro' thing (although it's the wrong decade for hipster appeal), the faux-ironic politics ('capitalism stole my virginity?!' c'mon!)... it just wasn't gelling for me. The band is like a Marxist trying to 'mingle' with hipsters, slipping them pamphlets while sipping on an (ironic) martini. The liner notes though? Still awesome. I believe their hearts are still in it, but I question the efficacy of the way they go about communicating their beliefs. I guess this isn't really a political criticism, just a personal one. There's no accounting for taste. Bottom line is, keep my music earnest, dammit!
but i digress....
Here's the real point of this post. The rest of the band went and formed TEXT. Or rather, the rest of band participated in TEXT, because it appears to be a loose collective of various artists and musicians. TEXT is... very strange music. The whole album is available for download with the blessing of its authors, so download away... after working up the patience to listen to the thing the whole way through, I guess you can call this... Swedish dub?! Yeah, and did I mention it's another long step forward for musical progression?!
The first track is people shouting in latin.
The second track I initially wrote off as some kind of attempt at pop, but it's got a heavy dub bassline and quickly morphs into something different. Anyone who noted the 'broken radio' feel to 'the Shape of Punk...' will recognize a similar meandering quality to this album, as musical elements fade in and out. It's as if the band is rethinking the dimensions of this thing we call a song.
The 'Collages Desertes' trilogy is an epic electronic dub song coupled with narration about torture. Similar themes to Foucault's Discipline and Punish. There are great musical moments in it, and then some moments that only bring to mind an A&E special on acid. The first part of the trilogy is my favourite. Still, you might listen to them all to hear the narration all the way through. Interesting, but grisly and definitely a bad acid trip.
Two standouts for me: 'We have Explosives! Shmexplosives?' sounds like a sketch of a kickin' Refused song. No lyrics, but all the musical elements are there. Finally, there's 'The Huntsville Treaty.' Phew. This song is a headbanging electronic song, taking the inspired production of Refused and just running with it. When the singer starts screaming 'My language is Dead!!!' it sounds like joy, and maybe... a theme perhaps?! The song shifts gears into jazz territory and comes to gentle landing, just in time to finish the aforementioned trilogy. If you are going to download only one song, this is the one.
Is TEXT a political band? Well, I don't know if it matters, (isn't every band political?) but the chorus to the second song is this:
Black is the light that shines in my path, Black is the colour of Freedom.
Good enough for me. So let's revise the popular perception of what happened to Refused: Dennis goes on to front a band whose purpose is the infection of popular culture with subversive political discourse. The rest of the band retreats to labour away in seclusion, intent on 'killing' the language of music. One band intends to carry a destructive payload in a catchy and innocuous vessel. The other intends to create a vessel that is in itself destructive. Both are political paths, both are legitimate. But which is more inspiring?

And hey! Since I'm acting like the friggin' "Scene Police", why don't we make this Shit-talkin' Week! Where we talk shit about the subculture's most visible personalities! We'll talk about Mack Evasion's movie deal*, we'll paw through Naomi Klein's garbage, Rimbaud faked his own death, sold out and changed his name to Ezra Pound, Ian MacKaye smokes pot and smells like patchouli, um... Rob at LoveEcstasyCrime has a story that involves the International Noise Conspiracy... but that's his to tell if he feels like it. :)
Shit-Talkin' Week. We'll decorate this place to look like Entertainment Tonight, maybe hang some dirty diapers from clotheslines and gain twenty pounds and wear magenta lipstick with a ugly-ass brooch.

*this is true!

did i mention i love south koreans?!

2005-12-18T03:07:00.000-05:00

linky

i couldn't resist.

2005-12-17T15:17:00.000-05:00

Mona Lisa's Smile Decoded
Has there ever been a more obvious example of the sheer stupidity of science?
Mona Lisa is "83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry."

Bourgeois art critics twist themselves into knots over the 'mystery' of Mona Lisa's smile, and the scientist shows up with an adding machine and misses the point entirely.
'Who was this Mona Lisa?' they ask. 'How was she to become immortalized in this way?' Old dudes are savouring the mystery, just getting down with those delicious rhetorical questions. 'What sort of person was she? That... smile. What is she thinking about? She is the template of human inscrutability... she is unknowable.'
'Not really', says the scientist. 'We know she's about 9% disgusted.' And with that, a stony silence rings through the Louvre. It is worse than piss in the merlot bottle.
"9% disgusted." Haha, what? Notice how the article is framed as if this is the resolution of an age-old mystery. Way to come through for us again, science. Through the process of quantification, human facts are reduced to gibberish. How the hell is this information functional? Why ought it be reduced to function? Because remember, this software wasn't merely developed to vandalize art. It was developed to create better, more powerful surveillance systems. Besides being irrational, science is paranoid: everything must be reduced to knowables, to facts... even if those facts are gibberish. Even the rhetorical questions of the stuffy aristocrats regarding their 'high art' are an issue of anxiety for science, and subject to liquidation.
Here's another thing about this entire absurd situation: the Mona Lisa is a painting. It was created, probably over the course of weeks or months. Was she '9% disgusted' the whole fucking time? I'd imagine that at some point da Vinci probably would've tried to crack a joke, in order to calm the young model down... but then this is conjecture, and I'm falsely putting myself and my modern expectations of sociality into an alien situation. My point is, science forgets that the Mona Lisa's smile is the result of an interaction of painter and model-- the smile is an aggregate of many moments of relaxation, boredom, and so on for the model, whoever she was, as well as what the painter saw in these moments, and what he wanted to see. Science forgets all that, and then forgets that it forgot. The process is forgotten, all facts are taken at (sorry) Face Value. Science behind the surveillance camera watches you get off the subway. Science measures 34% resentment... not a good sign. Science forgets that it is part of the watching eyes, the crowds, the smog and the armed guards that you resent. Science forgets that its observation is part of the equation. Science sees you look into the camera defiantly, pinned down in the moment. Science brings up your dossier and adds another line of gibberish, building up a case for the liquidation of your mystery. If you won't talk to the agents that show up for 'a friendly chat'; if you won't talk to the doctors who are concerned about your 'mental health', then maybe you will talk when they waterboard you.
Torture creates intelligence in more ways than one. It's complete rubbish for extracting factual information: after a beating most people will tell you what you want to hear. Remember when an anonymous senior official in the White House crowed about an empire 'creating their own reality'? And liberals pegged this as part of Bush's religious delusion? I disagree. I say it's an extreme manifestation of science's ongoing delusion. Suspicion begats investigation, which begats interrogation, begats torture, which creates its own 'intelligence' and thus justifies the suspicion. Psychiatrists must assume that the society is sane, which justifies the insanity in whoever walks into their office. If the signs of disease are not there, you can keep digging until you find it, or perceive normal behaviour through a different lens. The patient must be hiding something, they reason, otherwise why would they have been referred to me? It's circular reasoning. The state's scrutiny of muslim men creates the resentment that becomes the 'red flag' that justifies scrutiny. The point of investigation is always the individual, and never the examiner, and so Science will always find what it wants to find.

The Artist and Civilization part II.

2005-12-09T23:20:00.000-05:00

But to be the monster and the pathologist at the same time-- that is reserved for certain species of men(sic) who, disguised as artists, are supremely aware that sleep is an even greater danger than insomnia. In order not to fall asleep, in order not to become victims of that insomnia which is called 'living', they resort to the drug of putting words together endlessly. ...I wanted to be wide awake without talking or writing about it, in order to accept life absolutely.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

There is something not quite sane about the bohemian's insistence on writing those postcards to civilization from Henry Miller's thirteenth chair. It is as if we cast off the norms and compulsions of the old society, because we finally see them as absurd in the face of the eternal. In our isolation, we become purified by the fires of our own essential spirit. In a fit of ecstasy, we plunge into the forest. Standing at its edge, we continue to wave at the watchtowers of civilization. 'So long! This is where we are now!' The watchtower guard lowers his binoculars and reports to command. Yes, he's still there. Yes, he's still waving. It's been twenty-two days now. Yes, he's still screaming out his pity for the 'sheep.' The guard is under strict orders to give the bohemian some hot cocoa when he comes back in. Thoreau received more visitors in his exile at Walden than he did in town. He was the lucky one: nobody much cares about the colonies of exiles anymore; nobody comes a-knocking to see what we have learned. In the watchtower they wait. And for each of those bohemians, cast into the fires of their own spirit, the rewards of wicked civilization still beckon: to become the next Thoreau, the next Burroughs, the next Henry Miller. We are all too prepared to accept our role as producers of cultural value, of cultural redemption. We are all too prepared to accept standard notions of success. We trade the context of our lives, our rebellion and exclusion for greater exposure to our art. Even the most politically-aware of us trade context for exposure, and believe that our words become more valuable the farther they are spread. Punk bands, given the opportunity, give in to major label success. 'Well', they reason, 'if we can reach more people with our message, maybe that is our contribution to a better world.'
This belief stems from our traditional view of art as objects that stand and operate under their own power. Moreover, art as commodity, infused with all the fetish-power that that entails. In the absence of the original context, the music of the punk band is redefined by its status as a commodity. Through reproduction, the message of 'Kick Out The Jams Motherfucker!' finds itself to be a poster on the subway, a plastic disc at the mall, an organization of electrons on television, a billboard transfixed over the sky. The context of the art is no longer its birth outside of civilization, forged in the imagination of the free individual (if there is such a thing), but in its surroundings-- in the pseudo-eternality of capitalism. In this way it loses its opportunity to transcend the false gods. Its life is but thirty seconds long, a blink of an eye cut between CNN and a sitcom rerun. This is the repressive desublimation of Herbert Marcuse, but it cuts much deeper than even he imagined.
Since Marcuse's time, the frontiers of culture have collapsed into a singularity: the internet. Imagine it: once, inside the bus shelter on the way to work, you found a photocopied pamphlet decrying the emptiness of modern life and attributing it to the absence of space aliens. The last page, speckled with dirt, urges you to watch the skies on May 14th, 1993 for the return of our life-giving cosmic visitors. The power of the message, false or not, is inescapable.
Presently this group has a website as canny as any other. Their messageboard is full of abuse and ridicule and bible scripture, which is itself as meaningless as any other message could be in this context.
The perceptions of civilization have been increased by the internet: its omniscience is taken for granted. And yet the equation, of exposure as the inverse to context holds. Everyone has the capacity of infinite and immediate exposure, and the only context left is a cathode-ray tube. It is tacitly understood that we are all online, sitting at our places, on the electrical grid and at cable's length to a telephone jack. And if we are all getting stranger and stranger in our tastes and fetishes, the frontiers of strangeness have already been colonized by cannyness. In fact pop-culture hipsters celebrate the lack of context, the absurd, the banality of their 'discoveries' on the internet. No matter what the message, the medium reduces it to an electronic yawn. And hence artistry reaches the limits of our public imagination. The bohemian, waving from his edge of the forest, finds himself finally alone. The guard in the watchtower has lost interest, is surfing the web, browsing without much interest a bestiality website. The bohemian lowers his arm and begins to hear the howling of wind through trees, an inhuman sound if there ever was one. He shivers. It is expected that by tomorrow he will be blogging from the nearest public library.
I find this very depressing. I need to believe that the forest contains witches in hand-hewn cabins. I need to believe every freight train has its hobo. I need to believe in the ounce of truth in every schizophrenic screed. But this means that some individuals will have to eschew their stab at immortality, will have to accept their roles as ghosts. To not be an artist demands the greatest sacrifice: it accepts the mortality of the false gods of civilization, and it accepts the death of the false god of the artist. It means we must invent a culture that is once and for all off the grid-- not meant to be reproduced, but to be not seen at all. For example:
figure 1.

figure 2.

figure 3.

The Artist and Civilization part I.

2005-12-09T22:32:00.000-05:00

Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy horsepower fiends; in order to break their insane rhythm, their death rhythm, I had to resort to a wave length which, until I found the proper sustenance in my own bowels, would at least nullify the rhythm they had set up. Certainly I did not need this grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk which I had installed in the parlor; certainly I didn't need twelve empty chairs place around it in a semicirlce; I needed only elbow room in which to write and a thirteenth chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were using and put me in a heaven beyond heaven.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

...And this has been the goal, since forever, the purpose and objective of all bohemians, punks, street professors on Queen and Bathurst on a gritty Winter night;
amid the fires and fights; soft voices and fierce desperate eyes, pupils jumping and crackling like arc-light; dancing with questions... every trainhopper that speaks in ways and honesties unknown to the cities; glaze of sweat mixed with burnt tobacco; to be disappeared in the oncoming sun.
We are trying to break the twelve steps of society, to deny the holy numbers their power. We are shifting loyalties: breaking out of a heaven of duck ponds and alabaster homes to a heaven of our own ecstatic soul. Every bohemian, of which there are many now, knows this purpose. And every damn one of them, at one point or another, has tried on Henry Miller's shoes. To sit at the thirteenth chair, to claim nothing but the elbow-space to work, and to make art as means of advancing the species beyond its present condition. And in redeeming society, of course, you might redeem yourself. When we pulled ourselves out of willful employment: when we defined ourselves beyond work's capacity for actualization, and either went to it with a head full of secrets or just busted out entirely, we couldn't just let our lives become the means and end of our existence. Art was the end, at once a postcard to the existing society-- because they couldn't miss us if they didn't know we were gone, could they?-- and also the redefinition of our lives.
This is the crux of it: civilizations leave what after their passing? Vast amounts of legal tender, of use to no-one but the nomads who burn it for kindling. Concrete ruins to be inherited by the jungle. Ornately-decorated corpses, which as we all know stink like cinnamon. As they stink, a dead language on the wall boasts our leaders' and gods' immortality. What bollocks.
We have escaped these anxious assertions of immortality. The church, the government, business all chew up 8 to 14 hours a day warding off extinction. Their eyes never focus over the shoulders of their next challenge. In this way they never have to confront the sorry fate of their predecessors. Like the child who insists he will never grow up, they leave unsaid their certainty that their god, finally, will be the one that enjoys eternal supremacy. They might be right, of a fashion: physicists believe that every wave of our hand gives birth to new universes in the twelth dimension, bubble-thin and infinite. They exist as the vertical white scratches on the film of this life, dancing along to the racket of the projector. Somewhere Zeus rules over a universe the size of a high school gym locker. But infinite, natch. Jesus, your locker awaits.
But artists have seen through these illusions. The other measure of a civilization, besides the majesty of its garbage, is the culture that it leaves behind. Gods are eventually relegated to their pet universes, but the Homers and Ciceros live on. The servants outgrow their masters. And if our civilization can't provide joy or hope in immediate present, because it certainly can't, it can at least be civilized in its great works, in its hindsight. And one of us, from the colony of artists, may yet be the one to outlive our cruel gods. William S. Burroughs was probably our latest pharaoh.
And what does it get us? The libraries fill up with treasure, prepared and ready for this world's armageddon. Its similarities to the Federal Reserve are shocking: already it is touched with ghosts and dust and echoing footsteps. This civilization gets richer and richer in commodities-- those objects regarded so quaintly by future tomb robbers. Hell, compact discs don't even burn that well, and leave a nasty taste on the meat. The urge to create, driven by contempt for the finite gods of religion, wealth and power is, in fact, borne of the same death anxiety as they are. It is a little more clear-headed and far-seeing, yes. But in the end it is powered by the same compulsion to stockpile, to maximize a completely arbitrary wealth-value. How much art are we going to need, anyway?

yet more bullshit.

2005-11-30T03:22:00.000-05:00

fuck.
school is not over yet.
listen: i wanted to talk about other musical bands, but Fucked Up has a following here at pleasure.spot.central. At least... people other than me know about them, so that's cool and i'm excited and all that.

They now have a website, which is actually a blog.
A couple surprises.
Fucked Up has always (apparently) been a band full of music collectors; hence, for a long time all their music was on vinyl singles. They've got three tracks online (available for downloading, if you can find the linx!) which are from a rare vinyl. Apparently some people were paying $50+ for this album on ebay. You get it for free because you will visit the website and find those linx.
On the website is a very intricate explanation of the lyrics for the song which is sung. Very informative, and very interesting, all the attention to detail and metaphor that they've invested in this song.
The song itself I can only describe as prog punk-rock.
Actually, that's bullshit. But it's in two parts, and like twelve minutes long. and it has an essay explaining its meaning. That's kind of proggy, inn'nt it?
The first track is pretty wicked.
The second track, I can only recommend if you love drum solos, or whistling?!?!
The third track... oh my shit..!
y'know when you hear a song, and then rewind, cause you have to hear it again/again?! That has happened here. Wonderful. A kickass piece of songwriting. Song's called Fate of Fates.
All the best punk songs are about mortality. This is why teenagers love punk, but kind of suck at playing it. (Yeah! You heard me... damn kids) Punk/hardcore arose from the intersection of contradictions. The dominance of Reaganite capitalism's utopian promise vs. its reality, bereft of alternatives... the self-important messianism of white priviledged adolescence crashing against the bleak realities of urban poverty. Witness the pretentious nihilistic suicidalism(sic?!?) of Darby Crash and Sid Vicious, taken to its logical extreme, transforming over time into the slow realization that we are all dying with the lofty promises of capitalism and Enlightenment unfulfilled. Taking it back to the 'decline of Western civilization', (check your video store kiddies): "The air in paradise is poison... the final joke." (i am immensely paraphrasing). I don't know if that makes us gullible... probably. Only now is Western culture dealing with this disappointment. If it can pull itself out of its present lazy nihilist irony-hole, well, we'll find out.
I guess what I'm saying is this: if you are going to play punk, you better be hungry.
Bottom line: I really like the fucking song. Now if you will excuse me, I have to let the cats in.
(Also check out Career Suicide and download all their songs and listen to them and generally rock out in the comfort of your home.)

it's gone, all gone...

2005-11-23T17:57:00.000-05:00

3+ years worth of old emails, manuscripts, love letters, hate mail...
shit. catastrophic failure at my web-based email.
no, it gets better. I was trading a story (which rapidly turned into a novel) over a lot of those years with a friend who's (haha) on the same email server. so she probably doesn't have a backup.
shit. shit shit-
oh wait-
no, never mind. it's backed up on my hard drive. whew.
now i just i have to recreate my address book from scratch, and kiss everything else goodbye. no big deal.
The reason i bring this up, b'sides kvetching, is that the nature of the internet and the categorization of knowledge is becoming progressively more centralised. As you can see, I had a lot of personal data that was stored elsewhere.
And here's this story: Online File Storage.

It's amazing to me that all of us aren't backing up our important files online regularly. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason is because no product has emerged to fill this tremendous demand, with the right features and at the right price.

Bad idea. That's what cd-rs are for. And, like every other centralized service, the centralized data bank that has arisen is incredibly prone to attack. No, not the same old 'doomsday terrist hacker' story, goddammit, do i look like Tom Clancy? No. I mean, transcripts, reports and political data are all vulnerable to tampering. Shit, people fell for the Protocols of Zion. Now we've got Photoshop, and people Google for the truth. The present administration has already been massaging the official transcripts, ironing out anything embarassing, but people have been catching them at it. What if that system of information becomes more integrated?

On the other hand, centralization makes the whole tottering edifice vulnerable to collapse. It's old hat now to mention the blackout of a couple years ago, when we had a quick glimpse into a different world: the one with stars visible on a streetcorner. Something shaky and hungry in people's eyes. There was talk later on that 'maybe we should have more blackouts!' I haven't heard that suggestion made lately.
There's that too. Maybe we could use some cultural amnesia.
I admit, it's been kinda fun not having an email address for the past few days.
Sorry if I haven't responded to any of your emails.

2005-11-11T15:39:00.000-05:00

...breaking radio silence with incoming news... (and revised on Nov 12.)

A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people."

Found here. Not surprising, I guess. After all, that Goering quote is (I hope) a matter of public knowledge by now. But here's what I think is significant: these Republicans, or neo-conservatives, or whatever they call themselves, try so hard to be objectivists: that they are using Reason to perceive and to follow a greater Truth, a greater Virtue. Look at their hero Strauss: they crave a return to a time of purer truths and noble ends. At night, they can look in the mirror and see themselves wrapped in moral fibre.
Noble ends justify messy means. Remember? "We don't torture, but if we did it would be alright because it's a different kind of war." Anyone who decries those means is a philosophical dwarf, a closet traitor, etc. etc. right?
That moral fibre might as well be a Hollywood costume, borrowed from the set of "Patton" or wherever. It rings false. I don't to point you to any of the evidence that the CPA was the most corrupt government in history. You know all this. (okay, maybe it is worth a link. Just... hold your nose when you get there, okay?)
Here's the philosophy that worked for Bush for so long:

Means (lies, torture, war, ie. we don't wanna know)
==>
Ends (Security for the American People, democracy, blabla)

In other words, the stated ends of the 'war on terror' are to extinguish Evil, or at least its political influence. The means in which you fight it are inherently justified, even if they are in themselves are evil. Hence the argument that liberals (who the fuck are liberals again?!) should not 'defend' the monsters incarcerated in gitmo, because they would not extend that beneficience to us. Noble means are not a luxury we can afford.
I hope that the inherent contradiction of using evil to fight evil is apparent to everyone. I hope it is also apparent that the stated means and ends of this conflict are completely counterfeit.

I submit to you the revised version:
Means (terrorism, ie. letting it happen, exacerbating its causes)
==>
Ends (Continued Republican dominance)

The ends are as they have always been: the pursuit of power. And as never before has it been made explicit by those with the power, that the interests of people and their government are diametrically opposed. Time and time again the argument against anarchism has been made: that people are inherently cruel, and so some greater power must be created to pursue the lofty ends of freedom and justice. I would answer: power is inherently cruel, because because it provides to some the (usually violent, sometimes hegemonic) means to advance their own ends; that is, their own personal power, wealth, and influence. Power has never originated after the fact; power has existed before its alibi. In other words, its existence precedes its essence. Diminishing the ability of power to deploy violent means is the only way of ensuring freedom or justice. There are no ends, only means. Looking at means are the only way we have to measure morality.
But I digress. Some other choice quotes:

“The President’s popularity was at an all-time high following the 9/11 attacks,” admits one aide. “Americans band together at a time of crisis.”

Other Republicans, however, worry that such a scenario carries high risk, pointing out that an attack might suggest the President has not done enough to protect the country.

Never once is it suggested that such a turn of events would be a serious reversal of their stated aims, only that those means might not in fact produce the desired ends. It's positively ghoulish. Oh, here's another snip:

As Republican political strategists scramble to find a message – any message – that will ring true with voters, GOP leaders in Congress admit privately that control of their party by right-wing extremists makes their recovery all but impossible.

“We’ve made our bed with these people,” admits an aide to House Speaker Denny Hastert. “Now it’s the morning after and the hangover hurts like hell.”

Remember when democrats were licking their wounds after last election, debating that they hadn't done enough to 'woo' the right demographics, that they should drop the abortion thing, buy more guns, etc. etc.? Same thing here.
Whaddaya mean 'hangover'? I thought you were Down with the Family Values! You mean- you told me that you had moral fibre, but you were just sayin' that to get wit' me!!
Shocking, I know. But what this says is that the people doing the murderous arithmetic are the "moderate Republicans."

One of the things I hate most in the universe: used-car salesmen covering their ass with hijacked moral fibre. On that note, let's visit another corner of the vomitorium:

Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith, discloses in a new book that she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal.

here. Now, here's what's galling about this piece of work:

Nichols is accused of killing four people, including a judge.
"It's hard for people to understand the miracle of the story," she told the newspaper. "This was totally a God thing, to me in my life. This was God getting my attention, going, `I'm going to give you one more chance.'"

Yes, it's very hard for me the see the 'miracle' in a situation where four people died, a man got the death penalty, and a junky got a book deal. This is not, let me be clear, about contempt for christianity; there's is no real christianity in the story. What we have is a narcissist getting rich and dressing it up as the 'power of faith.' People using higher values to justify their own self-interest.

And why did god give her another chance? Could the answer be: 'because he has bigger plans for me?' Do those plans involve working at a shelter, benefitting the human race, y'know, doing all those 'jesus' things? Or does it involve profitting from a book deal while pretending to spread 'inspiration?' Let me add that the title of this book will be "Unlikely Angel." God is reduced to a literary agent pushing the incredible story of 'Her.'

ok, now I really have to get back to writing essays. consider us on hiatus for another three weeks. Then, though, there should be some new shit up. This year has been my first opportunity to really get into the work of the Frankfurt school, and it's certainly made an impression. For example, if you want to expand on today's polemic you can pick up Max Horkheimer's 'Eclipse of Reason' and read chapter one: 'means and ends.' So long...

hey, i'm still alive!!

2005-11-03T14:28:00.000-05:00

...barely. *koff koff* ugh...

How was your spooky day everybody. here was mine...

fucking grand.

I will never look at pumpkins, or crowd participation, the same way again.
For cheap laughs, look at this thread:
i have no idea what "self-clowing" is.

we'll talk soon... *koff*

special treats for such good kids..!

2005-10-09T20:59:00.000-04:00

Hey.
So there hasn't been an update, due to: A. Me being in a forest. B. Me, out of the forest, now in school. C. I dunno, um... Me, eating... uh, yogurt.
I have a 500-word polemic on protests, sitting on some server in blawger-land, just waiting for another 500 words to join the fun and complete it. Someday soon, you will see it in front of your eyes.
In the meantime.
Read about this. It's fucking awesome. Via Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity.

Music: This Is Not Hardcore. I'm not sure what it is, but it is stupendous. Mt. Gigantic. It's a band I don't know anything about. Listening to the CD, I get the impression that there are like a thousand people in the band, playing with thrift store keyboards, acoustic guitars, tambourines, lotsa singing, animal costumes. Definitely animal costumes.
The entire album can be found here. My favourite song is at the bottom, called "bring back the healthy."
Positives: wicked-ass indie rock songs held down by tight drumming.
Negatives: some dude has a nasty falsetto. (Part of its indie Made-this-in-my-bedroom cred) Also, I really hated the slow parts when I first listened. Now I don't mind them.
Ghost Mice: Guys, seriously. Go here.
Ghost mice are an acoustic punk duo of greatness. They use no amplification, and tour on freight trains. Listening to "Lost City" brings tears of joy to my eyes. The audio is recorded from a live show, and it feels like you are listening in on a long-distance phone call from a beloved friend. So the audio quality ain't the best, but you will not care. Ghost Mice are also here. Fuck yeah Ghost Mice! I don't think I have anything else to add. Tears of joy... joy! And I'm usually such a frowny grumbly fellow.

my president prop plop.

2005-09-08T15:49:00.000-04:00

What's been interesting for me during this ongoing Katrina debacle has been the visual
aspect of its dissemination to the public. Particularly since I've never been to New Orleans, and am not there now, and I'm forced to consume the imagery provided by the media. Of particular importance has been two images, both almost instantly inflated to archetypal dimensions:
figure 1.

figure 2.

I think most people would agree that these are important images. But important because of their very non-importance.
The first picture was taken on August 30th, three days after a state of emergency was declared in Louisiana. At the very instant this photograph was taken, people were drowning in New Orleans. Wait a minute... who cares?
Were we expecting Bush to jump in and tug them out himself?
The second image occurs after Bush's drastic shift in mood in relation to the disaster. As has been widely noted, those firefighters were taken away from their work in order to pose beside the president. Everywhere the president went, hurricane victims were run through metal detectors, phony reconstruction backdrops were constructed and promptly abandoned. If anything, the presence of the president hindered rescue efforts.
The first image fuelled a massive burst of outrage among liberal commentators, and polls showed less than half of the public was satisfied with the president's performance. And here, the characterization of just what the president does as a 'performance' seems remarkably apt. It seems to me the only reason for outrage might have been that the president did not excrete enough crocodile tears in public.
Like most of you who read this scrawlie, I find myself harbouring a particularly venomous hate for this president. Beyond his reprehensible policies, beyond even his access to insurmountable power, I find myself hating the man. I think probably that he's a prick in real life, but who's to know? For Bush, there is no real life. Even his so-called leisure, his 'ranching' vacations, are sculpted by exterior forces of public approval and wish fulfillment. George Bush, the man, is probably no more disagreeable than the old guy that screamed at me for jaywalking at College and Manning.
Like haggard junkyard dogs rising one more time to bait, the left snapped at the image of Bush posing with a guitar, and the right oozed at their action figure leading a group of firefighters. It didn't matter that neither image, in a sense, was true. Bush is a film prop; he poses with whatever is thrust into his hands; he has been conditioned to do this. The real story is how FEMA became so enfeebled as a wing of Homeland Security, and how the levees were left to disintegrate without adequate funding. But even here, saying that "Bush cut FEMA's funding" is a misnomer; he merely signed the bill. Again, probably a Pavlovian response. I very much doubt that Bush reads every bill that he signs off on. I also doubt that he was interested in the minutae of flood response. One might also point at the incompetence of FEMA director Michael Brown, who probably 'won' the position as a reward for party loyalties. Even so, can't say that corruption within a government bureaucracy surprises me much.
What surprises me is the utter pettiness of these rhetorical offensives. Let's look at the second image again. The (occasionally voting) public, the pseudo-We, are an audience inside a lecture hall. (soldiers bar the exits) The background of the photograph, the firefighters, are the subject-- a powerpoint image of surprisingly narrow focus. The president is the red dot of a laser pointer, dancing over the image and emphasizing its points. It hits me: why do we insist on putting a president in all these images? Maybe you can answer that question by looking back at those family albums-- that time you visited the Big Rocks in Big Rock national park: mother and sister are instructed to stand beside the Big Rock, partly to indicate the physical proportion of the rock and partly to reassure ourselves: indeed, we were beside the Big Rock... anyone who believes that we only bought a postcard and inserted it into our photo album is mistaken; there's mother and sister right there, plain as day... you can't buy a postcard with your likeness in it. Wipe your brow in relief... phew! There exists no commodity to erode the authenticity of a family photograph. (at least not then... now we have photoshop.) In all of these pictures, it should be clear that Bush is a film prop; also a yardstick, indicating proportion... but also constraining proportion. In image 2, the photographer must zoom in, in order to keep the president's features visible and recognizable... otherwise it could be just anybody walking there. (and what a crisis of faith that would be!!) In the absence of a president, the photographer might be free to zoom out, to minaturize the firefighters until their individual identities are invisible, and more importantly, reveal a more realistic scale of the destruction, dwarfing those miniscule human monkeys crawling over the wreckage... and so, you have to have a president in there, to constrain the scene... the camera must never zoom out to capture the totality of the thing.
So, the president (or let's be honest here... the mere image of the president) acts as a film prop, as a focus of public attention, as a source of proportion, and one other thing. The president must be a actualizer of public desires. The image of a president is an empty vessel, infused with whatever meaning we bring to it. No other president has understood this as well as Bush. Thus, again, contemplate the fiction of image 2. America sees itself striding along not as a mere firefighter, but in the president's shoes. As long as they believe that his power is representative of their own, their very real personal disempowerment can be disregarded. Confronted with the utter fiction of image 2, most Republicans don't care. To perceive the president's fiction is to perceive their own, to finally see the bullshit of 'United We Stand' dissolving amid calls of 'shoot the looters' and 'welfare checks.' And the Liberals, criticizing image 1, calling the performance an 'abject failure', evoking the chin-thrust of Mussolini, complaining that they would have handled things differently. Why, by this time, their man would have hugged two dozen displaced mothers, would have cheered up an entire truckload of crying children, and maybe even strode purposefully beside fifty firefighters of many ethnicities (remember, United We Stand even if we don't really). A Democrat might even wonder aloud why it's mostly people of colour left to drown like rats, but a Democrat would never challenge the status quo, just ruminate silently and emotionally to polite applause. In image 1, you can fault president Bush for following the wrong script. But don't insult the public's intelligence by insisting that there was no script, that the president is grinning because he honestly doesn't care, and not because it is the expression that is expected of him.
The reason we put our president in disaster photographs is to establish what we imagine are our own hopes and intentions in the scene. If we can see the embodiment of government-- at least in terms of spectacle-- striding through a sound-stage of disaster, we can believe that Things are Being Done. But not only is the president not symbolic of the public's empowerment, but the power he represents-- the goverment's-- remains largely ineffectual. For example, the broad reach of history has brought upon us this thing called Global Warming, which will probably flood most coastal areas in the world and negatively affect the weather. The flooding of New Orleans might be an indicator of what's to come. In order to change the process of Global Warming, governments of the world, all of them, would all have to enact serious policy to curb carbon dioxide emissions. No government on earth would be allowed to interfere with the economy, which relies on the continued release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. No government wants to be the first to destroy its economy and their continued riches, not in this competitive global marketplace. And after all this, it might already be too late to change the trend at all. In a very real sense, governments have no control over what happens to us. But their continued existence depends on the illusion of potency.
So, to paraphrase Bob Black, who are the anarchists? Are they the left of the ultra-left, the ones complaining most stridently about the president's performance, or are they something else entirely? And what can they offer a populace that has been so disempowered, that it craves and demands the illusion of power strutting on their tv sets?

2005-09-06T01:04:00.000-04:00

Full disclosure: I had made half-assed plans sometime this summer to visit big easy w/ a housemate, travelling hobo-style on a freight train. If Margaret Thatcher thinks a man's a failure if he's riding the bus when he's forty, I think he's a failure if he hasn't ridden a freight train. We're both pretty inflexible in our dogma, no?
Anyway, plan fell through. I worry I won't be able to do this thing w/ the train... omg! Life is sifting through my grasping fingers! Minor panic ensues... okay, I figure I got another forty years of good years left in me... okay, so I got time. Whew. I just won't enjoy it as much w/ my morning creaks in the joints. Hell, I already got those. I also can't enjoy malt liquor like I could back in the day. Oh well. Time marches on.
All these ridiculous anxieties. Now I'm worried there won't be a cultural landmark to visit; the region is basically a toxic waste site, with no indication how long it could be before it's habitable again. And then there's this: what's the new face of New Orleans? Rush Limbaugh brags that New Orleans "will be rebuilt by Walmart... all those corporations despised by the left." (sorry, can't find a link right now) Think of the flood as the penultimate manifestation of the gentrification god. Tens of thousands dead, all their rubbish possessions swept away, and beautiful (waterfront) property, in the City With A Viable NameBrand! Acres of clean land, oozing* with personality! Can you see the real estate agents salivating? Does it not have shades of Fallujah, Aceh, the cult of disaster capitalism? What will New Orleans look like when Walmart drains the bayou and sends the alligators to the taxidermist?
It's seriously easier to hate America than to remember it as New Orleans. It's almost easier to forget a place with a 'Decadence Parade' than to remember it as bygone thing. What happened to the landscapes of Kerouac, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck? Is there nothing left of it but daydreams in the library? Did America's heart die, leaving only the brain to occupy itself with the profanity-laced math of profit? D'you think the Wal-martian incarnation of Big Easy will have a Bourbon Street or contain any mention of Voodoo? What I'm saying is, you think you've been seeing looting up until now; wait until the professionals roll back into town.

Fuck.

is New Orleans in 'Anarchy?'

2005-09-03T15:50:00.000-04:00

You're damn right it is.
18-year-old "pirates" a school bus, rescues 100 from NOLA
Eighteen-year-old Jabbor Gibson jumped aboard the bus as it sat abandoned on a street in New Orleans and took control. The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there. Authorities eventually allowed the renegade passengers inside the dome. But the 18-year-old who ensured their safety could find himself in a world of trouble for stealing the school bus.

Also, there's this:
The "Looting" in New Orleans
Larger post soon re: NOLA. Actually, maybe two more. I'm serious. First I just have to proofread 'em, but these snippets were too good to pass up.

let's hear 'em: workplace horror stories.

2005-08-11T00:42:00.000-04:00

...
(glances at blog)
Uh... ah gee. I guess it's been awhile. ahem...
"Hello!" (anybody?) "Hi."
ok, why not... let's talk jobs.
Shit jobs. Degrading fucking jobs. Jobs... jobs with no social value whatsoever, besides the fact that you exist, that your labour is cheap, and the reigning moral order can't stand the idea that you should exist without 'earning a living', which is to say, calling people at their homes offering them phony vacations, or handing them scottish mints with stainless steel tongs at a restaurant, or parking their cars, or...
This is kind of an open dialogue at pleasure(blog)spot. Let me hear some horrible work stories.
Let's preface this with the illustrious Matt Groening.
Here's mine: now, I've worked a lot of jobs in my time. Well, maybe as many as you, but rest assured: every moment has been altogether too long. I've been ticketed putting up sex posters for dimitri-the-lover@yahoo.com, I've inhaled tons of black shit in a warehouse, I've tried to sell useless services to people outside subway stations, tried the bike courier racket in the dead of Winter, gone door-to-door for a terrific charity, been publicly chewed-out for failing to succesfully bleach bloodstains out of towels, delivered Chinese food on Christmas Eve, (this one time, the dispatcher, who ran the delivery business from her living room, had a minor heart attack on-air... I'm pretty sure it was due to somebody else's fuckup that time)... surprisingly, the best job I ever had was a care-worker for a guy who happened to be parapelegic. You get used to holding a spoonful of soup steady in front of a man's face in a restaurant. And while the guy was an asshole a third of the time, he was interesting (or drunk) the rest of the time.
This story isn't about any of that shit. This is about the shittiest job I've ever had.
thus far. (oh, right! I forgot! It can always get worse, can't it? Ha! Ha.)
For a summer I moved back with my parents and worked two jobs: delivering pizza and working at an upscale golf course. I was a locker attendant. That means: our 'office' was the utility room in the basement, right beside the boiler. Didn't mind being in there too much, 'cos the rest of the basement area was a designated 'rich naked flabby man-ass' zone. And we had all the flabby asses in town: all the used-car salesmen, with their commercials on the oldies radio station, they all used our facilities, pissed in our sauna, drank sleeman's honey brown at 2pm on a Sunday and then drove home drunk before we could call them a cab.
My job was everything, to be everything, to do anything. But there were naturally priorities. At 9:00 in the morning I punch in. I ignore the confirmed neo-nazis that were employed as dishwashers in the kitchen. Most of the morning I am rearranging tables and chairs in the main dining rooms for whatever function is occurring: Elks/Masons awarding a 'Businessman of the Year' award or some such bullshit.
Complications: the building is infested with pigeons. We are cleaning pigeon shit off of the newly-waxed floor. We are finding and disposing of pigeon corpses before the members complain. We are also warned: do Not drag the hundred-pound beverage service, as you will scuff the aforementioned Newly. Waxed. Floor.
Manager walks in around eleven. Shit-eating grin: "Eric! My main man!" I kid you not. Beneath his eyes are sockets of ash: this is a man who hates everything that ever walked or crawled on the green earth. He reads those manager self-help books. Ones with bold titles: 'How to Speak so Others Will Listen. How to Listen so Others Will Speak.' I never had the heart to tell him: nobody listens to you because you are a buffoon and your insincerity is palpable to everyone. It enshrouds you like the scent of death. You are a Disease. You are Gaping Void. Plus one day I went in to clean the toilet, saw his shoes under the stall door, heard a strange 'Fap-Fap-Fap' sound which suddenly stopped: ha! Caught him jerking off at work. Hating him became that much harder. He tried to sneak away after I left, so naturally I ambushed him and requested some time off. His winning smile was more of a winning snarl, but it worked... dude couldn't turn me down after that. Work-wanking is pretty low, I reckon... Kinda ruins the firm-handshake/winning smile illusion, doesn't it?
We got a lunchbreak at twelve-thirty. Employee discount of... what was it? 15% off whatever was in the kitchen. I still couldn't afford it. Plus those Nazis... I didn't know what they were spitting into the food. So fuck it. Eat my peanut-butter sandwich and idly scan the headlines of the National Post, the only thing I ever found in that place that had words on it. (Yesterday's headline: "68% of Canadians in favour of private health care." Today: "We retract yesterday's headline. Should have read: "68% of our subscribers in favour of private health care.")
1:00 to around 6:00 is usually reserved for fulfilling special requests from members, replenishing the footcream dispensers in the locker-room, washing towels, correcting some bungled operation performed by the wank-manager, or other Sisyphean work projects. Once during a tournament we were instructed by wank-manager to move a drink service, with several kegs inside, onto the green. The goddamned thing weighed so much the wheels promptly sunk into the grass. The british lady who outranked the wank ran out screaming (stoicly, natch) about us ruining the green, and to return it to the patio. There were four attendants working on this: we were no sissies, but finally we got it back onto the concrete with some help from employees at the pro shop. I think even wank-manager lifted a finger in the end. It took eight of us.
At around 7:00pm most of the members had vacated the golf course, and had proceeded to get sloshed on steak and scotch or that Sleeman's honey brown. Naturally most had started drinking at the ninth hole. They tromped downstairs, all white shorts boyish knees and bad breath, to deliver us their golf shoes for polishing. "I wanna see my reflection in those!!" Oh, yes sir. How very creative of you to request such a thing. "Hey, boy... there's a shiny coin in it for you." Boy?? "Hurry up, Eric, there are forty pairs to get done and we still have to hose out the sauna and I wanna get home in time for Law and Order..." Yeah, alright, but... boy?? To all rich fucks out there: you're lucky I'm not black, alright? Otherwise...
So I lived beside the boiler, spraying steaming hot water out of a tap, cleaning and polishing golf shoes, mindful of two things: I still have two hours of cleaning to do in the showers, but I cannot start until I'm sure there are no man-asses left inside ready to ambush me. I'm not being overly sensitive about men's bodies... boss left specific instructions not to go in while members were still on premises. "There's been complaints." Damn, when do I get to complain?
Also, there are usually three to five drunk members in the lounge area, making sexist jokes at the ladies tennis game on tv. Throwing out drunks was the only pleasure I got out of this job. Of course I couldn't do it rudely, but in an environment of such pompousness and insincerity, some of the fake folksiness begins to rub off. So check me out: I'm putting down my scrub brush and shoe, joining up with Greg, both of us adopting the Winning Smile-- stolen from our bourgeois enemies! and we go: "Hi Guys! Nice Day Today?" Ha! But they know: we are speaking their native tongue! We are taunting them! "Can I call you a cab?" How 'bout I call you an asshole. But I don't need to, because I am throwing you out!! Whee! This man makes more money than I have ever seen, and he's fucking drunk and can barely keep his eyes open and I am throwing him out. Call my ma and tell her to come with the camera.
Hey, it's a cheap thrill. But all I got to look forward to is cleaning shoes and scrubbing toilets.
My evening usually ended at 9pm, or 10, or 11... sometimes I could get off early to go work at the pizza place. Working there was like a soothing breeze of crisco-perfumed carbon dioxide. Employee discount= 20%! That means 'crazy sticks' are like a dollar-fifty for me. That's almost as cheap as if I had bought the Crisco wholesale. And if I stay on 'till midnight, I get a bonus. And then I get to drag myself home, cautiously smoke pot out my window, and avoid insomniac boredom by playing Dungeon Keeper on the computer. I barely stayed sane that way. That's right... not much in the way of social life. Maybe driving around in my parent's borrowed car, listening to Refused and Circle Jerks. Fun stuff. Very high school.
It wasn't all bad... oh wait it was. Shitstain boss. Following orders when you knew they were wrong. Degradation at the hands of pompous drunks. Smelly uniform. Dumb heat. Nazis in the kitchen. Long hours. Fifty cent tips. Boredom followed by tedium followed by mad rushing around. Getting in trouble for leaving the tv in the lounge on muchmusic instead of the Business Channel. Getting in trouble for flirting with Elizabeth, who was the female locker attendant. (She was lucky... not many female members. She just pretends to clean and stocks up the tampon dispenser every month or so). Umm, what else? Pigeon corpses? Covered that. Did I mention the Nazis? Oh, they didn't like me. I think on my first day, back when the courage hadn't been rung out of me, I asked some pointed political questions. I guess I was planning on performing some solo ARA stunt. Yeah... no.

Check this guy's story out.
Better yet, leave your own story. Let's build ourselves into a good old-fashioned towering Socialist rage. No splitting theoretical hairs, no infighting: just workplace horror stories and red bourgeois blood on a bedsheet, tied to a flagpole. Arrrgh!

my stab at naturalist writing.

2005-07-28T14:01:00.000-04:00

So some of y'all know I was gone backpacking for awhile there. It was good stuff.
Since I don't have anything else to share, and I don't feel like complaining about politics, i'll just transcribe something from that time. There's some other entries, but i don't know if anybody digs this stuff.
This is from Day 2. (ahem...)

Around 1:30 I reached Bruce Caves. Gnawed out of the Escarpment, the cave's ceiling is thirty feet above me. Layers of sediment have been flaking off for millenia now, converting the dimensions of rock to graceful curves. A bit of cryptic graffiti catches my eye: it proclaims '100 years' of something or other, with the date 1994, and arrows pointing to the right. Beside it are the faint yellow marks of earlier graffiti. I'm wondering if this graffiti, illegible now, was created in 1894. Such a thing would be dangerous, wouldn't it? If tourists start flocking here to read the graffiti, instead of just to create it? Why, it might create a self-sustaining spectacle, people building something for the sake of leaving part of themselves behind... something about matter and antimatter combining to blow a hole in universe... i dunno, I saw it on Star Trek. (here's another thing about Star Trek: why didn't they spend more time as tourists, caught in open-mouthed contemplation instead of just striding purposefully through bare hallways? They were all company men to the bitter end.) Letting graffiti speak might give us the wrong idea about our location in history. Textbooks are fuel for campfires. Suddenly names hearts and dates abound, written in the dirt, on the underside of leaves. The biggest lie of them all is that of the blank wall.
Back to the cave. Off the approximate centre, a pillar of rock stands, holding up the edifice. When I gaze passively, every assymmetrical curve suggests a cathedral. When I focus my eyes and follow its lines, it becomes the ecstatic etching of a gifted schizophrenic. There are no symmetries to coax the human mind into understanding. You look and you look and as soon as you look away the memory of it escapes you. I mentioned a cathedral. Scratch that, I begin to think that the cathedral was conceived in reference to the cave. It's a pity that the human mind can only fathom, much less visualize, an architecture that is symmetrical and two-dimensional. The best minds of the middle ages thought of a cave and created Baroque.
I'm already bitter at having to leave this place. I've stood shock-still, tracing and retracing the curvature. Occasionally I turn my glance to the royal curtains outside, the flat sight of lush forest. But I won't photograph this. A vow has been made. Cameras are too sly by far, tricking their meat companions into gazing into the photograph and remembering only the photograph itself. The periphery assaulted by a strict symmetrical frame, sharp as a schoolmarm's yardstick. The cave is perfectly proportioned as it is. A straight line will ruin it.
There's a reason a didn't bring a camera. When I went back to read journals I had made of childhood vacations, I was horrified to find that I had made a short catalogue of places seen, followed by arbitrary descriptions ('the water was very clear'), with each day's meals described right down to the flavour of ice cream. In an envelope pasted to the last page are the photographs. It's to my credit that even then I was avoiding the 'family pose' shot: us lined up in front of aquariums, fighter jets, blank blue sky with just the suggestion in the background of a breathtaking view. Lined up and smiling like a particularly pleasant family mugshot. So. The two rules are: 1. no snacking when there is pure existence to interface with. (I later made an exception, brewing coffee on the ledge of a cliff. There were fewer bugs there.) 2. No photographs. Either remember it or forget it by the strength of your faculties. You can't take it with you, but you can come back for more when you need it.
Sighing, I start my descent into cheerful birdcalls, holding my head silent and steady, holding the words in so I can write them down before I forget their taste.

***SECRET POLITICS SCREED!!!***
America is talking about early withdrawal from Iraq! Is it because their Shi'ite puppet government is suddenly cozy with Iran?! Would America withdraw and let the government collapse (with their military bases intact, natch)? What do you think think the White House would rather see, now that their free market paradise has evaporated? A second Iran, or a Somalian hell-on-earth? Stay tooned!!!

poetry is the fucktest.

2005-07-14T01:31:00.000-04:00

....and i watch your glance.

whewww.....
interfacing with her visual cues.
in your mind, all romance.
in words:
crept across the bar,
(dead teeth of forgotten forests),
all your history at large,
filters of cheap pneumatic drug,
and all it is...
is the slavering praise
of a man caught cock-handed
and leering
into another hopeless night.

**
(if you try to hail me, be warned:
i'm in the forest until wednesday
[thursday at the latest]
otherwise i'm listening to sleater-kinney
at all serious volume.
so...
try calling louder....

re: London

2005-07-08T01:57:00.000-04:00

okay...

after 4 unfinished drafts sitting on some blogger server somewhere, it's become urgent. i gotta start writing something and burying that last little drunken outburst down there. then London was struck, and i got absolutely nothing i can think of to say.
tragedy? no.
tragedy is a word to re-imagine things. Gussied up in Victorian lace; convert it to a monochrome woodcut where the blood becomes a pool of shadow. i hate the word and i hate the thought behind it.
Tragedy is a ribbon to wrap it all up and make it capable of dropping into a Churchillian speech (spot this week's Adjective Cliche for extra points!!).

i didn't feel tragic or surprised... just horror. That's it: not the romantic kind, the swampy B-movie kind.

We live in a butcher shop and it's hard to feign surprise. What do you think happens in a Butcher Shop?
(note: author may be now projecting to the warmongers in the peanut gallery, wearing I (heart) Gitmo t-shirts and spilling their bag of Sour Kids)

What the Fuck did you think happens in a war, hanh? All that rancid bullshit from Teddy Roosevelt about War building National Character... who do you think the Nation eats, you frantic jackasses?! They weren't little Eichmanns or heroes or anything less than our very kin.

So eat it up, losers. Stick your arm into that barrel you see by the window there... in there's Gitmo. That is what's inhabiting your skulls right now. You (heart) Gitmo, right? That there's Gitmo, so have your fill. Who cares who it was?! D'you think your cluster bombs and landmines separate the Guilty from the Innocent? D'you think the blood money and note-recited apologies cover every accidental shooting in Baghdad? What pathological deficiency in your conscience keeps you getting sleep at night?
C'mon, dig in. C'mon. The dead aren't going to eat themselves. Blair's already got a taste for it... he can't stop thinking how Resolute he is as he preens for the cameras. Bush has got the smirk swimming just underneath his skin... looks like he's leaning back after a satisfying meal. Waiting an appropriate amount of time before he lets loose with a belch.

So eat it up. Who cares if they were English this time, and not Iraqi? It's not like Iraqis had anything to do with 9/11. They just had something to do with your need to perpetrate harm until you stopped feeling angry. This war has never been about anything more substantial than American appetite.

Tune in again soon when hopefully I can come up with something that doesn't read like the transcript of a Tourette's gameshow.

alright! you fuckers.

2005-06-19T03:55:00.000-04:00

a small message for any asshole out there who isn't!!
FUCKING LED TO THE ABYSS OF FUCKING DESPERATION!!
by, (ahem) the despondency of everyday life!
Read this:

there, now.
There, there!

Isn't it obvious that the monkeys are running the circus?!
Attention all liberals, democrats, social democrats, green partiers, libertarians, conservi(eck!)tarians, parliamentarians, czecho(eck!)tarians, nationalitariats, prolemembers, etceters, et als.,
ISN'T IT FUCKING OBVIOUS YET THAT YOU SHOULD BE:
a:)fucking angry;
b:)listening to something other than softjazz; ie: hmm??
c:)learning to make bombs;
d:)i dunno, all up in the govnmnt's shit;
e:) e:?! you need a goddamn e:?!?!
f:) i rest my case.

Attn: all Tories/Republicrats:
1. Don't appeal to my grandchildren for your WorldWar Causes. My grandchildren have been sold out. There's nothing left (worthwhile) for them to inherit if there isn't an ecosystem.
2. Shut up and die.
3. See 2.
4. You don't talk about Fight Club. Cause we fucked your ass.
5. I'm coming from a place of extreme anger. Your best bet: label me an extremist.
6. We are all angry. We are all extremists. Try to ignore this fact. Fuck off and mow your lawn until peaceful vibes reign.
7. Ignore it when you see scenes out of Mad Max in your driveway. You'll die peacefuller that way.

&&

Can I make it clear? This is Bullshit!!

We're all fucked; hooray

signed,

just a quickie here.

2005-06-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

Meanwhile, in Iraq...
Amnesty International seems to have drawn some blood by characterizing American detention as a modern-day Gulag. We know that 'suspects' have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay, or renditioned to third-party countries. We know that there has been a systematic programme in place in Abu Ghraib to sexually humiliate inmates, and collect photographic evidence in order to blackmail suspects into becoming informants. The press reports: 'Disturbing Evidence' uncovered. Purse-lipped headlines with no exposition followed by embarassed sweaty columns full of broomsticks, juveniles, deaths, electricity, dogs, drownings... Followed the next morning by the shaky, grateful and canine reportage of stormy official denials. Meanwhile, unreported, the Government attempts to wriggle itself a legal tolerance to torture. Take note: all a tapeworm needs is time.
Today, in order to highlight their benevolence, American officials highlight how much money they spend on inmates' meals.
Curious, how self-described fiscal conservatives try to justify compassion with a dollar sign. This is their best impersonation of a 'liberal' that they can pull off. "See?! Just look at this invoice! See how we love them raghead rascals?"
Seems like these official denials are getting feverish, desperate... the oil is burning in the engine room.
But anyway... let's look into the article.
"The Pentagon is spending $2.5 million a year to provide a proper Muslim meal to each prisoner behind the razor wire in isolated Cuba.
That's $12.68 a day in meals for each suspect."
"In contrast, the Miami-Dade Corrections Department spends $2.19 a day on each prisoner's food - or $3.60 if you calculate salaries and equipment."
The subtext here is clear: Americans treat their enemies better than their own people. That one is a not-so-subtle handoff to a Fox pundit. No better excuse to encourage a little resentment. We feed Them better than We feed... waitaminute... $2.19 a day?!! Personal note: stay the hell outta Miami jail.
I really don't think it was a great idea to point out how expensively you can make a meal in the service of the government. A budget analyist is on hand for the inevitable quip:
"Maybe they have microphones in the lentils... I'm surprised it's not more. DOD doesn't build products, it builds costs." C'mon guys! Republicans used to be able to score a zinger off the narrative of government fiscal largesse. Now they're falling into their own sinkhole.

But wait, there's more...
Recently I came across this site, which is the website for the Defense Logistics Agency. It supplies the grunts with their warzone rations, and, interestingly enough, produces something called 'Meal, Alternatively Regionally Customized.' Let's read on...
"The Meal, Alternative Regionally Customized (MARC) is a self-contained, shelf stable meal that was developed... after receiving an urgent request from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) to expedite the development of a suitable vegetarian ration with unique dietary and component requirements designed specifically for detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (GTMO)."

You heard it here first from the Ministry of Subsistence. On another note, you gotta love the vocabular soup that these people inhabit when they're trying so hard not to say that they make food for foreigners that happen to be detained illegally. It's both painfully literal and sci-fi loopy.
"The final product configuration includes 10 different luncheon entrée menus containing food components familiar to Southwest Asian/Middle East populations and each is packaged in a single meal bag."
Could this be source of those 12 dollars and 68 cents of delectable regionally-appropriate food? Let's take a look:

Check it out: "Mexican Rice." "Vegetable Cracker." "Tea-flavoured powdered drink mix." Huh.
If you're interested, they've posted the complete details of the ten(10) different menus that they provide their detainees. You can also check out the MREs they feed their own soldiers. Example, from menu #5:
-Jalapeno Cheese Spread
-Wheat Snack Bread
-Pound Cake
-Candy II
-Coffee, French Vanilla
-Jalapeno Ketchup
You ever get the idea that the occupation is mostly just kids eating execrable cafetaria food and candy, blasting nu-metal and blowing shit up? The occupation is like my fondest memories of high school.

2005-06-03T13:19:00.000-04:00

Q: Why write?
A: I get a lot of satisfaction from playing god, so to speak. I get to place characters of the chess table. I get priviledged access to what they will be thinking, how they will behave. I get to shape their world; I get to throw in a sudden wind or a ray of sunshine as if it were a theatre prop. If I wanted to, I could inject a flying saucer to scoop up the protagonist when things become their most dire. Mostly I won't, because that gets cheesy and the readers will protest: 'it's not fair.' So I settle for small details mostly, I can write in bits of garbage in the alleyway, and they take on extra significance, perhaps metaphorical significance merely by being there. The reader knows that they are inhabiting an artificial world; every word is placed in sequence by design. The fun, for them, is interpreting it. The fun, for me, is putting it there, to be discovered by the perceptive.

"Art has the power to change the world..."
"Sometimes I wish we could get back to grunting and hooting at each other, instead of all this bullshit..."

(Is it true that thought is defined by language?)
(We have reason to believe that this is true, yes. For example, there is a tribe in the Amazon rainforest, that has no word for any number after two. They count, 'One, two, many.' They also have incredible difficulty with most mathematical problems. They do, however, have a name for each of thousands of native birds, and can identify them with breathtaking rapidity and accuracy...)

1.Language is transitory. Reality is simultaneous. No matter how quickly avant-garde writers write, no matter how many words dropped punctuation missed abbrev. etc. etc. they cannot capture the truth of Moment, that it is all at once. Consequently, (although the cause and effect here are muddled and can't be established), we conventionally perceive our world in transitory glances, flitting from pinpoint details. Razor-quick statements of fact, as opposed to sitting, wide-eyed, letting the world sing to us as a choir. Such an activity could be called meditation, and it only really becomes accessible to us after persistence and training.

You have to be careful, as a writer. I mean, I've had people write to me, who are just-- beside themselves. Really angry. And they're like: 'How could you kill [character] in chapter 8?! How could you be so cruel?! We didn't see it coming!' Y'know, people take it seriously. That's one thing about books, man. Cause and effect. Like, you can't do something before it is seen. Suppose Steve the protagonist is about to be murdered with a hammer from behind. Either he has to turn around just in time to see the hammer descend, or you, the writer, have to push yourself out of his skull and see that hammer from an omniscient perspective. How can you do it otherwise? How can you write a completely unforseen murder? How can you write a real murder?

I remember when I first Marx in college, and... it was a revelation. It was ecstatic. I ran around, I wanted to share this new understanding I had with everyone... it seems hopelessly optimistic now, but I remember, I bought a dozen copies of the Communist Manifesto, and I gave a copy to my uncle, for his birthday... and he was so good, he just gave me a funny look, but said thanks... it was just that feeling, that moment of Eureka!... everything made sensFALSE.
I remember when I was saved, it was just after my divorce. I was drinking, y'know, just questioning my life, wondering where I was going. And i started reading the bible, and it was just... Wow! y'know? It was a revelation. I could see how God loved me, and that there was a plan for me. I was on his path, y'know? I needed to know that, it was such a relieFALSE.

('what i wanna know is this', he continued. 'why is it that all of the political movements, all of 'em, originate from books? and here i'm including religious books as political, because that's all they are when you get down to it. And all these political books, they all start with a HOW PEOPLE ARE, y'see? like, a retelling of history, whether it's adam and eve or class struggle, or the selfish savage, and then HOW PEOPLE SHOULD BE, y'see? cause an' effect, wrapped up in a neat lil' bow... an' if you aren't how the book tells 'em you should be, you're an enemy, y'see? i been kicked outta every church an' every club, cause there's nothing that they fear more than aberration...')

2. From each object we perceive Effect from a past narrative of Cause. The garbage is there because somebody dropped it. The tree is there because somebody planted it. The impact of a bomb comes first, followed by its sound, its former location, and its meaning. Thus we are writing lines of logic in reverse: the present perceived reality sits at the end of the sentence, at the period. From there we give it meaning.

'it's a good thing they made history so malleable', he said. 'Otherwise politics would be obsolete.'

Q: How did you find that the brain interprets information?
A: Well, it's quite interesting, what we found. 90% of the information coming through the senses is discarded. You, for example, might not be aware of your tongue inside your mouth, or your big toe, but if you hear me say the word, 'toe', you will once become aware of it. If you're unfortunate enough to live near a slaughterhouse, you may find that your perception of the stench diminishes, and only become aware of it when your guest begins holding his nose. All this information, if left unfiltered, would be rather distracting, perhaps to the point where we wouldn't be able to function at all.

All lies can function only through omission.

All art functions as omission, as perception filtered through the artist's mind, discarding the senseless and illuminating the meaningful, promoting insight... Politics functions as an attempt to impose cause and effect... to identify problems and promote solutions, and thus to create morality.
(yes, but-)
Consider this cover story of Newsweek: "How we're wired for Spirituality."
(or is it our language that's wired for spirituality, for temporal explanation, for unwinding cables of cause from our perceptions, discarding what we think is meaningless in a hopeless rush to anchor the present to the past, to impose the safety of morality and to send the rest to hell-)
Excuse me-
(Keep in mind that every tribe on Earth has given themselves the label 'The People'; keep in mind that every lofty text has gathered its own group of enforcers. Every religion is a religion of peace in its own words; never in its actions. So what's really going on, outside the words? How long are we going to keep busying ourselves with mere alibis?)

"Art has the power to change the worlFALSE??
"What man fears is not evil, but indifference."

(If we can talk about a machine, a thing that responds to stimuli, that thinks in albeit very simplistic terms, we have to understand how it orders the perception of cause and effect, and how it defines morality. Human beings form its constituent parts, but they are ruled by their own moralities. You hire one as a worker in your bagel shop. A starving man walks in and asks for a bagel because he is starving. A human being, conceivably, will make a quick calculation. A bit of food could save a person's life, could alleviate pain. Giving away food = Alleviation of pain. If you could find an employee that sees all things as they are, untarnished by present ideologies or conditioning; a literal example of the noble savage, he will certainly give away one of the store's dozens of bagels. Certainly this won't do. Mechanical thought imposes policies to circumvent the individual's initiative. It's now against regulations to give away food to anybody. The punishment could be minimal, but it's enough to throw your employee's equation off. Giving away food = Pay cut. The machine has replaced its employee's cognition with its own. And of course, you can bring ideology into the mix as well, and the reason this starving man is hungry is because he is poor, and he must be poor because of some personal failing or wickedness. And it's easier to believe that pain is deserved than it is to believe otherwise. When John Locke or Adam Smith wrote their treatises on Capitalism, they didn't mention the starving man.)

'Humans have a distinct sense of fair play. We trust that cause will follow effect. We make judgements based on what we expect will happen due to our actions. If in Act III, our protagonist is suddenly crushed by a 500 pound weight, the audience will either laugh or leave in protest. We expect that things happen for a reason. We demand this from our narratives. We demand more from theatre and literature than from the outside world.'

"If there is one thing I could say to spark Revolution, it would be this: Never Trust God."

Today's Assignment: What would politics look like without books?

2005-05-27T14:48:00.000-04:00

time for music.

2005-05-13T21:34:00.000-04:00

Here I sit: I'm drinking Lowenbrau and listening to Breather Resist. That's just like me.

Wrangler Brutes. "Zulu." As you must know by now, Sam McPheeters is the patron saint of this blog. So he's got a new band, which I've mentioned before. Didn't think much of it, until I downloaded a song called 'Powdered Wig', which to my astonished ears sounded like the Second Coming of the Dead Kennedys. Minus the annoying Surf guitar. Purchase of the new album became merely a matter of logistics. (money)
So now I have the CD, and here's an overview:
*There is a sticker on the shrinkwrap that says: "The bird, the dog and the shirt are attacking the skinhead." Because, y'know, that's what the picture is. That explanatory sticker complicates any kind of interpretation of the album art/theme. I'm baffled. The album cover is indeed of a shirt, dog and bird attacking a skinhead. Is the sticker there to clear something up? Is it somehow important for me to understand the underlying conflict represented on the cover? What?
*Incidentally, the back of the CD has two elephants having sex in the desert.
*The album is twenty minutes long.
*Oh yeah, the dog is wearing a Peace symbol collar and has been hit with a raw egg. The skinhead is emerging from a garbagecan wielding a spear. Meaning continues to elude me.
*The music that the Wrangler Brutes play is a novel mixture of new and old punk/hardcore. Stylistically, there is the previous reference to the Dead Kennedys, although you can hear traces of newer angular metalcore riffs here and there. 'Driving', fr'instance, starts with a riff that comes straight from the Converge playbook. The band sounds at once pared down, and overly complex. For example, there are no studio flourishes, very few effects, there's no ultra-modern Mesa Rectifier heavily-compressed guitar "heaviness." After listening to the album twenty times straight, yeah, the hooks are there but seemingly buried under musical run-on sentences and a mess of misplaced punctuation.
*Does it sound like I'm being too critical? I really like this album. But its one fault is that there is so much happening in so little time. Your typical retro-punk outfit might play four bars of G-D-C, the Wrangler Brutes' bassist will play four measures of arpeggios while the guitarist plays constantly-shifting dissonant chords. The drummer plays pretty consistently, but hard. It sounds like what it is, three hyper-talented musicians that are bored with conventional punk, running amok within a song that's only a minute long.
*One of the reasons the complexity of the riffs stands out so much may be because the album was produced without any digital manipulation. There are a few obvious technical flubs, and one probable lyrical flub. For example, the second bass note of the album sounds pretty sharp to me, and I really don't have a golden ear. I'm torn on this. On one hand, seeking digital 'perfection' on a recording just ends up making the music sound sterile. Trying to achieve 'perfection' on a record is about as odious a proposition as banning the use of adjectives in journalism. On the other hand, complex riffs like those produced by the Wrangler Brutes are in great danger of becoming jumbled and muddied when they aren't played exactly on beat. The recording, as a result, has got this stomach churning, exhilarating, harrowing quality to it: three musicians (and vocalist) playing live, at the very razor's edge of their abilities.
*Lyrically, though, Sam McPheeters has never been sharper. Shit, I loved hearing him on this recording. If you'll listen back on old Born Against material, you'll detect wry caustic humor throwing a dirty dropcloth over a desperate anxiety for the future. Circa Today, with the Wrangler Brutes, Sam's humour, insight, angst and ability are all sharper then ever and combined with a 'Holy Shit!' Bug-eyed existential crisis. "Unmentionables", f'rinstance, is a song about ordinary people confronting cosmic truths, and like, totally losing their shit in a public place. I may be easily amused, but I thought the term 'unmentionables' for both underwear and for incomprehensible truths was really spot-on. Plus it's got the chorus: "Unmentionables! It's incomprehensible! Don't show your underwear in public, or you will go to jay-yalllll!!!! Hut! Hut! Hut! Hut!" That's a crystal chandelier, in my book. Then we've got the unlikely sing-a-long of "Pemex, Gazprom, Exxon", which was stuck in my head for days. 'Adjust it' deals with America's unique luxury in that people can choose to alter their perception of impending danger by merely changing the channel. Very insightful.
*Some other tracks of note: 'Garbage Can.' Why? "Ariel Sharon is a fucking cock, I'd like to sock him in the crotch with a pointy rock." 'Mgmt. Sheen.' Why? Minute-long bellow. 'Zulu' is thirty seconds of pure unadulterated song. And finally, 'Homosexual President', the album's closing track. With a killer name like 'Homosexual President', you figure, the song better be good. And it is. So good.
mp3: Shit Search.

May 6: Cursed w/Fucked Up, Protest The Hero & others @ the 360.
Here's the thing: I wear converse and black hoodies during the day. These are my normal garments. I'm not trying to impress anyone. I catch a quick note in one of our weekly rags: Cursed is playing tonight. Holy shit. I'd be an asshole not to go. What am I wearing? Blue jeans, worn in. Slightly snug. I forgot where I got 'em, probably stole them from my dad. Aforementioned cons, aforementioned hoodie, haven't shaved, looking slightly ragged due to insomnia. I tied a green bandanna around my neck (cattle rustler, or if you prefer, the Clash) and I'm on a bike and out the door.
And these fuckers all look like me! Shit. Maybe I haven't been flouncing down Queen st. West in awhile. I certainly haven't been to many live shows in awhile. Toronto can be a wonderful place. No, I'm kidding. Right now it's designed to induce maximum despair.
A room full of hardcore kids, drinking friggin Stella Artois??! What is wrong with me? I take a sniff: there is something with seriously wrong with a punk subculture when it smells like any other mass of people in Toronto: vaguely like vanilla.
Fortunately, the girls are all looking very pretty. Probably because they're all in high school. I'm having a Matthew McConaughey in 'Dazed and Confused' moment: "I keep getting older, they stay the same age." Ugh!!! I silently sentence myself to twenty lashes for grossness. Ordering a bottle of Blue is my protest of all things skanky and Artois.
On the review. Is this a review? I think so. If it's a story, I'm getting to the point. Protest The Hero was the first band I heard. (I was late.) They are from Whitby. I think they are all seventeen. Anyway, they were tight and possessed chops. Like, ironic eighties prog-metal chops. Everything was ironic. In between songs, the singer would rally the crowd. "Well, hello Toronto! We hate you all. No, just kidding." He pointed the mic down to some hysterical schoolchum: "You rock! You are sexy! Whoo!!" He responds: "Shut up. No, just kidding." This went on for two decades. At this point in the evening, there is a gaping void in my breast.
Next is Fucked Up. I had heard of them so many times. I never went; to me, the name 'Fucked Up' is evidence of a high school skater-pop band. Not so.
The first thing they do upon hitting the stage is heap scorn on the openers. "I hope nobody mistook that dippy fashionista prog-rock poser shit. That's not hardcore." Wait! I'm being assailed by an angry fat guy with a shaved head! It looks.... yes, I'm sure of it! He is no longer in high school. "Hardcore is about moshing, straightedge, and collecting records... in that order." And they kick into the tightest, sweetest, old-school high energy desperate angry hardcore. And thus was my evening saved and I cracked a most un-punk grin for the remainder of the set. Who knew? Usually I can't stand macho posturing by a guy in a button-down shirt, telling me what his music is supposed to be. And I'm sure that I fit into his definition of 'fashionista', I'm certainly not a member of any scene. But damn... it was beautiful. I felt about as conflicted and refreshed as a feminist who wants to be called 'dirty whore' during coitus...
Fucked Up sound like Youth of Today with crouton-sized chunks of the Germs mixed in... and come off far less ornery in interviews. This little bit I found particularly insightful...

You sing a lot about dehumanization and alienation, what part do you think activism should, or can, play in reconnecting people and improving our lot?

Well i think any activist group who isn't doing that might be a scam. What else is there? I'm not an activist, but reconnecting myself to the things i need to be in tune with is a primary concern. The trouble with activists is that they are trying to fix a system that isn't broken. You know, the global economy, the state, whatever you want to call it - is working perfectly, and gets better at what it was made to do every day. The state doesn't enfranchise people in real communities, or reduce energy use or maximize free time, because that isn't what it is designed to do, and no amount of activism is going to make it that way. Activism shouldn't be about trying to mend perceived holes in the way the system works, but about expanding the holes, and trying to find more. A lot of activists are afraid of violence because its one of those holes thats open, and most upstanding responcible people have a real vested interest in keeping them closed. So to me improving my lot doesn't mean creating fair global trade, but in not needing global trade at all. It doesn't mean improving the minimum wage, but eliminating wages altogether.

Here's a song I adore: Dance of Death.

Cursed are labelled as "Loudest Band in Canada." I didn't find that; I mean, the fillings shook in my jaw, but not that much. Cursed are... Cursed. Wonderful noise. They get compared to Melvins, to Mastodon, to His Hero Is Gone, to Discharge... Lyrics are about funerals and Bloody Mary so I guess this counts as metal. Shit! But you know what? The singer cites Rimbaud and Henry Miller on their website, so I guess I get a free pass. Not a metalhead. Not a metalhead. Phew.
It was almost anticlimactic after Fucked Up. Plus I didn't know much of their material, and so it got lost in the general howl of things. I can't find their website right now, so no mp3 for you.

One final note:
It isn't even funny how bad I have the Fear right now.
Converge, Terror, Cursed, Mare Canadian Tour
10/5: Toronto, ON @ Opera House.
Oh shit. Oh lordy. Hang on to your fillings and/or orfices.

i live in a communal house.

2005-05-02T14:29:00.000-04:00

Communal is one of my favorite words. Maybe because it sounds like urinal, and I've always had good luck with those. But also: I go into the bathroom, and on the windowsill: Communal Condoms! awesome. Communal Bath Bombs! Well... it's good to know they're there... I guess. Communal 'zines! Wait, those are mine...
Downstairs... we eat together from common food, we share plots of garden space with unlucky apartment dwellers... there are milk crates full of old bike parts in our bathroom. When my bike seat was stolen from Bay St. (what the fuck? Some drunk banker stole it?) I just dove in and built myself a new one. Most days I'm incredibly thankful for cheap rent, and the chance to live what I preach. 'Cause it is, this is anarchy... barebones and lazy but functional. We're not all anarchists in name, but that's only a word, and the deed speaks louder than words.
When the time comes, and a roommate moves on, we run an ad and choose a new one. This is where tensions come into play. This anarchy we have, it's quiet, usually unspoken, operating on deference. The system doesn't operate very well on a deadline, which is what the first of the month becomes. Anarchists, overt and otherwise, usually hate deadlines.
Things that might usually be handled quietly by one individual become important to the group. For example, this time the wording of the ad became contentious. One person wrote it, but in a way that the group wasn't thrilled about. Especially when we didn't get enough applicants that we could agree upon.
For the past two weeks, interrupted by my whirlwind crosscountry tour (six hours in Winnipeg, three days in Vancouver), we've been interviewing potential roommates, debating their merits, reiterating how we are supremely fucked because we can't agree on one. I suggest you never witness an anarchist trying to conduct an interview, because the results are painful. (I'm speaking with myself in mind, here.) K. gets nervous, conducts the tour of the house, gets jumpy and excited and repeatedly asks if they like the room, if they are still interested. I forget all my important questions and ask if they are allergic to cats or ferrets. B. turns ice, peers deep into their souls and asks the hard questions of compatibility. P. selects people solely on how bad he would feel turning them down. His daughter technically gets a veto, but she's usually watching television and gives a quick thumbs up or down.
As the storied masses in and through our house, the whole process becomes hypersensitive. In everyone we are searching for signs of extreme psychological distress. We pretty much vetoed one guy because of a bad joke. Scene:
Me:"So, uh, how do you feel about noise?"
He:"oh, noise doesn't bother me, the only noise that bothers me are the voices in my head." (nervous chuckling)
Me:"Uh huh."
He:"Yeah, but I got alcohol and weed to stop that." (more nervous chuckling)
Incidentally, now he's dating one of our roommates. But not living here.
One thing I'll admit is that this batch of applicants has some of the neatest lifestories I've ever heard. Unfortunately, there hasn't been one that has been acceptable to everyone.
What has surprised me though is how easily a little flame will heat up our house. We are usually very affable people, but there has been just a whiff of tension, just a few short words. And the temperature jets up when things are not communicated plain as day, What we are doing next, How we are doing it, and When. Just think! We are all very familiar and experienced with communal activities, whether in houses or projects or activism or whatever. And we still let this thing called communalism fly out of our grip!
My point is this: anarchism for me has meant less and less Revolution, and more of learning to just get along. I know it seems obvious. But for me, I spent a lot of time convinced that I would be shot during the final orgasm of unrest before government was put to sleep. And then: holy shit, the world's changing, these things I thought I was wishing for are suddenly coming true, and I've never even fired a gun before! What am I going to do when they come for the Anarchists?
And just as suddenly: holy shit! What am I thinking? Are people really going to 'get' this solidarity thing right smack during martial law? Are housewives really going to break curfew out of defiance? Like, when they start shooting down news choppers and airing twenty-four hour soap opera marathons instead?
What makes us think everything will figure itself out after the capital-R Revolution? We've been out of practice for so long, how can we believe that we can co-operate when we have ourselves and our children to feed? Who is going to spay our cats??! Revolution might be fun for macho youngsters, but it's going to be scary for a lot of people. You tear down a dead tree, and all the soil washes away in the next rain. What's there to hold it?
I think it's defeatist to think that we can only start making revolution after The Revolution. Our society is notable in its wastefulness. There's plenty lying around, waiting for idle hands. I used to suffocate, waiting for el Revolucion, waiting for it to claw back the smog and fences. Human relations were never my strength; it seemed it would be much easier to make solidarity when Revolution came with its banners and festivals and shooting in the distance. Revolution would drain us into the streets and let us meet each other. It was so goddamn beautiful that I knew it had to be false.
Government will do what it's always done, when there was smoke on the horizon: empty the prisons, hand out guns, hire militias, minutemen, rapists, contras... nothing spoils a party like a lynching. Sure, there are stories of wartime camaraderie. It's a powerful glue. That's why governments strive to impose war on its own soldiers, and terrorism on its enemies... Terrorism disintegrates solidarity. That's why we'd better get familiar with our neighbours' faces now. And how often have college activists been good neighbours? I'm not accusing, just thinking back... no, I guess I wasn't a very good neighbour. Those 3am 'fundraiser' parties. Oops.
And there's something else. Anarchy works, but only voluntarily. We don't let just anyone crash on our couch. For our house to work, we must hear a resounding 'Yes!' We can't assume a yes, and then impose authority on our roommates. Governments have always seized power, and then assumed consent. To hold out for Revolution is to do the same, to hold people hostage to political forces they don't control. Scene:
From your neighbourhood, you hear explosions all day. Then in the evening, masked men with assault rifles in a commandeered police car (covered in circle-A graffiti) roll slowly up the street. "Congratulations!" they shout. "You are now all anarchists!" Who's fooling whom?
Don't get me wrong. Governments fall. Often spectacularly. Men have failed to build perpetual motion machines, and they fail to build their cherised dystopias. Government will fall, and if we're there to witness it we'll name it Revolution. But I've been trying to build my own, baby-r revolutions in how I live. Turns out that they're pretty banal revolutions. It's hard, because I've always had giant daydreams. I can't go to bed excited about mending my socks tomorrow, starting a bike collective, joining Food Not Bombs... not the same way I can get terrified and excited about getting my dumb ass shot in the street. But I have moments, flights of fancy, when I say to myself: "Congratulations! You are an anarchist!" And I can feel the "Yes" deep under my ribs, held under my lungs like fire, and I'm smiling as I walk down the street, catching curious glances...

nothing important.

2005-05-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

I am fulfilling contractual obligations with this post.
No, seriously: more coming later. But first:
What The Fuck?!?!

Yeah, I get it. You're making an educational colouring book by combining maps of countries with their respective stereotypes. Is this what passes for Geography in high school?! Draw the political barrier, then draw the caricature, and then indicate whether they are friend or foe by how friendly they look. Isn't that all the information you need? Iran, for example, appears to be giving the British reverse-peace-sign gesture. Perhaps, in the artist's mind, Iran is driving a cab to Heathrow airport, and flipping you off as he divebombs into your lane. On his flying carpet.
I feel sick. In eight months, some little shortie is going to watch the CNN newscasters explain how the red arrows on our 3D map represent the 51st Armoured Battalion advancing into Tehran. And the kid will be filled with horror: No! That's where the man's eyebrows are! The tanks are going to get caught in his eyebrows! Little kid has nightmares about the Unfriendly Cabbie and his Unfriendly Eyebrows. As an adult he won't go anywhere he might encounter unfriendly immigrant cabbies, with their oily eyebrows and impatient accented English...

Ok, next:
China. Not only is this an ugly caricature, why is he reading MAD magazine? Or is that supposed to be Mao, and the artist's hand slipped while churning this out of MSPaint? Also: his heavily populated coast is going to lead to some serious chiropractic pain down the road. All the MAD magazines in the world won't ease his suffering.

Next:
Japan should never be made into someone's head. It looks like the guy was hit by a stray hollow-point bullet. He survived, albeit horribly disfigured and a little crazy. Now you see him at the bus terminal: he thinks he's surfing. He's making splashing noises from his mouth. All the commuters give him wide berth. If this was in my colouring book I would paint him the colour of tears.
Russia: Dude's arm is on backwards.
Poland: Sausage! Haha. Good one. As if the Poles haven't suffered enough. As if the kids haven't suffered enough. He's smiling, but for how long? Didn't Poland back out of the Coalition of the Willing? How long before that smile turns upside down, and he tries to garrote us with that string of sausage?

Do we have time for one more?
Greenland: Look, kids! It's Macrocephalic Santa Claus! He's come to bring presents to all the good little children who spend their days withering away at the hospice, tending to their secret fantasies of declaring war on the normals and their world outside these walls... Macrocephalic Santa Claus comes to tell you that he knows your secret thoughts, he had them once too, but it would be best to put them away, like other childish things, put them away and forget them, child... Also, technically Greenland isn't a sovereign country.

For those of you just joining us, welcome to my blog! Welcome to my museum of delusion. No. It's not supposed to be funny at all.

the story that keeps on writing.

2005-04-14T01:50:00.000-04:00

the last time you saw her, her hands were wrapped around fire.

I got to play with clay today. Also: contributing to society.

I have a crush on Swiss Grrl Ramones with a Sax.

Almost finished reading Walden again-- am putting off the last bit. Being in between Walden is almost better than reading it.

Beloved roommate Misun off to Korea again after returning from Europe and spending >48 hours in Toronto, frantically trying to meet all her friends one. last. time. If you are ever in the position of long goodbyes, promise me, promise yourself: do not give yourself less than three days to do it. It looked pretty stressful. And shitty, esp. when she figured out the flight left at 7am, not pm.
Now go to a mirror, and promise yourself: am, pm: these things are different.

Last time Misun left, we were stuffing ourselves into photo booths at every subway stop. Flight was delayed five hours: the man gave her $12 for an airport meal. Naturally we spent it all on coffee. Then spent time reshuffling the airport paperback displays: quality control. Put Donald Trump's screed in the 'Fascism' Section, emphasize the memoirs of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (sic.)

Security in High Park is surprisingly strident at 11 in the evening.
When a boy needs to walk alone, he probably means it.

When you spend three hours in a doctor's waiting room, society's things are probably fucked.

Spent four days into a 'project', as I call them: four days learning to solder. Now my bass guitar has a switch. The next 'project' beckons, but what? bike? bookshelf?

This is all I've recalled of the past two weeks, now more:
I'm routinely in situations where being poor makes me feel awkward. In on the other side of grubby windows.
I spend a lot of time wondering if I'm content.
There has been no writing for awhile now: it's been gone before; matter of course. But I'm sitting, reading a magazine, waiting for it: ______________. yeah, exactly.
also: i'm visiting Vancouver sometime this month. So that's nice. Montreal in May.
Dreams, when they come, are of travelling.

time for astro-pleasure.

2005-04-03T21:54:00.000-04:00

Not to be mistaken with your favorite condom flavour, you sick fucks.
From the 'bands you used to love in high school' file:
Remember the metal band Tool? Claymation music videos with the spooky dolls?
Many lyrical references to Alistair Crowley? Lollapalooza?
Apparently singer Maynard has found jesus.
*ahem.* Yeah.
*cough.* apparently, this isn't a prank.
Remember KoRn? Seven-string Ibanezes? That goddamn-awful clankity-clank bassist?
One of the guitarists also "found jesus."
So imagine it: you are a forty-something member of a late-nineties metal band from L.A. You are, (ahem), working on new material, y'know, walking to your rehearsal space in Orange County, and one of your buddies comes in: "guys, I'm quitting the band; I, like, totally found jesus."
It's totally, ya know, kind of a rapid transformation, don'tcha think?

Now I'm thinking of some of nu-metal dudes I knew in high school, and I'm hypothetically thinking of what would have happened to them if their limp-bizkit cover band had "made it"...
yup... I think I have the answer.
Y'all 'find jesus' when your dreadlocks succumb to male-pattern baldness.
Shoulda just put on a baseball cap like Tom Morello.

On a lighter note:
Remember the Minutemen? D. Boon chubby telecaster-scramblin' wonderloaf? All playing the songs of wonderment with the wordy spiels? No? Me neither, but I've got the album and really liked it.
Mike Watt hasn't found jesus, no sir! Watt is still touring, still peeing in the bottle while driving to gigs in a phat econoline van. Watt has his homepage here. Upon perusing some of his tour diaries with, ahem, Iggy Pop, (update: still hasn't found jesus!!) i fell in love with his writing style. "Popped and hosed" is equal to waking up and showering, to "spiel" is to shoot the shit, etc. There is a pretty informative log during the two weeks he was recording his latest album. Pretty interesting, how he tries to match descending/ascending/cyclical riffs and song keys to match the three stages of Dante's 'inferno.' Pretty wordy, but worth the three hours of insomniac surfing that I spent.
* * *
I really hate to try and read books or essays on the computer screen, which is pretty ironic considering how much time i spend by the old Cathode Ray feeding tube. It's a shame, because there's lots of nutritious literature out there.
This here was mighty fine read. Click on 'E-texts' and find 'And Island to Oneself' by Tom Neale. Story of a man who, for reasons he can't really identify, decided to go live on a deserted island. Now, the meat of the story is a lot of what he built and how he overcame adversity, etc. etc. Some of it gets tiresome, like he's fishing for your approval. But overall it's a good read, and I do enjoy survival stories.
On that note, here is a freeware game where you have to survive on a deserted island. Click on 'Schiffbruch' on the left. Hmm. German translation=funny. The main character can't tell you enough about the 'lovely' rocks he found, the 'splendid' tent he built... but it's fun, and fuck... what a great game concept. Recommended if you dug the 'Sims', but hated how the game was about buying a more expensive couch.
More game stuff.... i don't play them, but i'm getting sick of seeing programs where you play 'an elite mercenary travelling to hotspots around the globe' or whatever nonsense you can string together to put on the box. It's interesting how the realm of software has shaped itself by an obselete concept of conventional warfare. How many games are there where you play on an empty map, monopolizing resources and manufacturing more tanks than the other player? And then the kids who played Command and Conquer get shipped off to Iraq, and wonder why the 'bad guys' aren't wearing matching red clothes. I'm still waiting for the strategy game where you infiltrate a living city, studying the enemy occupier and setting up ambushes and jailbreaks...
Jagged Alliance 2 had you waging an insurrection against a Batista-like dictator. And this game looks fairly promising in simulating a nonviolent revolution.

Finally, more books online. Start at project Gutenberg. Then there's the classics. And then:
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. A textbook.
Counterculture throughout the Ages. Hippy.
sniggle.net documents the War against common sense.
I promise: 20% more verbs next week.

on gender II.

2005-03-31T20:18:00.000-05:00

to whit...
Be it known that gender, as a social role, has been used as a weapon against us.
Where women have been historically stripped of their autonomy, pruned, laid passive,
brutalised and commodified,
men have had their gender stripped, quantified and measured according to the interests
of the state. Sex, through marriage, became the first political economy. Women were
relegated to the role of mere commodities, products to be distributed as a reward for
services rendered... notably state-sanctioned aggression.
Thus, the challenge to gender equality activists is to redefine gender... not as a
constricting social role, but as a spectrum of traits... to liberate the individual from gender as it's "supposed to be" to a thing that is inexorably theirs and as such, flexible to their desires...
Thus, feminism must be about men's liberation, and men's liberation about feminism.
When we last left our heroes...

(click on the picture to learn more about this incredible graphic novel)

here's a story...

back in school i took a "women and film" course. No, I wasn't the only male enrolled in the course, and I did not enroll to pick up chicks. Get your mind outta the sitcom.
About halfway through the term, the class starts a discussion: we had been watching movies after every class, and then the following week the prof would spend twenty minutes explaining how that movie could be considered a 'women's film.' Hollywood films, we were told, shared certain characteristics. Conversely, the films we had been watching had very little in common: they were mostly independent films, mostly directed by women, but apart from that there was no thread running through them that we could see. The final straw was that we watched Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' the following week. How, we asked, could a human who was not a woman, make a woman's film? Hitchcock was undoubtably an enlightened fellow; 'Vertigo' is a striking film that changes its meaning depending on which character you let yourself identify with. But could it be a woman's film?
The professor conceded that the whole idea of 'Women's Film' was necessarily vacuous. There are, after all, many kinds of women. Not all women make women's films, and not all women's film is made by women. But we could be sure what Women's Film wasn't. It wasn't a mainstream, Hollywood film.
The class had a sublime moment: we sort of tore ourselves from facing the front of the lecture hall, and kind of glanced at each other over the empty seats. A woman's film is one that isn't a man's film. But what Hollywood writes, in their epic action regurgitations, are those indeed men's films?
The Feminist project of the past few decades has been to redefine Womanhood: from passive object to whole human: reclaiming male traits and social roles. It has been, undeniably, a great success. But it has come at a cost: the syndrome of the 'super-woman', the working-mom, the ideal that enlightened women are supposed to pursue, a conglomeration of traditional gender traits and newer ones tacked on. It's often said that a modern woman is expected to wear many hats, as a mother, a wife, a businesswoman, etc. In other words, she is expected to compete in two rat races now, instead of the one she had before.* (perceptive readers will now note that I've just disproved my own implicit thesis from part I, that 'maleness' was somehow different from its counterpart in how it foisted upon us a competitive ideal. The 'Real Man''s counterpart is the 'Good Wife', who is expected to impress friends and neighbours with her expertise in the 'Womanly Arts.')
The Feminism project is still, if you will, half-finished.
For too long the Feminist project has progressed like an aggressive marketing campaign, relabelling womanhood with new adjectives: strong yet nurturing, soft yet firm; yes, I'm pretty sure we've all seen the soap commercial. If you want to take the analogy of the wearing of many hats further, you can say that the Feminist Project has been appropriating traditionally-male adjectives and putting them on. All the while, and this is key, maintaining its own Wholeness.
Thus we have the concept of the Woman's Film, as if there was homogenous chain that draws all Womanly experience together, that distinguishes onscreen the gaze of a woman from the gaze of a man. And naturally, there isn't. Human experience is far too rich and complex to crudely divide by mere biological classification. Or consider: many Take Back The Night rallies turn their backs on male allies by asking them not to attend. Implicit in this notion is the idea that there is something inherent in all women, something deep in their genetic makeup, that makes violence more meaningful to them. Conversely, that men are less capable of feeling strongly about domestic violence, and that their willingness to take a visible stand against it is less meaningful and less truthful, and thus shouldn't be allowed in the same realm as that of women. I would understand if survivors of violence wanted to march together, but the issue is that one gender group is allowed to march, and not the other. I call bullshit. The only people who fully understand the consequences of violence and intimidation are the ones that experience it. There is no 'shared experience' that binds women tighter than the shared experience of victims of violence.
This is the problem: we've only up until now been able to define our gender in opposition to each other. Thus, a lot of men end up being intimidated by the Feminist Project as it appropriates their hats. They see a movement that redefines itself with the juiciest adjectives, reducing Maleness into a less-than-flattering caricature of itself. They don't see the opportunities for empowerment that lie in their own project. Feminism has been more successful than even its adherents have realized. For the 'Real Men' of America, seemingly embattled and entrapped, rally around the ludicrous strongholds of masculinity. If Womanness now encapsulates success in business, fearlessness, empowerment, and all that they've left us is the vestiges of aggression, machismo, and a reptilian opposition to sociability, then by gawd, that's what we'll be. Unable to see an escape hatch from Fortress Manhood, the 'Real Men' become ugly caricatures of themselves, midget Ted Nugents self-consciously spouting the lines they think are expected of them: "We should just NUKE 'EM ALL!!!!" The Women of Take Back The Night, labouring under a false dichotomy of victims and perpetrators, exclude themselves from their allies and the men, feeling that a little hurt, find themselves in the ridiculous position of being in support of domestic violence.
A man goes the cinema, having been warned that 5 of the 6 films playing are "chick flicks." Feeling trapped, he rents a Steven Seagal movie and wonders, in his boredom and disgust, "is this all there is?"
A people embattled will rally around their banner. But Feminists come as liberators, not as conquerors. We cannot continue to think of gender as two opposing camps where you must struggle to fit in. It would exceedingly difficult to abolish Gender, but that doesn't mean we should let it usurp us as individuals.
Firstly, unfortunately, we have to do away with gender chauvinisms. A woman has to admit that a man has the same potential for empathy and nurturing as she. Or to put it another way, men have to take their share of the responsibility for raising the kids, cleaning the house. Liberation is usually followed by chores. Who cleans up after Revolution? Take a look in the mirror.
The current empowerment of Women into 'Super-Women', is unsustainable. That ideal is as unrealistic as those put in fashion magazines. In fact, it's difficult to see what's so empowering about trying to make oneself malleable to two sets of expectations and criteria, of running two rat races, juggling hats, whatever you name it. What's important now it to illuminate the very concept of that rat race, that social role that we are coerced into accepting. I don't think it's right for me to wage aggression in the name of the state. I don't think that makes me less of what I am. I don't think women should feel obliged to 'empower' themselves by accepting what they don't desire. Most of all, gender must no longer be defined by what society hopes to use in us. we are humans, born with traits. These traits are partially formed without our consent, by our very DNA and lineage. Separate from that, society places values on these traits, price tags, and encourages what it sees as most useful to itself. Traits are gendered, and if you don't offer what society deems valuable, you are left in the margins, you are not a 'Real [whatever].' Instead, we should lay out our traits like a buffet, and give what others are willing to use.
By redefining Manhood, we can hope to finish the Feminist Project, and we can hope expel the 'Real Men', the defenders of Patriarchy, the aggressors, the rapists, from their fortresses! Let them forge their own identities in the muck, with the rest of us.

One quick note on the nature of gendered priviledge/victimhood.
You would have the worst kind of myopic republican to deny that women have historically been oppressed by patriarchy. I don't want to deny my priviledge. But I have some glaring concerns about this worldview:
1. It is Eurocentric. Once again, we run up against this chauvinism, this idea that Women, all Women, share a common bond in their shared experience and victimhood. The truth is much more difficult. Are you saying that white women share equal victimhood with women of colour? Or, perhaps more importantly, that women right now living in the developed world share a common victimhood with women in the developing world? If we are talking honestly about priviledge, it would be more relevant to throw out gender and start talking about the priviledge that is grounded in citizenship. In a world of such brutal, immediate and pressing victimhood and priviledge, it's simply distracting to talk about priviledge along gender lines. Furthermore, I would suggest, that if you've never personally been made to wear, say, a hijab against your will, or you've never personally been forced to undergo female circumcision, you have no business claiming that victimhood as your own.

2. It is disempowering. To divide humanity along lines of historical victimhood/historical priviledge is as static, as ossified, as the original historical precedent was. There is no solution in claiming priviledge/victimhood, there is no path of escape from the cinderblocks of history. We need a way forward, right now. To remain and to argue historical injustices to turn our backs on the promise of today. I'm not saying that Patriarchy is irrelevant. I'm saying let's start making it irrelevant. We need to fund and reinforce battered women's shelters, right now. We need to eliminate imparities between pay. Child custody in divorce cases needs to be reformed. Shit, arguing about whatever doesn't affect our struggle in its present form just saps our momentum.

intermission.

2005-03-17T13:37:00.000-05:00

gII coming soon.
sorry it's taking so long.
in the meanwhile, what the fuck:
Bush nominates Wolfowitz for World Bank
It's probably a good thing he did this; I was getting tired of sitting at home sharpening my (metaphorical) knives. It was also getting tiresome; all this nostalgic daydreaming over Seattle. Now we can see if we can still keep up with the kids out there.
On the topic:
This was somewhat interesting. Not completely relevant, and the 'warfare' analogy gets strained a bit, but whatever.

Hee hee:
Overworked-- and angry about it. The title is actually pretty inaccurate, because we get this tidbit at the end:

Despite Morimoto's non-stop schedule, he doesn't consider himself ``overworked.''

``I work for myself, and I choose to work as hard as I do,'' he said. ``In this economy, you've got to work hard to keep your job.

``I choose to work my butt off.''

That's a pretty shaky understanding of 'choice' you got there, pal.
Like 'choosing' to go work at another fast food restaurant when your manager shoves his hand down the front of your polyester workpants.
'Choosing' a decrepit apartment when your landlord increases the rent and you can't afford it.
Oh, it's true... you'll get people making this argument at babble.... justifying why an employee should be forced to wear makeup. That was a real trip. And the picture I get is... some people living life like it was a final exam, and choice is nothing but the letters A thru E on a multiple choice test.
But whatever.... the true threat is you indeed have a choice, choice to walk out of the room. It's not easy, and you'll never see it happen in the movies.

More:
Now, a quick word and disclaimer: I read the eXile, a Moscow 'alternative' paper. This is pretty interesting. In Canada, the alt. weekly has a lot of stories on marijuana legal woes, usually a self-indulgent personality piece on 'love and sex', and then substandard film reviews. In Russia, they have sections called 'Death Porn', which detail the week's bloodiest and most ludicrous murders, 'Whore-rer Stories', which are probably the equivalent of our 'love and sex' columns.
Truly, the world is a large and expansive place, if it houses us both, me and the guy that writes the Schopenhauer Award. That kind of cynicism is kind of alien to Canadians, it would probably dissolve the ink if it were ever put to newsprint west of the atlantic. And I have to say I find the occasional bits of misogyny and anti-semitism pretty fucking baffling.
But you find some really good, really insightful writing there. Hold your nose and avoid the club reviews, which are written by some aristocratic shitstain. Pay attention:
Edward Limonov. His first language is not English. I don't know why the editors couldn't bother cleaning up his grammar a little; granted, he's a famous Russian poet so maybe he's got some pull. Also, I found this interesting: he's the leader of a tough little political party called the 'National Bolsheviks'; he's done some hard time for attempting the buy weapons. The national bolsheviks have gotten the shit kicked out of them by the state... they go around staging sit-ins and throwing pies(!!!) at important politicians. These people are tough. I read one of Limonov's books recently. It wasn't great, but it had its moments. He has a nice piece on money this week.
John Dolan is a quiet professor seething somewhere in the U.S. The guy's got real bite, real self-loathing, plus he's intelligent and caustic. He wrote a wonderful little bit on Hunter S. Thompson here.
Gary Brecher aka 'War Nerd.' Okay, y'know the middle-aged guys who read too much Tom Clancy? You hate 'em? They can't get over the handling stats of F-16s and get waaay too excited by footage on CNN of cruise missiles and stuff? This guy is one of those, except he knows his history, and thinks George Bush is a twinkie, and knew that shit was getting bad in Iraq instead of being distracted by the gee-whiz fireworks on tv. In my opinion, the guy suffers from a debilitating case of Realpolitik once in awhile, but he's dead-on right about lots more. For example, his article on the RPG-7 before it got famous. Search the archives, and you see the guy writing about stuff that will happen in Iraq three months before it comes true. Oh, and remember how Republicans were calling 'em 'Freedom Fries'? 'Cause the French were 'surrender monkeys'? Here's Brecher pissing in their Freedom Onion Soup.
Slices of life: in Siberia and former junkies in Ukraine.
I was once told (on the subject of Nietzche) not to refuse to learn from assholes. It's the eXile. You don't have to invite them to your birthday party. But learn if you want to. Anybody else have good links like this?

on gender I.

2005-02-28T15:59:00.000-05:00

The reelection of George Bush threw a large rock through our expectations of democracy. That is, the best systems of decision-making we've come up with thus far, designed to iron out irrationality and promote moderation, failed. They failed completely. The worst possible outcome occurred. The crazy radicals on the margins, myself included, are both elated and terrified. Turns out all our worst predictions are coming true. It becomes clear that the only thing that once kept us from rabid fascism was a silly sense of propriety. Clinton didn't torture people because he didn't have to. Silly propriety. Now the die is cast. The precedent has been established. The system will not return to sanity, the system will refuse to cripple itself thus. It's got a taste for power and it won't turn from the banquet; not unless it is chased. But all that is the future.
But if the reelection was an insurmountable challenge to democracy, it was also a challenge to manhood. The demographics of Republican voters drive this point home. The American male, I assume, desires to see in himself the best traits of manhood. Courage to face challenges, a thirst for honesty and virtue, impatience for bullshit. The American is a modern-day cowboy, shoots straight, looks you in the eye; he's gentle when it's warranted, hard as iron when it's not. Yeah, I know. Quit laughing. These are the men that vote for George Bush. And in the process of doing so, they pissed on anything of worth left in being Man. Honesty becomes delusion, forthrightness becomes analytical blindness. These are the bastards that believe we should "just nuke 'em"; they see the world with all the perspective of an ant farm. They redefined courage as aggression, as the frothing hyena instinct that circles and kills whatever target is wounded. And in America, it was the usual targets. Homosexuality, immigrants, France, Sean Penn... I couldn't invent this shit even if I wanted to, even if I still thought it was funny. Paranoid, xenophobic, eternally suspicious and eternally insecure, masked by the grin of a salesman. This is Man. A cowboy in his SUV, stuck in traffic, stuck in that traffic as it crawls into the polluted sunset, forever, screaming along with the hate-talk radio station. That is Real Man.
And that qualifier, 'Real', that's important too. It's the 'Real Men' that sway lesbians from their wayward path with one swagger of their hips. (as in: "hey baby, you just haven't had a real man yet.") 'Real Men' that sweep across their town's frontier, on the lookout for the 'Unreal Men', which I guess is the rest of us. Real Men eat at the Keg, order their steaks bloody, drink Manly drinks devoid of little fruits hung on swizzle sticks. Yes, even a slice of lime could be an object of derision. The way of the Real Man is fraught with peril, seeing as how the modern world is populated with people who either aren't Real Men or Real Women. Real Men have never known, will never know peace.

Females, you think you have it bad? Let's review gender starting with biological determinism: as vessels for genetic code, neither of us have a distinguished role to play. Females are responsible for... well, they are baby factories. Women are responsible for multiplying those potential streams of evolutionary progress.
Men are responsible for natural selection. We are more violent, more prone to disease, more successful in our suicide attempts. Our role in evolution is to die, to weed ourselves out of the gene pool before our dead-end sperm can pollute it. And if any one of our number survives the petty squabbling, the duels, the rodeos and the bullfights, this lucky buck goes and tends to the herd. This is fucking evolution.
Fortunately, the human race jumped that ship many years ago. When enough of us start surviving long enough to fall in love, natural selection slows and the process of evolution stops. At least until the next plague.
This is what happened to us. Around the time of the neanderthals, we find evidence that humans within tribes helped each other. Those who were elderly or crippled were often carried whenever the tribe relocated. Those individuals who were less useful to the group still shared in the bounties of the hunt. I can Thomas Hobbes groaning from his special place in hell. Calling me a dirty hippie. Suck it, old man. This is the truth. There is no evolutionary directive at play here. None that the Darwinists can perceive, anyway. You do a search, and you find that mutualism and self-sacrifice are widespread in the animal kingdom. For every athletic predator, there are a thousand bees and flowers.
At this point in our history, we are all happy little indians. A female has no real disadvantages when it comes to hunting with a spear or bow, and thus no reason not to participate in the hunt. Females can build traps, harvest crops, gather roots; they may not participate in wrestling a feral warthog, but if you ask me that is to their credit. So far, there is no reason for gender inequalities to arise.
None except a female's disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat. When humankind discovers scarcity, when tribes run up against other tribes and there is an outbreak of hostilities, this becomes an issue. Male infants become more valued than females. Infanticide is the oldest form of contraception in the world, and it is the female babies that are 'aborted.' Females become scarcer than males.
If there are fewer of one gender than of another, it's easy to see how monogamous relations between them may become something that isn't guaranteed. Scarcity creates value, value creates commodity.
One morning and the woman wakes up, and she is considered her father's property. And her father will not give her away to just anybody, no... for his little girl, he will accept nothing less than a Good Man, a Real Man, one who is a great fighter and provider. A Good Man is one that will risk injury and death to fight for the self-interest of the tribe. Sex becomes the first political economy. And on the morning that the woman finds herself a commodity, the man finds that he will never be secure in his manhood again, that he may not be a commodity himself, but he has the potential to become worthless. Woman is reduced to servitude, man is reduced to breadwinner. Their fates are drawn tight together, and the lovers anxiously watch each other from across the hut. They have been placed in opposition to one another; those two that should be closer to each other than anyone else on earth.

And from that day forth we are polluted with Real Men. Men can never just 'be', they must ever be 'Real.' Women are taught to shave their legs, dress nice, to increase their commodity value in order to attract a 'Good Man.' Women starve to death for such a thing. A man is taught that their only worth is in their purchasing power. A woman, at least, may find social worth in what they are. A man will never be granted this small dignity. His only social worth is in what he has. And since he is only worth what he has, it is always vulnerable to being stolen. When a man cheats on a woman, there is bitter betrayal and emotional upheaval. When a woman cheats on a man, she is launching a direct attack on his position in life.
Let's dive down into the depths of hell. Woman and Man live in a bachelor apartment in North York. Man is abusive to Woman. He wonders where she goes at lunch. He reads her email. Keeps her car keys. He wonders if she's cheating on him. He watches her friends, sees a thousands nonexistent flirtatious gestures in her movements. He insults her, tries to strip her of dignity. To keep her in his house, emotionally dependent on his approval as well as materially dependent on his labour.
Does it sound like I've been trying to claim victimhood for mankind? I hope not, that is not my intention. But maybe you can spare some pity for this Man. The reason is this: Man, whose only worth is in the things he keeps, cannot love. He knows the word, and he will whisper it to Woman when she finally, mercifully, leaves him. She will hear the word in the receiver of a payphone. He may believe it himself. No. This thing called Man cannot know love. The thing he craves is her gaze, her adoring focus, riveted on him so that he can never leave her sight. The thing he craves is a brilliant shining acceptance. The thing he craves is dead enough to fit in a box. That is not love. That is a thing to be pitied. Woman may have to share a cardboard box of an apartment with him. She doesn't have to live with him inside that skull, listening to the monstrous insecurities that make him what he is.

It is less acceptable in our pasturised society to engage in violence. The image indelibly remains, etching onto our retinas, but the actual act is now taboo. Fistfights carry the stink of blue collar desperation, and so the bourgeoisie settle for less, settle for the images of violence and for the rituals of aggression. Watch an episode of Fear Factor: a team of Californian bodybuilders has just defeated another team of Californian bodybuilders in a competition that involves spitting bull semen into a bucket. High fives all around! And the winning team turns, screams 'booyah!' carries out a number of pelvic thrusts. This is the petty, the impotent aggression that modern man settles for. America's military is composed of technicians, sitting at a desk inside a B-52 and pressing the proper buttons when ordered. The Republican Party is composed of baying shitheads that will threaten you with death over the internet, but don't have the stomach to kill their own meat. The mass of America reclines and gathers obesity. And all along its shores, men blow themselves up only to kill six neighbours at a checkpoint. By their own revolting standards, America's men are no match for the outside world.

I bring this up because I am asking the question: can Manhood be salvaged?
Part II soon.

wicked-ass visual upgrade.

2005-02-18T23:49:00.000-05:00

coming soon.

update: francis fukiyama shits blood.

2005-02-12T18:12:00.000-05:00

Ideology Colas.

goddamn you gut, i'm getting mixed messages.

2005-02-12T15:17:00.000-05:00

The Thursday after my food poisoning, I was invited to an Indian restaurant for a lunch buffet: within a week I experienced the worst and then the best stimuli my gut can produce. It was delicious... anything 'Indian' I ate prior to this was not.
Anyway.
I don't have a lot for you; at some point, I got another "deep" post coming out... these are probably the least-loved scrawls I put up here. Judging at least from the webcounter (that I promised I wouldn't use, heh). After one of these rambles goes up, I watch the counter... no comments... average time online is 1:20 minutes. I don't time my reading, but that means roughly that people read halfway through my ramblings. Whatever. That last trilogy of posts, revolving roughly around the mechanical thought-processes of panoptic institutions... that wasn't all that fun to write. It's not my strength. It's just practice. Whatever. The next "deep" post is gonna be much different, if I can help it. Gotta let it stew some more though.
Me? I'm listening to Some Girls. Now, this band has some very important points in their favour: apparently, (1.)they are a hardcore "supergroup" just 'cos they got the bassist from The Locust, and the yeller from American Nightmare. I wasn't too taken with A.N., but whatever. At least they're not one of those goatee/shaved head/tank top "youth crew" bands... fuck, those guys are like army recruiters who've been laid off, and now. just. can't. let. go. (2.)They are the only band on Deathwish that don't have a skull on their album cover. (3.)Their preference for pink visuals and tight shirts tends to piss off said Youth Crew types. (4.)They write infinitely catchy, weird, crushing hardcore songs that run under two minutes each. I'm serious... oh lordy. Just like the old days of Minor Threat stuff... a fast, overdriven, pop song... if you like it, dance... because the song is over in forty-five seconds. If you don't like it, relax... it's over in forty-five seconds. See what I mean?
Okay, it's not like Minor Threat at all. Except in brevity and catchiness.

Senators reject visible pants fine
The committee chairman, Kenneth Stolle, described the bill as "a distraction".

Mr Howell was unrepentant.

He issued a statement which said his bill "was in direct response to a number of my constituents who found this to be a very important issue".

His constituents included customers at his barber's shop, who were highly offended by exposed underwear.

Mr Howell had also considered introducing bills to stop people slouching at the wheels of their cars.

Valentine's becomes day for activists
Across the country, teens from hundreds of schools and youth groups will make chastity pledges Monday on the ``Day of Purity'' - organized by the Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based conservative legal group.

Cookie klatch lands girls in court.

A Durango judge Thursday awarded Young almost $900 to recoup her medical bills. She received nothing for pain and suffering.

"The victory wasn't sweet," Young said Thursday afternoon. "I'm not gloating about it. I just hope the girls learned a lesson."

Young said she believes that the girls should not have been running from door to door late at night.

"Something bad could have happened to them," she said. (like getting sued?)

To quote Bill Hicks, that's what fundamentalism breeds: no irony. Wait: wasn't irony dead? Ha.
And I'm going to put this up, for the sake of knowing your enemy:
Don Eberly's conservative 'civil society.'

In the end, "people are either ruled by character and civility or they are ruled by cops and lawyers," Eberly concludes. "When social institutions and authority collapse and the capacity to govern human affairs through voluntary, consensual means erodes, all roads lead to the state.... A society in which atomized and poorly socialized individuals continually organize to use the state against each other is a society in which the individual and the state are advancing but civil society, a place of consensual and voluntary action, is in rapid retreat."

I got a perverse thought stuck in my head when I read about this guy: he would dig Marx's theories on alienation of the worker. Here's where politics as sports begins to break down: the uniforms all start to bleed in the washing machine... when the players come out onto the field, there's no blue team and no red team, just a bunch of guys wearing matching outfits of mauve...
Essentially the guy is appalled by the phenomenon of monoculture, of the dissolution of community bonds in the face of a rampant culture industry that advances personal greed and consumption over all else... of course i'm paraphrasing. And I'm using my codewords... monoculture, community, consumption... over his. But when I do so, he sounds exactly like an anti-globalization activist.

Eberly sees a "values crisis" in America and claims that it can only be addressed by Americans organizing "for social change outside the political process"; renewing the non-governmental sector of civil society, particularly the development of voluntary associations.

What libertarians have been unable to do (and a lot of activists!) up until this point is to separate the theory of capitalism from its practice. Capitalism was supposed to be an anarchistic solution to the problem of distribution... a response to the corruption inherent to the feudal system. The "natural law" of competition within the marketplace would stabilize the system and guard against the concentration of power and wealth. Remember: capitalism was meant to equalize and distribute power... not to distribute wealth equally, but to fairly distribute opportunity... and thus to impose a moral legitimacy on wealth, a meritocracy. Natural Law was supposed to eliminate monopolies of power.
And thus the left and right get stuck arguing (as we so often do) morality... we say poverty is immoral, and they say it must be fair, because if people didn't deserve it, they would be rich... due to equality of opportunity. But Capitalism has failed. Instead of distributing opportunity, it ultimately leads to monopoly, to "synergy"... Capitalism has never once functioned the way it's supposed to. Barring shocks to the system, power ends up conglomerating into corporations, into family dynasties with a corner on the market, a monopoly, a concentration of wealth that impedes the 'progress' of others... hey, isn't that the thing John Locke et al. was trying to avoid?
Why, yes... I believe it was. Whether you see the situation through our moral filter or theirs... capitalism has failed. The heart's dead, but the brain labours on... although the best argument you can get out of a capitalist these days is that it's 'better than the alternative'...
Eberly on the other hand, sees greater danger in the development of the welfare state: "The entire weight of sophisticated opinion – buttressed by every school of prestigious school of public policy in this nation – was that increasing segments of American society would steadily come under the managerial supervision of a credentialed, enlightened, bureaucratic elite." Well, yeah. I think there's a great danger in the establishment of a 'nanny state'... such a thing rules out the ecstasy of dangerous living as surely as the xenophobic "moral society" of Eberly's dreams, fixated on the threat of the freaks and queers, invading the streets and dancing at all hours of the night...
Or to take a local example, the continued failure of Toronto's government to deal with its homelessness... built into the welfare state is a thirst for moralism and punishment... the only solution made obvious to city council is more shelter beds. People tagged and identified, incarcerated in exchange for warmth... food in exchange for a lecture or a sermon... bedbugs rampant. 'The Carrot and the Stick.' You have to ask permission to open your own locker. Contrast that with OCAP's work... the true 'faith-based charity' that Eberly talks about, although he probably wouldn't approve of OCAP's brand of hard socialist faith... but it fits with his distinction of "ragtag local charities as the antithesis of the public administration state." He assumes that by 'value-based civil society', he means his values, his 'traditional' values. But there are a lot of values out there.
It's just interesting, is all I'm saying. Weird parallels between the 'left' and 'right.' But completely different flavours in your mouth. Imagine it were possible you could drop all the labels in the spitoon, and talk this over in a bar... you'd get a lot of impassioned arguments. But not the hysterics we have now. It's all very confusing, but that's okay... confused is the best thing you can be, because it's the only thing that's true.

i am sick: no pleasure here.

2005-02-02T17:36:00.000-05:00

quick update. i'm just crawling out of an epic struggle with the kid formerly known as influenza.
doctor tol' me: 'shoulda got your flu shot.' and: 'come back if the shit you cough up turns green.' and: 'stay away from pregnant women.'
cripes. in the immortal words of limp bizkit... i feel dangerous.
oh god... now i'm having horrible late nineties flashbacks.

anyway, after the flu came food poisoning. i've almost certainly nailed it down to 'no name' brand imitation crab cakes... although nobody else at the house was retching fine silt all of sunday night. i guess my whole immune system is still weakened from the virus.

the last two posts here have in some way been related to my bowels. i am truly sorry for this.
oh, what else? let's see...
one of three cats is in heat around here... pretty funny situation where the cat was crouching on top of the bathroom door... have no idea how she got up there, lacking a climbing harness and rope. She then pounced on Mi-sun when she went to use the bathroom at 7:30 in the morning. There was a blood-curdling scream which i remembered, vaguely... i woke up and assumed it had to have been a dream, so went back to sleep. Apart from that, the cat has been causing a urine disaster... peed on blair's bed, on rachael's bed, on mine...
Hey, speaking of Bowel Movements...!

And there was also an election in Iraq... with electoral officials apparently telling people they wouldn't be receiving food rations if they didn't vote. I dunno, that situation is giving me deep misgivings. Quoth the shitheads: "What, you little snotnosed commie lib-ruhl... you got something against voting?" You bet your fucking ass-sputum i do. Voting is about the cheapest consolation prize you can give that special someone on your list of the oppressed. If freedom is to mean anything, after all the insults and abominations that have been attributed to it these past decades, it must mean more than the choice between two preselected options... it's gotta reside on the border between society and the undiscovered... it has to be a blank piece of paper rather than a ballot. Our generation, it has no frontiers, man... no condition left undone. Edward Abbey had a great quote, which i've only begun to play around with in head... human freedom needs wilderness. The implied social contract requires some alternative, a negation... otherwise it is laid bare as the sham that it is. And the last refuge of the priviledged is to claim 'there is no alternative'... bullshit fatalism. Let the migrant workers plot and scheme in the broom closet... there is no fatalism there. They can think of a thousand ways to enrich their lives... you're not going to like any of 'em.
After six days of being sick from the bike courier job, my boss called me up to inform me that i should return the cellphone in my coat pocket because i was being charged for every day i kept it... i asked him why he had waited six fucking days to inform me of this. Especially since I had asked about the commission/charge scheme on the first day, and he had 'been too busy' to go over it...
Him: "Hey, c'mon... that's business..."
If nothing else, capitalism exists as a parallel moral system... businessmen swoon with heady relief, see, that's just business. You didn't say Simon says. Businessmen take capitalism the least seriously of all. It's just a game, see. Nothing is for keeps! Ken Saro-Wiwa digs himself out of a shallow grave at halftime, knocks on the door at Shell Headquarters... they all share a good laugh. "Man! You sure got me there!"
Morals dictated by intent rather than their consequences. You ruin another man's life because he trusted your handshake and word. Oops! That's business, pal. It's like yelling 'Gotcha!' and running away giggling. It's business. It's an apology. Businessmen released from the weight of behaving like adults.
Don't ever apologize to me and tell me it's 'business.' Stand on your hind legs for once in your wasted life. Own your deceptions. Own your petty lies. Just once I'd like someone to say to me: "yes, i cheated on you and was dishonest. i saw an opportunity to make a little more money and so i took it. i understand that you have no recourse, either legal or otherwise. my word is to me worth less than thirty dollars." Just lay it bare. Business does not work through your fingers, god does not speak from your mouth. Stop pointing to the sky when i call you on your shit.
When we drain the swamp of gods, we kill your scapegoats. Leave you on the far bank to grieve over your rusty treasures. Leave you to dream of the days of being young... collecting deathbed conversions from serial killers. Gleefully considering it a job well done: "that's two more souls for gawd!!! I'll be district champion this year!!!" People are so careless with their toys.

okay. enough with the dark poetry, man. My eyeballs hurt. here's entertainment.
(edit)
Tall glasses (of ginger tea, sadly) Raised to the Peasant Insurgency. Wish I coulda been there.

This could very well be...

2005-01-26T16:08:00.000-05:00

...the post that gets me kicked out of the *ahem* "ultraleft."
Here's the story:

Everyone's got the distant uncle they don't know well, and whose presence only sorta show up sporadically, like under the christmas tree. I have one such uncle, actually a bunch, but this one sent us a couple things. One was a bit of his own poetry, framed with a background of flowers or something. I thought that was pretty neat and silently gave him props. He also sent 'the kids' some gift certificates... for McDonald's. In his own words: 'because I know how it is, away from home, sometimes growing kids get a craving for two all-beef patties, special sauce...' etc. etc. You can picture the jingle in your head. If I repeat it verbatim here, who knows, I might get sued.

Uh, not really, uncle. But it's the thought that counts.
Like most times at my parents house, I make a Big Deal out of it, like, what the hell am I going to do with this? In the end I take it. My thinking is this: for all those times, many times, when I do not have money, at least now I have something to offer a panhandler. I have $20 worth to get rid of.

First dude I met while postering for a job on Richmond, the night before New Year's. Richmond street in Toronto is the 'Entertainment District.' This is where the pricks hang out to get rejected by women with fake suntans. Whenever I poster here I pass drunk fuckwads waiting in line outside a shitty club, dressed like wannabe mafia bosses, labouring to come up with some funny putdown for me. Usually I throw up some paste, a poster, and another layer of paste and I'm gone before the gears in their head stop turning. Anyway, this guy is working the intersection, waiting for red lights and walking up to the driver side of cars asking for money. Yeah, he's an amateur and he looks too well dressed. He asks me for change and I give him a book of gift certificate "dollars": $5 worth. He doesn't know what it is. We're having this conversation in the middle of the crosswalk because that's where he stopped me. I try explaining that these are gift certificates; that you can use them the same way you would use legal tender. Pretty soon, light changes, honking ensues, he sort of shakes his head in disgust at me and mutters 'Peace.'
Second time was even worse. Girl yelled at me: "I'M A VEGAN!!!" I ran home and hid under the bed until dinner. These things were fucking controversial. I didn't have the balls to try offering them away again.

Goddamn it. What was my recourse? I sat and pondered the best course of action. I could throw them out. But then this evil corporation would still have my uncle's money, and wouldn't have incurred the costs of serving food. Besides, it was wasteful. That went against every anti-consumerist instinct I had! I might as well throw away actual food.
I could try giving them away again... but no. I was too chickenshit. Who knows how many vegan panhandlers are out there. And come on... offering McDonald's food... to the impoverished?! That's fucking crass. I mean, it happened to me and I didn't enjoy it.
I guess... I could go order something. What's the big deal?! Activists like singling out corporations that most embody the things they hate. But Nike isn't the problem... sweatshops are. McDonald's is no more evil than... Burger King. Besides... I looked at the gift certificates. Part of their value would go to 'helping kids.' I could get behind that, unless McDonald's was sending these kids to Bible Camp or something. No matter. At least they would have something nutritious to eat. Unlike me.

There was something else... this could prove to be a test. McDonald's was a symbol. This was the public face of capitalism. Could I eat from Capitalism's plate and walk away unscathed and unrepentant? This could be like an innoculation against junk food. Get the very worst of it and you won't have an appetite for ground beef for decades. Remember: I am a twisted nut. I once applied for a job at a golf course for the sole reason of learning to hate the kinds of assholes who own used-car dealerships. All I will say of that experience is that I succeeded in my goal beyond my wildest dreams.
The day finally came where I was famously broke and the house was, er, in between groceries. My target was to eat at the trough of all that was wrong with the world. McDonald's. Located at the mall. In a Wal-Mart. On a Saturday afternoon. In a crowded mall. Shortly after Christmas. If I didn't hate humanity by the end of this, I figured I could apply for saintdom at the Vatican.
Waiting in line at McDonald's was not uneducational. I watched a fledgling high school romance between my cashier and another pimply employee. I asked for a 'shake.' They don't sell shakes at this location?! I have been asleep far too long. What year is this?
Plus, I noticed, nobody was having fun! I had tried coming here as sort of an ironic practical joke on myself, so I was gamely trying to maintain a hipster sneer. As if I knew how ridiculous I was by being here. Shit, I couldn't do this! These people weren't having any fun! We were all suffering together! I wanted to throw out my arms in a big group hug and wax enthusiastic on the merits of organic fruit, to this, my wayward brotherhood of (Wo)Man!
They made my order to go, even though I asked for a tray and a plastic fork. The cashier gave me a look that told me she was waiting for her break, and that there were no more tables available. Maybe I could go home to eat, and, y'know, watch television or something. Ha! All this irony was making me hungry.
I noticed something else that has changed about McDonald's. Instead of those paper bags they used to have, they give you all your food in a transparent plastic bag. To better pollute the planet, I guess. I mention this because on the way home, I was... found out. I ran into Chris coming out of one Toronto's many delicious Roti shops. I said hi... and kept walking. Fast. It was too late. I saw him smile, eyes flicker down, to the paper cup proudly embalzoned with that big yellow 'M', and finally through the plastic bag, to discover that I hadn't just bought a 'salad' or something innocuous... this was a Big Mac combo with fries and a Coke. The Horror. I didn't have the heart to detail my manifesto to him. It looked like an otherwise healthy-minded comrade... crumbling in the face of junk food. How I suffer for my art.
The details of ingestion are largely anticlimactic. It wasn't the worst meal I've ever eaten*... I was surprised how depressing french fries are as a food source. But there is an epilogue to this sordid little tale. An hour later, I had a feel in my gut. A feeling I can only call... ungood. The ensuing bowel movement was nothing if not dramatic.
umm...
Buckshot! *cough cough*

It was probably the best outcome I could have hoped for. I was ecstatic! Because I learned something important about myself. One day, they may be able to shove Capitalism down my throat, but they'll never be able to make me digest it!

*That honour is relegated to a breakfast I had as a Boy Scout. The idea was to hollow out an orange rind and then cook an egg inside it by putting it directly into the fire. I'm still not sure why... if you don't have a pot in the wilderness, will you have an orange?! Anyway, I didn't completely remove every trace of orange from the rind, and didn't completely finish cooking my egg, and a bunch of ash fell into it when I put it in the fire. So for breakfast I had liquid egg mixed with bits of orange and ash. Later I was vomited upon by a kid named Mike. I'm not sure if these things are related.

the ends of history.

2005-01-17T17:03:00.000-05:00

Jim said, "Y'ought to think only of the end, Doc. Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile."
"Jim, I wish I knew it. But in my little experience the end is never very different in its nature from the means. Damn it, Jim, you can only build a violent thing with violence."
"I don't believe that," Jim said. "All great things have violent beginnings."
"There aren't any beginnings," Burton said. "Nor any ends. It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can't remember, into a future he can't forsee nor understand. And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates itself."
-John Steinbeck. In Dubious Battle

Know this:
That Mankind (yeah, why not, let's gender this concept, shall we?) in its religious and in its political holy works seeks to kill History. The bible ends with Revelations. The philosophy of Marx ends in Utopia. The blind thrashings of neo-liberalism end with Fukiyama's End of History, and since we're beyond that, they haven't had much to go on since. Pretty confused, that lot.
Why?
It has appeared to me that Mankind (there it is again, get used to it) has had enough violence, enough Grand Adventures to fill any cosmic abbatoir. Do we not learn from history? If we have a generation still able to recall WWII, do we not have enough evidence to try and at least shy away from bloodbaths?
No.

Three things have lifted Mankind out of the mud and into the slaughterhouse of History. One is our ability to make tools. Moreso than the fine manipulation of hands is an ability to narrow our gaze on trivialities and thus produce a better flint, a better gun, and a better bomb. The progress of our weapons has raced ahead of our science of not using them. Second is the gut instinct to create groups. I've been in enough mass social convergences to understand that part of it is basic, instinctual, reptilian. To shout in a unified voice, carried by the sheer momentum of the mob! Fuck yeah, that's an interesting feeling. It's a scary feeling. Crowds are defined, always, in opposition to someone or something. There are no protests without cops. There are no audiences without football.
There are no Nazis without War.
The most important part of politics is that, the gut exhilaration of the herd. Everything else is alibis.
Which brings us to thing #3, our language. Our communication through metaphor. Our ability to thus invent the divine.
In, (ugh), Western culture, Plato started a genre of literature called 'Political Theory.' His is the first book you will read if you go to University. In it, Plato speaks through Socrates to propose a perfect city with a perfect king. Ok, let's not slack off here, gotta keep up the pace. You can spend a lifetime poring over Plato. Some people do. But how does Plato create a perfect city and the perfect king? He uses rhetoric. He argues, he debates. The Republic is a dialogue. Plato asks leading questions, proposes answers that will feed his argument, and uses faulty deductive reasoning. Finally, to mould his perfect hypothetical philosopher king, he proposes that there must be an objective truth operating behind the world, and thus, through a process of selection and grooming, we can create an individual with a perfect view of what is Truth and what is Right, and we can confidently put him (or her!) on the throne to rule us all.
And thus I introduce to you the two facets of political thought. Politics as parlour game, and Politics as faith.

I ask you, where do people argue politics? Who argues politics? Why?
Some of us argue about practicalities, such as how to create a system in our household where food and chores are distributed equally. Or how to best take down a system that we feel is malevolent. We are not arguing politics. We are not using its language. Politics is something you debate at dinner parties. We might meet someone, an opponent, and we might want to impress everyone with our insight and wit. Thus we talk politics. Not to win, just to compete. Politics is a game. We don't use debates to discredit policies. We do it to compete. We do it to define ourselves in opposition. Thus, the civil skirmishes over issues, the two mobs rushing at each other with different coloured flags, soccer hooligans kicking the shit out of each other over the names of their ghetto; what's important is not the name of the ghetto or the colour of the flag. What's important is the blood. Those guests at the dinner party just have more to lose than us rabble outside. So they do it in a civilised manner. They lose face instead of teeth. Hurts 'em just as much.
So are bibles and manifestos merely props for incidents of street warfare? Not really. They are also wonderful pieces of literature. Fuck, there's been plenty of manifestos and bibles. The ones that endure have to display a certain amount of craft. There is a feeling you get, reading a book like this, when the author lays it all out, and it seems to click- yes! You are privy to an important revelation about the world around you. You have imposed a sliver of meaning on what was once incoherent. Yes! This is a feeling of holiness, of enlightening ecstacy. Yes! You feel like you gotta share this feeling with the world. There is hope because there is meaning! You quote that book to your friends, and they shrug, because there is no objective meaning, and there is no holiness, it's all in your head. So you seek out like-minded people and you go to the meetings and you ponder how you might organize to enlighten the masses. This is a pattern I see in those circles of both evangelical christendom and vanguardist marxism. Hell, I've read books and gotten that sugar-rush of 'Eureka!' There are traces of it everywhere. On the bus to what became a massive anti-globalization protest, and someone read the response of a neo-liberal suit to his opponents: 'free trade benefits everyone.' Shit, I thought. It's worse than I thought. These people aren't evil, they're MANIACS. I'm not going to get into a debate (haha) about the nature of trade. The point is, when you find someone who can say a phrase like that, without irony or a whole string of equivocations and provisions, then man, you have found yourself a True Believer and my advice to you is to run away or punch him in the mouth.
There are many political texts, a lot of religious texts, but not all of them end with the killing of history. But here's the thing: the most succesful political and religious texts do. Or put it this way: why is it that of all the permutations of Judeo-Christianity, it's the Rapture-focussed cults that catch on in America today? I think it comes down to means and ends. If you have a text that promises to make current violence meaningless because it will lead to a net elimination of violence in the future, it absolves the blood on your hands. Let's take a look at what politics offers the firm believer: the ecstacy of enlightenment as an individual, membership in a group, the visceral thrill of competitive violence, and finally, the absolution of guilt through the certainty of rapture. That's quite a package. All of this, and the political believer doesn't have to face questions about agriculture or livestock. The political believer is not responsible for the slaughterhouse of History because History is merely a bad dream from which we will soon awaken.
This is absurd. Can you imagine how bored our children will be in utopia? If we are living in a Fukiyaman End of History right now, where there are no great causes to pursue and no great tests to overcome and nothing to do but earn and spend and consume, then what kind of curse is utopia? This is why I could never buy into the concept of heaven. If my grandparents are there now, what do they do all day? Watch soap operas feed the ducks? Heaven is inhumane.
There will be blood in our children's lifetime. So be it. If there is an appetite for destruction in the heart of Man (whoop!), then better it be fed in drops rather than a cycle of binge and purge. Most importantly, the structures efficient enough to create armies and bombs should not be allowed to go on. There is slaughter because there are armies. There are armies because there is politics. The goal of politics is to kill history. If nothing else, the goal of anarchism must be to kill politics before this end can be accomplished.

recipes for disaster.

2005-01-11T17:09:00.000-05:00

Don't be surprised if things slow down around here. I have found myself dutifully employed, M-F, 9-5.
No, it's not like that. At the moment, I am a bike courier. Soon I will be wearing tight pants and growing dreadlocks. But I digress... my copy of Recipes For Disaster came in the mail recently. It's over 600 pages, so don't be disappointed that I haven't had time to really dig deep into it.

Getting a package from Crimethinc always fills me with conflicted pleasure. It's like getting a distant postcard from that one 'crazy' friend you have, who tried to shoplift a case of beer from the LCBO while barefoot. The postcard is saturated with joy and stories beyond belief, and you are caught shaking your head, wondering if you could or would want to live like that. Hitchhiking in the bayou. Getting shot at in Kentucky. Sleeping in a ditch with dirt in your hair and woken up by an organic farmer in the morning. It is oh so tempting. But for now, you think, I will settle for this postcard and the certainty of a hot shower in the morning. Still, it nags.

And so it was for me again. I come downstairs, and there, like a pregnant belly, is the Crimethinc package. You tear it open and look at all the goodies-- Crimethinc absolutely spoils you with free stuff above and beyond what you buy. This time, there were two copies of a children's story by one of the authors of 'Off the Map.' The book itself, the byline being 'an anarchist cookbook', is definitely an achievement. If you are looking for technical information, how to, say, fix a tire or pick a lock, you'll be sorely disappointed. Also, unlike that other cookbook, there are no phony bomb recipes. No, the recipes included are those of the social persuasion.

The most substantial chapters in Recipes for Disaster those that focus on organization: creating anything from a bike collective to a black bloc. I'm sure there are a lot of people who have had previous experience with these efforts, but the book is full of creative hints and ideas that struck me as almost revelatory. If you've spent any time as an 'activist', a lot of the recipes in the book will be familiar; I doubt, however, that you won't be able to glean something of use from them.

From there you get into some of the deeper stuff. 'Surviving a Felony Trial', fr'instance, or 'Sabotage.' There is a chapter titled 'Evasion', but it focusses on actual Evasion and nothing to do with the book. What I found very compelling was a firsthand account of sabotage. The (anonymous) author detailed what went right, and what mistake ultimately led to a four-year prison term. The bullshit factor is nil. Nobody is pretending that actions don't carry a large amount of risk. The grating tone of activist self-congratulations is kept to a minimum.

So what sort of book is it? Where does it fit into the Crimethinc canon?

I admit that I really enjoy what Crimethinc does. Written in between their words is a harrowing level of joy. I can read Evasion and just drink it up, smiling to myself on the subway. Even if I'm not about to stop paying rent. There is a hectic kind of idealism in Crimethinc writings that gives me pause. I don't think my metabolism is quick enough to digest the infinite amounts of joy and danger that they prescribe. I'm not that sort of individual. I'm a self-styled rationalist... which is to say, chickenshit. So I do occasionally settle for reading about joy, instead of doing it...

Thus when I am reading the words of someone that resembles me not at all, am I defeating the purposes of having a Crimethinc? Do I rely on their works as an innoculation of adventure, when I'm not feeling adventurous enough? Has Crimethinc become what they hate most: a distributor of rebellion as a commodity, doing what the starved masses feel they can't do themselves, and then selling them the thirdhand account?

No, actually I don't. Let me go about explaining this by way of a confession. I used to listen to Rage Against the Machine. (copyright Epic/Sony, those murderous bastards) From there, I picked up a book that they had suggested in their liner notes. Chomsky, of course-- are you surprised? Built inside me already was a sort of undefined anger. I couldn't understand why I hated arrogance so much. I would root for Daffy Duck because I knew he would ultimately be humiliated by Bugs Bunny. Rooting for him didn't change the cartoon at all. But still I'd do it: root for the underdog. If I had kept doing that while watching tv, I probably would have ended up becoming a fashionable nihilist or something. I think a great many number of my age group fall into this category.

I didn't. Seattle happened in November 99. I heard about it on the radio. In April, I was in Washington D.C. Then onwards and onwards, and so forth. That first morning, though, driving through the empty streets of a place much bigger than me, I was terrified. It was maybe the first genuine emotion of my entire life.

It's a shame that we live so utterly in a spectacle society that we use it to define what is possible. It's a shame, but there it is. I don't know how people live as I once did: rooting for the slick villian with something to say, even as they know convention demands that he be killed. All I know is that I might have been there, in front of the television, if there hadn't been a Seattle. If there hadn't been that chance to redefine the possible. While reading Evasion I dumpster dove for the first time. (my first time shoplifting, however, was six years before that.) After reading a zine, I graffitied(sic) for the first time. It's not a matter of innoculation but of gentle pushes, baby steps. Baby steps because revolutions don't come natural to me. Sorry. But I'm working on it. And some of us need this, need these stories to be told. It may take fifty postcards, but eventually I may come to see New Orleans.

And that explains my conflicted love of Crimethinc canon. The nagging feeling I get is coming from me, telling me to Go Out and Do It now that I know how to do it. Crimethinc act as one of the last bastions of cultural idealism. They continue to do what they do because ultimately they still believe that culture can be force for political change. That's right! Even after punk died. Even after all the Che t-shirts at Parasuco. Even after corporations took the aesthetics of culture-jamming and made it into 'guerilla marketing.' (uuuuuuggggh....) Culture can be dangerous. Which is why I'm so happy to see this big book on my desk. Crimethinc could have settled for publishing fifty more Evasion-type travelogues. But they didn't. They filled a book with personal accounts to triumph and adventure and defeat, and then pointedly tell you how to Do It Yourself.
So go Buy the Book. Or write your own.

sorry, no metalheads in this one.

2005-01-05T14:32:00.000-05:00

Linky linky

Unfortunately for Americans, we have come to equate fascism with its symptoms, not with its structure. The structure of fascism is corporatism, or the corporate state. The structure of fascism is the union, marriage, merger or fusion of corporate economic power with governmental power. Failing to understand fascism, as the consolidation of corporate economic and governmental power in the hands of a few, is to completely misunderstand what fascism is. It is the consolidation of this power that produces the demagogues and regimes we understand as fascist ones.

As always, I have no idea whether or not I'm just dredging up the obvious. Ah well.
Also, this...
Q: Do you suffer from media leaks? Evidence of prisoner abuse can be embarassing, and can even ruin your favorite shirt! But there is a solution... a final solution! Stop taking prisoners.
Who the fuck is the army hiring to do PR?
"We are always adapting to the changes in the environment and our commanders, our soldiers, are also trying to be more sensitive to the Afghan culture," Cheek said. ''I've told our commanders, for example, to minimize the number of Afghan nationals or others that they detain."
Oh, I see. Cause it sounds like you were talking about just shooting 'em all. And leaving them in mass graves. Yeah. Ha! Sorry, man. Cause you see, the headline says... boy is my face red! Well!
What could have given me that idea?

2005-01-04T02:05:00.000-05:00

There are many things the internet does not do well.
For example, I don't think I've ever read a messageboard debate that ever accomplished anything of worth.
But.
I think the internet has been hailed, by better men than I, as an unparalleled source of HUMILIATION and SHAME.
Yes, from the Fat Chicks in Party Hats to that dude that won some webby award for being the creepiest Peter Pan fan in the world, the expanse of civilisation is reduced to the equivalent of a clown car full of Jerry Springer guests colliding with an Amtrak train over... and over... and over again. And you ask yourself: who is the ugliest specimen of humanity? This dork who has published his shockingly bad poetry online, in some sort of epic fit of self-delusion? Or I, for laughing at his pimply man-boobs? Who indeed?
And here it is: the Hessian Lo ve Pages. This is some sort of pinnacle for the genre. It's some kind of sublime joke that the Universe has played on us-- a splash of frigid liquid nitrogen on the libido of middle America. It is an abridged record of the responses one gets to an AOL personal ad supposedly posted by a tattooed, Suicide Girl "metal chick" proclaiming her interest in Slayer and Iron Maiden. And if you ever find yourself, in between gales of laughter, feeling sorry for men who answered a practical joke in the dumbest, most transparently-desperate manner possible, remember that these metalheads would not hesitate to kick your ass on sight, or at least overcharge you for what should be a simple oil change and tire rotation.

And if it's below your sophisticated sense of humor to laugh at desperate shitheads, then look at it as a sort of sociological experiment.... a quick poll of who's checking the internet for love.
-Apparently there are a lot of guys claiming to be friends/relatives of Fred Durst.
-A lot of lonely men work at Guitar World.
-Some men sign off as such: 666 DUSTIN.
-There are a good number of professional, conservative old men that will snap at anything under 25, then attach a family portrait to woo their mate. ("that's me in the middle!")
-Many thoughtful males are willing to give a young lady singing lessons. Hmm.
-The rest are more to the point. Apparently the average length of a penis in America is nine inches.
-Cops are not above offering to kill former spouses in order to impress ladies.
-Just stay away from AOL.
-Inexplicably, some guys are still worried that they will be mistaken for 'gay', even while answering a personal ad. So much so, that they must make it immediately clear that they hold 'fagety' phenomena in low regard. Good one, guys.
-Then there's this:

He seems nice. And he brought his guitar to the lake.

whore-piss V.

2004-12-30T13:41:00.000-05:00

And that title is how I choose to wrap up the holidays. (take a bow)
Oh, and what a merry time it was! *cough* tsunami- *cough*
If you are reading this, and I assume you are (as opposed to letting the words wash over you like Miami memories),
you have access to one of the greatest communication systems ever devised. I've been reading some of the news, looking at some of the imagery, reading some of the outpouring of misery from other scrawlers. I'll leave that task to you. I won't try and make sense of it. There's no sense. I followed along w/ the Guardian's "Interactive Guide" to the making of a killer Tsunami. It's got that keen, chirpy sorta museum-science tone to it. ex: "...And when the tension reaches a critical point, an Earthquake occurs!" Clean white little arrows indicating the direction of the Trail Of Destruction. CUT TO: some corpse hanging in a palm tree.

I can see why some people hate science and wrap their arms around religion. You'd think they could instil some solemnity in a flash video about how the world chooses to fuck you up today. It's a good thing that religion is as morally bankrupt as science is hopelessly maladroit. As I was reading blog after blog, I passingly wondered: "Is it just lefty blogs? I wonder what the American Christian network is making of this." I didn't really follow up on it. As it turns out, they're still running headlines about that issue... with the guys... with the dicks... in their asses... ...doesn't that seem a bit illogical?! Let's compare: Homosexuality. Mass Death. Penii are pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
I think these fundamentalist people are still pissed they didn't think of anal sex first; I mean, it must be pretty fun... if, y'know, you buy that bullshit about people choosing to be gay...
Fuck these people. Fuck them and the cardboard issues and their silly little rage that they bring to bear on people minding their own affairs. We just lost 80,000+ people... that's done. We have thousands of brand new orphans, widows, widowers... the oncoming threats of cholera and starvation. That's real. Cholera is older than sodomy. This is real. 'The threat to Christmas.' pfah! These beady-eyed jowly fucks can't even get through a family dinner without working themselves into a towering rage. It's a good thing heart attacks are catching.

Incidentally, somewhere in my reading-pile is the bible. When I get around to finishing it, I'll maybe post a review. Depends on my chutzpah. My pocket review of Genesis: whoa. The author just walked me through about twenty generations of nonacentarians, and made it about as compelling as an invoice. Dry stuff. It's a book that could have only been published in the desert. Maybe it loses something in the translation(s).
To Iraq, now, where shit just keeps getting stupider. And by stupid, I mean bloody. And bloody stupid.
Elections!! Should we vote in 'em?! Bush says yes!! al-Sistani say yes!! bin Laden says noo!! The bombs say: splat!
(I'm sorry... black humour is the last refuge of the damned. In line to enter hell, I bet you got a lot of nervous comedians.)
So bin Laden releases a tape, claiming that voting is a sin.... Juan Cole thinks he's shooting himself in the foot. Then Bush
actually responds to his statement... which is actually pretty incredible. When you don't even want to acknowledge your enemies as human beings, the standard practice is to ignore their words, and shake your fist at their image whenever it's politically expedient. You certainly don't respond to what they say. Bush doesn't respond anything that anyone says. If you ask him a question, he responds to the question he thought you should have asked, such as: "why are you so great?"
But in that article, there was a great and shining moment of truth:

"Mr. Bush and his aides have said they think Iraqis have a deep desire to vote - and that the mere act of voting, regardless of the outcome, will make them feel both empowered and invested in the new government."

al-Sistani is running on the platform that voting is a religious responsibility, and the only way of expelling the occupiers. The majority of Iraqis, I think, are willing to try. They are trapped in a cage, pressing that red button and hoping a shiny food pellet will come out of the chute. The cage still stands. Destroying cages with your bare hands is hard. I know this, I'm not trying to belittle anyone's struggle for liberation. I just don't think it will work. It seems fairly clear that America isn't going to leave even if asked politely. I mean, I'm no D.C. insider, but all this talk of withdrawal after the elections is weightless. The oil is still in Iraq. Saudi Arabia is still... Saudi Arabia. Iran is still sitting and watching. All the reasons, the true reasons, that America invaded Iraq are still there. Okay, creating a free market oasis was kind of a wash, (but the theory is sound! sound!) There's still the oil to monopolize, the old scores to settle with Iran, the permanent military bases... to install... no, Americans are staying put. Even if the troops wash their hands of the security situation and continue to cower in their bunkers.
Meanwhile bin Laden and al-Zarqawi are doing their best to disrupt the elections, and thus add to their legitimacy. Fuck, you guys are dumb. bin Laden's ultimate goal is to create a pan-Arabian superpower. You don't do that by killing Arabs and inflaming sectarian tensions. Of course, the Americans are up to the same tricks: the Kurds are proving to be their best proxy army.
What is the lesson here?
Historically, you don't occupy a territory, not unless you have an appetite for pain or you are willing to commit genocide. But if you are occupying a place, you use tribal divisions to make your job easier. For a little while. What you are really doing is sowing another minefield for future generations to step in.

Military powers don't give a fuck about whatever sputum they string together to create their justifications. Militaries are institutions. The cognition they exhibit is comparable to the thrusting of a giant cock. On an individual level, I guess it might be pretty impressive if they can coordinate airstrikes, artillery and infantry rushes. Big whoop. Guerillas can mortar Americans, pull back from the retaliation, blow up a Bradley with an IED and disappear. Pretty impressive. Zoom Out, what do you see? Armies exist for their own sake. The killing is the goal. Think of the wounded pride of all those American generals in Vietnam, sitting behind their desks in sweaty offices, delighting in statistics: "we were doing so well! Why'd we withdraw? You see all dem' dead gooks(hajjis)? How could we not be winning?"
It's the reason Microsoft can't build a sturdy web browser. It's the reason the film Brazil is so scary. Institutions don't achieve political goals. Institutions only maintain themselves. I dunno; I thought this was interesting. It's a look back at Vietnam.

On 28 July [Dayan] went aboard the largest aircraft carrier then cruising off the Vietnamese coast, USS Constellation. He was a professional military man and had often read and heard about such ships; yet what he now saw made a “breath-taking impression” on him. The vessel constituted five acres of sovereign American territory that could go anywhere without having to worry about troublesome allies. Isolated at sea, the crew did not constitute a security problem and the lack of anything else to do made them work all the harder at their jobs. The ship was protected “from the air, the sea, the ground, outer space, and under water”; if Dayan was being ironic—after all, the enemy consisted of little men wearing straw hats—he did not say so. The product of this floating factory was firepower. Every ninety minutes, amidst a numbing outburst of fire and noise, flights of combat aircraft took off to strike at targets in Vietnam; but when it came to specifying the precise nature of those targets his hosts refused to answer his questions. As always, Dayan was impressed by the Americans’ pride in themselves, their nation, and their mission. He ended the day by noting that they were “not fighting against infiltration to South [Vietnam], or against guerrillas, or against North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, but against the entire world. Their real aim was to show everybody—including Britain, France, and the USSR—their power and determination so as to pass this message: wherever Americans go, they are irresistible”.

remember the reason for the season.

2004-12-20T19:35:00.000-05:00

which is.... Winter Solstice.
Yeah... Go Pagan. Contact your local Druid.

Let's make a deal.
During holidays, I'll stop writing so you can stop staring at the screen and start staring at a warm fireplace.
If you're bored in T.O., there is free skating at Dufferin Park.
On Fridays my roomate cooks vegan food there.
(On Mondays she runs the recipes by us for dinner. Yes, envy me.)
I can tell you that it will be worth it to dine there on Fridays.
Ok, later.

alive with culture?!?

2004-12-13T23:28:00.000-05:00

Ok. A manifesto is outta my system. Just dabbled in storytelling.
Let's talk music.
Current fixations:
Botch; again, still. Downloaded their farewell EP; trying to decide which album I'm going to [buy/have bought for me 4 xmas] first.
I believe my love for this band has been established. Very well.
Also, specifically, a cover they did of O Fortuna. Now, you know this song even if you don't think you do. Imagine a movie trailer on tv. There is action. There is a dude. On a horse. Running in slow-motion. What is the opera music blasting out, inspiring excitement? That. Is O Fortuna. If you are still confused, dude, just plug it into your nearest file-sharing program. You'll get it.
Yes. Botch, a screamy hard-core band, covered this fucking song. It's great. By which, I mean hilarious. You gotta hear a young man screaming in Latin. It is tops.
So this is my request to the world at large. Next time somebody makes a protest movie w/ cops and protestors, and there is footage of somebody charging at anything, please put this song in your fucking movie.
Next:
Wrangler Brutes! I've only heard one song, but it is mighty tempting. And who are the Wrangler Brutes? You are asking this to your screen. I shall divulge. It is the band comprised of Sam McPhuckingPheeters of... Born Again$t. Also comprised of... many talented musicians.
Born Again$t! Plug that also into the file-sharing contraption of your choice.
Now a case of the heeby-jeebies.
This was Sam when he was 19. The year: 1989. This is him now. There on the left: the old guy. Do the math. Sam McPheeters aged fifty years in less than two decades. Chilling. This must be what happens to musicians. Also: I don't think you can blame Jack Daniels or anything 'cos Sam was straightedge. Probly still is.
Jello Biafra got fat. The first time I saw him speak, somebody yelled "Show us your tits!" And he did. In his own words, as he jiggled in own boob: "that must be a 45A right there." Again: chilling.
Next.
Converge is on the cover of exclaim!. No, I'm not that much of a fanboy. The exclamation point is part of their name. Anyhoo: hooray!
Next.
Breather Resist. Sounds great. Must pinch pennies.
Next.
Brian Wilson re-issued some album of his. This would make an ideal classy gift for parental units. Accesible, and yet indicative of sophisticated taste.
Don't steal my idea, sister dear. And don't tell them about this site.

hody pody IV: the legend reruns.

2004-12-11T15:59:00.000-05:00

Listen up y'all: i'm 14 and i have a lot to say.
(snicker)
ok, so since the last i posted that book down there, I gots myself a bitchslappin' disease to which my bed was its only concern.
All you people down here in the pit; i'm sorry y'all, you were not on priority list. assumin' dem microbes could cognitate such a list; bein' how's they ain't sentient, you know what i'm sayin'?
ok.
My friend Nate has this band. They will not hesitate to destroy you in the best way possible. I had a broken link to their website; now they actually have a website again. Take a look. It is entitled 'love these guys' near the top of my right-hand list. awright.
Now, this website is just utter illness. I can't put my finger on what bothers me about it; needless to say that whatever the reason, the overall impact is such that I am unsettled to a large degree. Maybe it is the genie who comes out of a lava lamp and requires the use of a wheelchair to come out of the ocean. I just don't know. Perhaps it is the band photo with facial hair run through the 'liquify' feature of Photoshop. That could be it; I'm not sure one way or another. Anyway I am happy to eliminate a broken link for you people.
From this topic, I have three segueways to choose from. Umm... okay. Picked one.

Nate and I lived together last year, and previous to that lived in the same residence. Ah, the shit that used to go down. One of the things was getting exposed to many different kinds of music, usually late late at night. (This other kid, named christie macneil [and she too has a blog to find on the linkway to your right, called toxic avenger], she too had an excellent and varied taste in music. These are people I like very much, and I hope they would back me up in a good fight.) So these kids and I, living in an ugly building with shredded green carpeting and bad fluorescent lighting and common rooms all beat up like Kosovo, living as i said in this squat damn institutional craphouse with-- aha!-- a bar within 10 feet of the front door, ekeing out a particularly unhealthy lifestyle in our youth, chasing that liquid dream through insomniac days that begin with sundown, and end in batted eyes and rusted silences, listening to a stereo play, large black window looking out onto empty parking lots, and yet more fluorescent lights, and raping trails in the heart of a town called north york. Living some sort of dream I suppose, looking back it all has the tint of drug paranoia and stifled horizons.
Whew, okay, sorry about that. Little bit of stream-of-consciousness exorcism there.
We'd listen to all kinds of shit, often with nate presiding, and if he was stoned, he would play us some of the shit he was working on at the time. Not with the band mind you; he had a four-track plugged into his computer and that's how he would impersonate a band. Other times it was-- oh shit, Wesley willis, nirvana, beck, nihilist spasm band, etc. etc. etc. on into the good night. Christie would play us cat power in her room: god, she took a parcel of her home with her everywhere, somehow her room smelt like the country and her dog. It was breathtaking. No, in a good way. Remember, we're living in north york. I have no love lost on that place. And you know, in that stunted nocturnal life, you never imagine that anybody has ever listened to same stuff you do.
So now Rob informs me that Hugh McIntyre of the aforementioned Nihilist Spasm Band ("DEstroy AMerica!") has died. When Wesley Willis died, I wrote him a little obituary for our college newspaper and pumped his music out our third-floor window. Now, I'm not sure what I'll do. But it's always heartening to suddenly realize that the weirdo band that you thought nobody knew suddenly has fellow appreciators, each with their own 3 a.m. tales. Cheers Rob.
Another story involving Nate:
Toronto can be a chore sometimes. It's too... too damn expansive. Toronto is Big. Self-consciously so. Depending on the neighbourhood where you live, you might very well find yourself in an artist colony. Toronto is Big. So as to not fall down the drain, you must be also be Big. Imagine the modern horror of being normal in the Annex. So everyone has a side project, everyone has an art collection somewhere, everyone's DJing somewhere on weekends. I'm not trying to sound cynical or anti-bohemian. I'm trying, straining, actually, to make this make sense. There is the sensation, in Toronto, that anyone you're liable to meet aged 18-29, is in some realm a celebrity. You amble into the Green Room, say, on a Thursday evening with your housemate, sniffing around for the odd pint of Creemore. Look around: just a bunch of people, right? Wrong. In underground currents of which are not even aware, these people are extremely important. That guy? he has a hit mash-up in France. This girl you are shaking hands with? She has a conceptual art exhibit on Queen Street. There is a sensation of vertigo, because the floor has collapsed beneath you; there is another channel of energy running through the plumbing in the bars and under the tables, there are entire dimension to the social undercurrents that must be running outside of your knowledge. Toronto isn't laid out on a grid; it runs deep like a human ant colony: compartments of culture operating in microcosms, dividing ad nauseum, cavernous and insular, manufacturing nothing but succesive layers of ego.
This, I understand, is the post-modern society we are living in. Once upon a time, the 'artists' might have been a very exclusive caste. But as common culture fragments, we are left with something very different. Hell, I'm a punk kid. I've got "my tribe." Even I have a hard time keeping track of the (notice the very skeptical quotation marks throughout) "genres" that exist within my own culture bubble. "Sci-fi grind?!" w.t.f.
So everyone, left to their own devices, goes and does their own thing. Awesome. In a burgeoning metropolis, stripped of most identifying signifiers, people go and invent their own cultures and tribes. This is quite normal. How else are people going to identify themselves? By their jobs?!
This is awesome, y'know?! This is my favorite politics in action! But wait. Why do we need thirty successive layers of conceptual art installation genres? Why do we need so many cultures? Especially since, by my reckoning, they have all taken on the very same model of the mainstream bourgeois culture industry they replace?
I'm being unfair. But it's the feeling in the air, the vibe of Toronto, of succesive layers of exclusivity and tightly compartmentalized self-importance. If you can find fifty kids who treat you as a celebrity, great. Welcome to Toronto. You'll fit right in. Otherwise you may find yourself feeling disoriented and unwelcome once in awhile.
People need to actualize themselves in some way. Outside the Annex lies North York. Which is even worse. Out there you have a different model of self-actualization, where people derive satisfaction from being consumers. Even farther out there you have folks whose very centre and focus could very well be a church. Their entire identity is wound up in not being godless, or urban, or not being anything but Gladys who sells strawberries on Highway 7 and sings badly but proudly on Sundays.
Dammit yeah, I'm in favor of an Artist Society over the Consumer Society. You go back and read Marx, and what is he talking about? Creating a society where workers get a feeling of self-actualization from their labour, not being alienated from it. But why does the product of the Artist Society have to be wasted on surplus art? And yeah, I consider it surplus art when it's being distributed in an echo chamber for the expressed purpose of creating a microcosmic hierarchy of status. Let's bring on the Artisan Society, let's get those kids building furniture and clothes and shoes for one another.
I'm sorry. I'm being unfair. And quite guilty of the same offense that I'm levelling at all the good kids out there. I guess it's just part of the Toronto atmosphere; the haze of self-importance that can be quite distracting until it lets you in. Really, I don't think I've met a single person out there who was out-and-out rude or snobbish. Anyway, here's my story.

Nate and his band are playing the Cameron House in the back room. It's a fairly big deal; there's a couple opening acts and they have been expending effort to sell out the room. I'm there, of course. Christie and Miche are there. The House is out representin' for one of their own. Nate asked, very respectfully, this guy to open for him. Nate is usually not someone you equate with respectfulness. Not that he's arrogant; quite the opposite. Nate gets quite disdainful of people who take themselves too seriously. He's generally a caustic, sarcastic kind of personality. One of the reasons we're friends. Anyway: The first band comes onstage to set up; y'know, a generic sort of radio-punk band. (radio-punk vs. true punk: gel in hair vs. glue in hair; moderately fast rhythm vs. all-out d-beats, etc.) They're lookin' sharp, they spent time with their arrangement of clothes. Guitarist has more than one guitar onstage with him, and changes guitars to get a negligible difference in tone during the set. They have spent some time learning how to dance while playing. Y'know, average Toronto citizens who have picked up the aesthetic traits of Being In A Band. They finish the set. My prognosis: it takes a lot to impress me, and they have not. It's very generic. Nothing they've played has leapt out at me. At least they can all play in time. Whatever. They finish the set thusly: "this is going to be our last song! Thanks to all of you! Thanks to Run with the Kittens! (nate's band) We've got CDs, they're 10 dollars, we've got a website at www.*****.com, you can also sign up for out email list to find out when our next gig will be, check us out tuesday, we'll be playing at ******..... thanks again!" Again, let me say: enthusiastic young Torontonians, following through on what you gotta do to Have A Band. Whatever. These 'last song' lectures are pretty fucking commonplace.
Next is Nate's friend. A little about this guy: Nate was kind of nervous that he wouldn't go over well. He calls himself the 'fisherman.' Why? He likes to fish. He's wearing a flannel shirt but no galoshes. He's probably in his late fifties. Drinking unobtrusively a whiskey tonic. He starts off kinda shy with a punched-up acoustic on his lap. Gets the whole souncheck situation smoothed out, and then sends the audience into shivers. The place is silent except for the tremendous applause in between songs. He casts a spell. His voice quavers with emotion, singing a song of friends passed on, and there's not a dry eye in the house. Christie turns to me, not during one of the songs mind you-- that would be sacriledge, and says something like "I think I'm in love." At the end of the set, which has felt like three dreamy hours, he says something to the effect of: "Thanks for listenin'. I'm called the fisherman, and if you want to reach me, I live about fifteen kilometres out of Orillia." Toronto is not known for being warm. But the audience sends him off with flurries of applause. They are begging a grandad to tell them one more story. It was a strange, regressive experience. You forget how to speak in any tone but one of wonder.
That poor Toronto band huddled their amps and guitars out of that bar and into some fuel-efficient car for a quiet drive home. Nate and the band were ecstatic, despite knowing full-well that they would have to play their asses off just to not be forgotten that night. They did, and they weren't, but the evening's toasts went to the Fisherman, who lives out of Orillia, if you want to reach him.

politics: institutional cognition and its flaws.

2004-12-05T23:34:00.000-05:00

I have a question for you.
What is politics?
I'm already on record (I hope) as thinking that Political Science (and thus four years of my education and tuition) is bunk.
Why?
It can't be a science. Science is when you test a hypothesis, in order to accept or discard it. You cannot perform an experiment on a society. There are too many uncontrolled variables. You have no control group; nothing to compare a 'test' society with. And to add annoyance to injury, you get plenty of armchair philosophers with intricate hypotheses
(Marxists, Capitalists, etc etc) who do not test their hypotheses, oh no, they merely twist history to reach the conclusion supported by their hypothesis. Communism in Russia failed because it wasn't really Communism. Structural adjustment in Argentina failed because they didn't do it right. Hey, the theory is sound. Trust me. Vote Republican.
Society unfolds at a glacial pace. Very few social experiments begin and end in a lifetime. So history is carried through the words of others, as narrative. All of our political theories end up being more robust than our experiments.

...

Let me state two things I've noticed about human cognition.
(II) Human beings are terrified of the unexplainable.
(I) We comprehend the world in metaphor.
[aside]: There are tribes who have no names for numbers past two (one, two, more). These people, as a result, can't comprehend mathematics. There are also tribes that don't distinguish between green and blue. They are functionally colourblind.
Let's assume that humanity's capacity for society-building (and our selfish claim to 'reason') began with our ability to create and communicate in Language. Language is the method that we use to build the lil' running commentary voice in your head, the thing called your 'self', your ego, your awareness and sentience.
Language itself is nothing but metaphor. (see: semiotics)
Mathematics is nothing but metaphor, albeit usually it is far more accurate than words. But I'll be damned if you can tell me that Infinity can be expressed as an imaginary number, and it equals a*b to the root of whatever. (I hated calculus).

We, as humans, use our Language to communicate. We can agree that 2+2=4. That's pretty clear. We can agree that there is a river thataway (points West). So far so good. Language is working. Our tribe of hunter/gatherers is pretty damn harmonious. We agree that the brown running things with horns taste good when cooked. We agree that we are People. We like to dance.

When we start a civilization things start to go awry. We found a city of 100,000 people. Naturally, there are problems in this city. An individual human being, the only thing capable of judgement that we have, is in a tricky situation. It does not have the spatial or temporal breadth of perception, nor the cognition to examine this city and its myriad citizens in its true form. A human being is not omniscient. Failing that, a human being might possibly be able to interview 100,000 people in a lifetime, but it would be quite impossible to disseminate a clear judgement from that task. Moreover, a human being does not have the lifespan to observe the long-term consequences of present actions.
So we fall back on metaphor. We collapse perception into, say, statistics and trends. We create general characterizations. We say: "Me see Black Ape and he stole bread. Me think Black Apes bad." "Well, Me think White Ape greedy; eat too much bread, no share." Okay, please, I'm doing it too, I'm creating a broad characterization, me a dumb White Ape and doing the best I can with what I've got. I'm not trying to start a race war here. calm down.
My point is that stereotypes are built into society as the only way we can make up our mind about things. Remember 'Politically-Correct?' Shit man, did that backfire on us progressive people or what? Now all these talkshow Fuckheads become big heroes for having the 'guts' to spew the oldest, sickest racial stereotypes they can find. The French wear berets and enjoy mime, you say? Really. Ever been to France this century?
And what do Americans say when they criticized by an English newspaper? "Hey, f*ggot, shut yer mouth, remember 1776! We kicked yer ass!"
Conversely, they won't thank the French for winning them their Revolutionary war. How rude.

Politics is our invention to try and create a meta-decision-making infrastructure. This infrastructure consists of: 1. the means to perceive a society on a mass scale, and then condense that information into easily-digested form. 2. a central decision-making elite that create 'solutions' based on their 'perceptions.' 3. an authoritarian system of coercion and that then imposes and carries out those 'solutions.'

It's easy to see how the first part of the equation fits into a society. Our very definition of 'civilization' is dependent on it. We divide societies into 'pre-historical' barbarians and 'historical' civilizations. The moment a group of people start to make records of important events, harvests, populations and such, they are considered civilized. Yes, even the Aztecs, who made accurate records of how many slaves they sacrificed. Yes, even the Nazis, who took painstaking records of everything they did in their camps, right down to the tons of gold extracted from the dental fillings of the 'Untermensch.'

The foundation of political perception is paperwork. The foundation of political coercion are walls. Surely these two mechanisms function well in tandem. The Panoptic machinery becomes a useful tool for both observation and for coercion. Now, what of the actual decision-making process?

In antiquity, of course, it was thought you should invest the decision-making process in one individual. The theoretical roots of the monarch originate in Plato's Republic, I think, although having the theoretical underpinnings of absolute authority is obviously not a necessity. You can just up and do it and not feel compelled to write a book about it. Plato, however, felt that need to write a book. He was living in a democratic Athens, a city that had executed Socrates. So he had no love lost on democracy. We'll get to that in a moment.
So the monarch's word is Law. He becomes our chief dispensary of Justice, thus, our best evocation of god. (After all, what is god's role except to provide the illusion of a just world?) But our monarch is mortal. Well, fuck. He just died. Alright, let's give the crown to his son, Prince Bucktooth the Unstable. You can see where this is going.

Marvin Harris (see a previous post) believes that many of the despotic monarchies that existed in ancient China and Egypt were able to exist so long because of agriculture. You see, the population was dependent on irrigation, which required a large infrastructure of dams, reservoirs, channels and so forth. These populations couldn't create these things autonomously because a neglected dam upstream could lead to disaster downstream. Only a highly rigid and violent authority could organize the manpower and planning required to maintain the agricultural infrastructure, and keep their populations fed.

Eventually, though, the Europeans had to abandon their absolute monarchies. Authority seeks only to maintain itself through the course of human lives. The shocks of unstable monarchs are dangerous for the entire system. Thus gives rise to the system of checks and balances, and its ultimate manifestation, representative democracy.
Instead of centralizing the decision-making process in one person, you maybe scatter it between a group of people, and then maybe ensure that they are accountable to yet another group. The actual problem, and its proposed solution, is argued and debated between several minds. Through debate we see the Truth emerge.
You want examples? Try every single decision-making structure we've got. The judicial system is based on a rigid set of laws and precedent. Two sides lay down their arguments. A judge decides how a present situation fits into the centuries of precedent before it, and instructs the jury. The jury is chosen to try and eliminate any possible ethnic or extra-legal sympathies and antipathies. They generate a group decision.
The scientific community struggles to come to a clear consensus through a system of publication and peer review.
The executive body of a nation is constantly under attack from the legislature. Every four years (in this country) they are given or denied a mandate through ballot.

I wrote a little bit about this machinery before, in terms of its relation to the Panoptic mechanism. Notably, it all happens on paper.
I would hope that everyone takes to time to read at least once their respective constitutions. Then listen to the supreme court as they bat around a specific issue in its relation to the sacred constitution. It's all recorded. Far from the decisions made in the shadows of an insane monarch's mind, the process of cognition is externalized as language. A judgement made yesterday is transcribed today, published, sold to the lawyers who put it on their bookshelf as precedent. It waits to be read when it affects a case that they are making. If a lawyer can make a strong case that a judge broke precedent in making their judgement, they might be able to appeal and overturn that decision.
Scientists, too, are expected to transcribe everything that they see and do to create their findings. For the sake of accuracy, qualitative observations are neglected, quantitative observations are promoted. If you are explaining the colour the pH paper turned, you are expected to give it a number, not call it 'magenta.' Your paper is then held up for review, criticized by your peers if it seems to lack scientific rigour or if it contradicts the established theories.
I don't think I need to discuss the process in which electoral politics unfolds. I think we've seen enough of that. What I'm getting at here is that there is a common decision-making structure at work, sharing similar characteristics. 1.Language is used to externalize the process of cognition. 2.The process of cognition begins dialectically, with established opposites forming the limits of possibility. 3.The process of cognition is evolutionary, in that it seeks not to end the historical train of thought, but to amend and complement it. In the United States, the judicial battle over gun control debates merely what the writers of the constitution meant in writing the Second Amendment, not whether that Second Amendment has any relevance today. 4.Each process of cognition has at its core a specialized language, and that specialized language is a method of controlling the means of the decision-making process.

How does one go about changing the world? Depends where one wants to find a position. You'll notice how human endeavour is cut into the different fields of expertise. To become a lawyer, you enter yourself into the Panoptic institution as a student. You learn the foundations of what has come before you-- the constitution, the language, the conduct, the etiquette, and the process of education is usually severe enough that you will be cramming fourteen hours a day in order to pass your bar exam. In other words, you are being restricted to the status quo by simple means of massive volume. There is never a question of striking out on your own to question the usefulness of what has come before; not if you want to practice and pay back your student loans. Once you enter into your 'profession', you are starting at the 'bottom.' Here again the Panoptic system of hierarchy, carrot and stick. Remember, in this system, those on top have to be the most disciplined of all. By the time you find yourself 'on the top', in the vanguard, you are playing for prestige. After thirty years of grunt work I doubt very much that you have the stamina or the clear independent thinking to dare question the system.
I read a fascinating article awhile ago, and I wish I could remember where I found it. The gist of the article was that something like 40% of the legal documents written since confederation contained serious flaws in jargon, such that they could be considered inadmissible. Legal language is the reason that there are such things as lawyers. And, it appears that half the time the lawyers don't know what the legal jargon means. What sort of mindfuck practical joke is this?
Legal language exists to create specialisation, to create a long process of financial strain and mental conditioning in order to protect the judicial institution from the outside world. And, since most politicians start out as lawyers, the parliamentary system as well. It exists to dissuade the general public from getting involved in policymaking. In addition, the system of civil liability exists not only to create an ironclad system of accountability within the Panoptic system, but to dissuade 'vigilantes' from, say, creating policy outside of this system of governance. Example: grocery stores crush their surplus food rather than let hungry people acquire it for free. What is their justification? 'Civil liability.' As if a bum can afford to hire a lawyer and sue a corporation.
And just how useful is this language in creating policy? Not very. Politicians spend most of their time debating points of order. I'm serious. Since every meeting is recorded in some form, most of the calories in Ottawa (or Washington) are burned following procedure. Down in the trenches of the legislature, you'll get fifty minutes of charge and counter-charge for every five minutes of voting. And what are these charges and accusations that are flung around? Usually that someone is 'stalling' or not moving quickly. Built into the very nature of our 21st century political institutions is a tendency of conservatism, of obfuscation, of rigid alienation from the facts on the ground. How does one become, say minister of the environment? No knowledge of the environment is necessary. Merely party loyalty. The party system is very strong in Canada, and it's yet another example of a system of rigid hierarchy, rewarding personal loyalty with greater prestige.

Now we enter electoral politics, where the jargon is significantly different. Now, citizens aren't specialists. They might not have the best idea of what policy ideas will work and which won't. I don't think there has ever been a succesful politician who lectured his followers. The language of electoral politics is one of high emotional calibre, suitable for melodrama and technicolor musicals. I jest, yeah, but not by much. Here, unfortunately, political communication must be rapid and punchy. To be effective it must be instantly digestible, immediately satisfying.
Once the monarch was understood to be the physical manifestation of god's will. Again, you can see where I'm going with this. Plato did. Putting his words into Socrates' corpse, Plato wrote that democracy would naturally lead to civil war and ultimately to authoritarianism. He came to the conclusion that what was needed was a philosopher-king, and laid out a system of education for creating such a person. So here's where we're going to drop his corpse and keep walking. This is the ultimate challenge of democracy, laid out in its infancy and a little too spooky to keep under wraps. Democracy put Socrates to death. Hitler was elected and remained quite popular. Then there's Georgie, who campaigned in military costumes and flew into stadiums to the soundtrack of 'Top Gun.' Okay, yeah, I'm drawing a glib parallel between Dubya Bush and Hitler, and it's bad form. But here's why it matters. Representative democracy doesn't exist to create a mandate for a politician. It is a mass spectacle, designed to draw people into a shared solidarity. Strange things to the system when people are paranoid or humiliated. It is a system that isn't reliable when the society is undergoing tension.
Compare the political profession in Ottawa with what occurs on the campaign trail. You have two seperate structures. Parliamentarianism, the bullshit in the senate and legislature, this is the machinery of governance. It is a Panoptic institution. Then there is the quest for the electoral mandate. Look at Paul Martin, solemnly swearing to LEAD CANADA INTO THE WONDERFUL FUTURE THAT IS ITS DESTINY. All kissing babies on the side, shaking hands, with that big banker's diamond tooth smile of his. I admit it, I'm cynical, ok? I grew up in the Chretien years, the dude who ran on the same platform every four years: Save Medicare, Abolish GST, Renegotiate NAFTA. Every fucking time. He's 0 for 3. And people kept voting for him? So who are you calling cynical?
My point is electoral politics has very little to do with governance. It's too anarchic. It's a sweaty spasm of asskissing and confetti and sweet little lies. I again draw your attention to the American election of '04. No serious candidate would dare tell the American people that they were making a mistake in Iraq. Socrates died because he was a pain in the ass. Nobody campaigns on a platform like that.

The painful truth is, democracy has a very checkered record. In most of the world, democracy leads to ethnic and political schisms, from the Czech Republic to Iraq to Canada. This happens regardless of economics, education, racial makeup, or whatever. Nobody has 'outgrown' this. It's not a matter of backward peoples, unless you count all of us together.
I'm also not suggesting that multiculturalism is doomed to failure, and we're destined to stay on the farm with all our cousins and give 'seig heil' salutes at suppertime. I'm saying that the democratic structures given to us are flawed. They take all power from us. They give us a heady rush of power, just a promise, in their parades and speeches. But only if we submit to a warrior-god. And then, they wage war on what only appear as concepts. George Bush doesn't out and say 'we hate fags' and he doesn't go onscreen to execute a 'raghead.' He solemnly promises to wage war on 'evil.' I'm willing to cut humanity some slack here. We have been made essentially powerless by the government's monopoly on policymaking. I walk past a dozen homeless people some days. I've given a lot of my hours to stopping homelessness. But so much time is wasted on advocacy; trying to get politicians to bat an eye. I've given up. That system of policymaking doesn't work. The machinery is creaking. But when we try to go out and do it ourselves, we find we've been surrounded by police officers. And we are beaten, pepper sprayed, shot if necessary. They make it clear: there is only Their Way. And if you haven't the masochistic streak or the adolescent rage necessary to sustain you through that fight, yeah, I can see how people can settle for shaking hands with a candidate and proclaiming him a Good Man. Hope is a fucking resource. Government holds the monopoly.

What I propose, when I am busy slagging off democracy, is that we abandon the very concept of politics. By which I mean, whatever method in which political decision-making is monopolized. Democracy is meaningless if people are not allowed to write their own policy. I propose doing away with any political theory that's going to demand obedience; I propose destroying any master plan that denies people the hard work and pleasure of creating Politics with their own hands in their own neighbourhood. Political theories are like Bibles, what the fuck does it have to do with us? I'm sick of politics full of grandiose statements and prophecies. True politics is like work rather than war; there's no glory, and you're not travelling to faraway lands to get it done. But at least it's not a lie.

hodge podge III.

2004-12-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

Let's play a game.
On the topic of ISIS: check this out.
Thoughts?
Look again.
I ask you:
is this not the most HUNG OVER promo photo in the history of the biz?!
a.)we got two guys crashed out on a ratty couch, with their feet up on the coffee table next to an overflowing ashtray.
b.)dude in the middle looks like he's having difficulty standing up.
c.)poor Aaron Turner can't even look you in the eye; he is regretting what he said last night.
d.)wicked bedhead on the far left.
e.)general signs of over-indulgence: unshaven. bags under eyes. everyone's lookin mean and tired.
f.)where are they crashed out? an abandoned house? notice, also, the shades are drawn against a punishing morning sun.
g.)the photographer even went as far as to use a nausea-inducing lens to heighten the hungover-ness of the scene. Notice the warping around the bedhead's er, head.
h.)coup de grace: whiskey bottle hidden in the far-right corner.

Congratulations, ISIS. You are hung over for posterity.

I am often not a nerd. Usually I go out and do things. Once in awhile, tho, I have these... attacks. Entire weeks go by when insomnia lays me low and I am trying to fall asleep to the rising of the sun, and trying to drag myself out of bed before sunset. I end up feeling bedraggled and sick and upset with myself for losing a day. Embarassed to be seen by housemates, knowing that they probably conclude that I am a lazy ne'er-do-well. This is when I sometimes end up playing a lot of computer games.

So put yourself in that state of mind, back where I was about-- four weeks ago. Around that time I aquired a copy of The Sims. Yeah, that game. The one that was released with like six expansion packs, each one costing $20. Not only is the game entirely based on the pursuit of buying your little simulated people more things, you are paying very real money to buy those virtual things, which you must then purchase again virtually while playing the game. And your Sims don't even get to progress past first base. Yeah, one long kiss between hubby and wife and a dialogue box comes up asking if you want a baby. Talk about killing the mood.
I didn't know this when I started. I built myself a wicked punk rawk girl, with the torn-up clothes and wicked 'daredevil' career path and maybe bisexuality. And fuck no...! She doesn't need to buy a television; she can get by with a boombox and a fish tank. Television is for bourgeois fuckers.
Well, it turns out that in this game of life, you pretty much need a television. Television-watching, inexplicably, is considered a social activity. Your neighbours come around and eat your food and then want to talk. But you can't have a conversation sitting down unless you are watching tv. So.... my punk rock girl would come home from a long day of daredevilry, try to call over a neighbour for some social time, but then be too exhausted to stand up. So she ends up sitting quietly on her couch, staring off into space while the neighbour eats her can of beans. Too tired to even dance. Pretty soon she is lonely and bored. The fish die.
At this point, in real time, it is three in the fucking morning, and I am feverish and anti-social, and I am playing this game, and realizing that I have created a miserable, poor, lonely girl who breaks out into sobs every three hours, and spends the rest of her time muttering to herself like a subway psychotic. My gawd. I realize this is one of the most macabre fucking moments in my life, having woke up and six in the evening, having not spoken a word to anyone all day, having not even fucking bathed, and then having played this game where I am playing the role of a crazy shut-in that prods the dead fish floating in her aquarium and tries to seduce the pizza delivery guy by coming to the door naked.

That shook me up, and the next day I bought sleeping pills and went to work and bathed and made conversation at the dinner table.
Today, in between work and play and reading and writing, I started a game simulating the house I used to live in with three other male friends. We lived in a townhouse on Jane and Finch, with graffiti on the walls and a hookah in the living room and piles of recycling in the kitchen. According to this game, by day four we have started to tear each other apart. A.J. boos me when I play guitar in the dining room. This naturally causes some household tension. Shoumik is unemployed, and thus gets trapped with the lion's share of the household chores. Rob is drinking every night. That's just not healthy. The guinea pig has died. We have no way of paying for food, so we are eating scraps off of the previous day's dinner dishes.

It's too bad this game doesn't let you buy marijuana. That might make it easier to play as a counterculture hippy.
Maybe those capitalist bastards will include that in their next expansion pack.

ISIS.

2004-11-29T01:48:00.000-05:00

ISIS ISIS
ISIS
IS
playing (did play) tonight.
Oh my goodness, wonderful. rad.
My ears are ringing. It was great.
Aaron Turner (singer/guitarist) reminds me somehow of a younger, less cynical Father Time.
Know this, friends, that Father Time is one cynical motherfucker.
Hmm.... they had always struck me as a 'jam' band. Not so. They played remarkably tight, very little improv,
except at the end. Their bassist seems to have a longer neck on his bass than mine,
'cos his seems to include every note that's wonderful. Truly a remarkable player.
OMG. This, coincidentally, stands for Old Man Gloom,
whose CD I have been searching for since forever and finally found at the ISIS merch table.
Score one for the Gipper. (me)
Things that make me happy:
Everything. (for the moment)
Stingrays plugged into Ampeg amps. It's the way it should be.
Also: Bloor street at midnight. The fact that home is only a five minute bike ride away.
The fact that my ISIS button has the Panopticon on it, and if I wear it upside down it says 'Si, si.'
Girls that remind me of an ex-girlfriend, but aren't. (it's like a get outta jail free card!)
Volume in copious amounts. (given)
The fact that I warmed up for the show listening to the Almighty BOTCH, and then the opening band had their bassist.
Yeah, I'd recognize that bass and bassline anywhere. They were great.
A warm kitten when I get home. That's pretty cool, admit it.
I've also noticed: when I saw fear before the march of flames earlier this month, then These Arms Are Snakes, ....is hardcore getting a larger segment of skinny, gay men? (Also, see The Locust, whose bassist, it is rumored, got married to their drummer in a 'publicity stunt.')
One can only hope so. Punk is/was supposed to be a home for the outcasts, what's more outcastic (sic) than a gay male who listens to heavy music? This music was born as a big Big fucking tent, with room for everyone....
I'm fucking sick of the kung-fu kids in the mosh pit, all ludicrously macho, with the fake varsity Every Time I Die T-shirts, who bring their dads to shows as chaperone. That shit's weak. Go home, jock. Get spat upon.
Think of it: three fat kids in the pit, kung-fu high kicks, and nobody wants to get kicked in the face. They monopolize the pit. C'mon. Who's having fun there?
No mosh pit tonight, just a lot of satisfied, glassy stares and swaying. Wonderful.
Another post tomorrow, a 'deep', political one, started it before the show and now I can't finish it because i don't have the cynicism necessary to delve into political matters right now. The bile well is empty at present.
Hope nobody minds if I'm having fun right now. No, I didn't think so.
Good night y'all.

freaking vortex.

2004-11-27T18:58:00.000-05:00

Genius.

just finished reading marvin harris.

2004-11-24T17:09:00.001-05:00

and it concludes with a couple sinister tidbits:

...Food production, to take the most critical example, has now become totally dependent on our oil supply. Agricultural traction, lifting, hauling, and transport were captured first. Now we have reached the stage where the conditioning of the soil through chemical fertilizers and the defense of plants through herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides have also become totally dependent on an ever-increasing supply of petro-chemicals.
...
As David Pimentel of Cornell University has shown, in the United States 2,790 calories of energy are now being used to produce and deliver one can of corn containing 270 calories. The production of beef now requires even more prodigious energy deficits: 22,000 calories to 100 grams (containing the same 270 calories as in the can of corn). The bubble-like nature of this mode of production can be seen from the fact that if the rest of the world were suddenly to adopt the energy ratios characteristic of U.S. agriculture, all known reserves of petroleum would be exhausted in eleven years. [This book was written in 1977].
...
Since evolutionary changes are not completely predictable, it is obvious that there is room in the world for what we call free will. Each individual decision to accept, resist, or change the current order alters the probability that a particular evolutionary outcome will occur. While the course of cultural evolution is never free systemic influence, some moments are probably more "open" than others. The most open moments, it appears to me, are those at which a mode of production reaches its limits of growth and a new mode of production must soon be adopted. We are rapidly moving toward such an opening. In the meantime, people with deep personal commitments to a particular vision of the future are perfectly justified in struggling toward their goal, even if the outcome now seems remote and improbable. In life, as in any game whose outcome depends on both luck and skill, the rational response to bad odds is to try harder.

-Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings

record of a shooting.

2004-11-24T03:04:00.000-05:00

taken from the Guardian.
Watchtower
'It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward'
Operations room
'Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?'
Watchtower
'A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death'
Captain R (after killing the girl)
'Anything moving in the zone, even a three-year-old, needs to be killed'

....we were just following orders. Remember forever what you have become, soldier.

fyi.

2004-11-23T15:19:00.000-05:00

if you thought that last essay was a bit uneven, i agree. Edited some typos. Cleaned it up. (added a phallus.)
Enjoy!