MMM

I'm watching the press conference about Gustav preparation right now. Jindal has got his shit together, damn. Sounds like they're doing their damnedest to prevent another Katrina. Let's hope it's not too bad.

On a purely political level, this had got to be somewhat of a catch-22 for the people who mismanaged Katrina. If it's significantly less of a catastrophe than Katrina, it will show just how much of the tragedy was avoidable and a direct result of the failings of Brown, the Bush administration, and FEMA. If Gustav is really bad, than it will just show the sheer incompetence of the federal government to handle any serious natural distaster.

Chertoff just spoke for a bit and Jindal is back on the mic. Say what you will about his political persuasion, the man is on top of his game. Definitely makes me feel a little better about what may happen.

There a new political website, called Culture11, one many are calling a 'right-of-center Salon' that looks promising. It's more youth-oriented (by which I do not mean Young-Republican) and it seems to cater more toward thoughtful and intellectual analysis than mere campaigning and propaganda.

Assuming the Republicans lose this next election - and the more I consider McCain's VP pick, the more this seems likely - they should find themselves at a low enough point in which to rebuild themselves. They should tap into the growing sentiments toward libertarianism and traditional conservatism that seem to be present in the youth of today. The Ron Paul movement was largely fueled by the youth and was hardly a cult of personality. There are a lot of people on the fringes of the left and right, extremely dissatisfied with their parties' platforms but mindful of the crackpottedness of the "Big L" Libertarians, who are eager to see ideas of individuality and freedom enter the mainstream.

The mainstream voices of the left and right have degenerated into mere advocacy of whatever is the platform of their particular party. Even in the NY Times, the "opinion" columns of Bill Kristol and Frank Rich are nearly indistinguishable from press releases from the parties. Intellectual vitality is lost to activism, and the readers suffer.

I'm a weird case, as anyone who has debated with me knows. I doubt the legitimacy of any government - I certainly deny the right of a government to detain, imprison, and even murder its own citizens - and I simply do not believe that any human being or organization has any dominion over another. Some would say this makes me an anarchist. However, I also try to be a realist. So, I recognize that as long as we do have a government, and are likely to for a long freaking time, they might as well keep us safe from harm - by which I mean in terms of health care more so than security. Considering my own medical, um, hijinx this might not come as a surprise, but many would say that this disqualifies me from the political right-wing. Add to it the fact that I am pro-choice, anti-war, soft on immigration, etc and you might think that you've got a bona fide Lefty on your hands. But, add to it that I am generally pro-business, pro-small government, pro-states rights, anti-hate crimes legislation, etc. and my readers (mostly Lefties likely) might be surprised. I have my reasons for all of these stances, reasons with which I could inundate you, given the opportunity, but mainly I value independence of thought. I like reading thoughtful articles and blog posts I disagree with, just as much as I do the ones I agree with.

When I first got into politics I only read stuff on the left. I was a fan of Common Dreams and Tom Tomorrow; now I can't stand them. Stuff like that and The Huffington Post are utterly predictable. I might agree with a great portion of it, but if you only encounter agreeable material you will become intellectually stagnant. So, as usual via the loooong way, this brings me back to Culture11. I disagree with much of the opinions on the site, but I respect the thoughtfulness behind it.
For example this is from an article called They Doth Protest Too Much, about the DNC protests:

Perhaps it is true, as Susan Sontag posited in On Photography, that there is “an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” but it is clearly not an aggression on par with the menacing gait, symbolic defiance and petulant attitude protesters attempt to co-opt into their faux insurgent chic. Admittedly, adopting a believable revolutionary stance must be difficult in a city where the Agency for Human Rights and Community Relations publishes a helpful pamphlet on how to avoid arrest. Yet something larger is at work here. “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure,” Sontag wrote. “Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.”

The essence of the infamous 1968 Democratic convention to the Recreate68ers tourists, it seems, was not philosophical, but cultural. The protesters aren’t really here to shake up the system or tear down the edifice of a decaying society. None, not even those designated to speak to the press and police liaisons, exhibit the kind of charisma or ambition necessary for something as grand as all that. The Zapatistas in Chiapas would surely accept their aid if these twentysomethings and younger wanted to trade their hovel in the ‘rents basement and an X-Box for a jungle bunker and war against the man. No, it’s more akin to the conceit of Total Recall: they paid the price to come travel to a city where, for a week, they can live an artificial -- but lurid -- version of a dangerous -- but celebrated -- time in history. They came to rub elbows with a story, to gain that “imaginary possession of a past that is unreal”; to be able to say, like the vets of SDS and the Weathermen Underground, “Hey, we were there when the s*** went down.”

See, most analyses of the DNC protests either hail them as cultural heroes or unamerican criminals. This article definitely paints them in a less-than-glowing light, but at least it is thought-provoking. You may disagree with it, but you can't simply dismiss it with a snarky comment like most partisan commentary. Personally, I think that protest-culture is essential to the health of any society, yet damn, most of those motherfuckers are annoying and just as close-minded as the people they condescendingly condemn. And I've been one of them.

In short, we need more conservative voices at this level. Culture11 is coming at a good time, the market is dying for smart right-of-center voices. We'll see how it develops, but I'm optimistic. Give it a read, it will probably piss you off a little, but whoever said that's a bad thing?

Oh, for the love of God...

Commemorating the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Ted Hearne has just released his acclaimed Katrina Ballads as a digital download on New Amsterdam Records.

I highly recommend it.

It is one of those rare pieces that manages to be dense and ornate, while being accessible to a large audience; sharply political, while avoiding a condescending, preachy tone. I've seen it live and it's an experience. All of my friends playing in it spoke of how challenging it was to perform, but it didn't seem much of an effort - partly because they're great players, but also because the music lends itself to a casual style of virtuosity. The music is deep and difficult, but unlike much modern music, the physical and interpretive challenges it poses are so linear and melodic in nature that the music translates very well to the audience. It helps that much of it has a groove behind it, likely inspired by both minimalism and rock/pop. It's a perfect project for New Amsterdam, who caters to the younger generation of devotees to music that is both series and accessible. And plus, it's got Nathan Koci playing electric fucking horn. How can you beat that??

You can listen to the whole thing streaming on the New Am site. Also, here's a cool article in The Times-Picayune about it. Seriously, give it a listen. You will not be disappointed. And 10 bucks for the whole 70 minute piece? Can't beat it.

Such a ballsy pick. And so political. Even I would rather blog about Palin than about Obama's speech last night.

Let's get this out of the way though:

She's hot.

Sorry.

Like serious hot librarian MILF hot.



I can't think of a woman in politics since, well um, ever who has given me near-impure thoughts. She also has a good deal of charisma and vitality, which McCain sorely lacks.

Now to the cynicism (oh the sweet cynicism...). It is so obviously a ploy to grab the Hillary-devoted idiots who have been threatening to vote for McCain. Many of them are women who were so insanely devoted to the idea of a woman president that they would spite-vote for McCain just to punish Obama for, ya know, having the audacity to beat Hillary fair-and-square. McCain is running from the Rove playbook 100% now. He's hitting Obama at his strengths, promising a historic ticket of his own. The messed-up thing is that this now will be a historic race no matter the outcome. The first senator president since Nixon. The first administration with either an African-American or a woman in the top office. It's hard not to be excited about that, even if it is such a blatant ploy.

Palin is also very young and inexperienced - she was not picked for her achievements - so if the Obama camp is smart they now have a golden defense for the Obama inexperience argument. They should be producing an ad right now that brings this to light.

Tracks by Silver Jews, Sam Cooke, Dolly Parton, Billy Holliday, Loudon Wainwright, and um... Ted Nugent.

Get 'em while they're hot!

-via Bargainist

Awwwww shit.

I'll get into the speech a bit more tomorrow, but I've been browsing the comments of CNN.com and Foxnews.com and there are a surprising amount of self-described conservatives and Republicans who were moved by the speech, many enough to promise Obama their vote.

One of my favorite "Obamacons", Andrew Sullivan, puts it well:

I'd like to support a conservative not beholden to the religious right, not indifferent to fiscal degeneracy, respectful of the constitution, hostile to torture, tough with foreign enemies but eager for new and old allies, and intent on making government smaller and leaner and more effective. Such a conservative is not available, and unless the GOP is reformed root and branch by a new generation, there won't be one available for a long while.

I got home last night just in time to catch the speech. Watched by more than 38 million people, it was definitely a speech to remember. It wasn't as intimate and honest as his race speech, it wasn't as optimistic and inspiring as his 2004 speech, but it got the job done. Peeps needed specifics, he gave them plenty - although some of it sounded a bit, shall we say, lofty (oil independence in 10 years? C'mon). He responded to McCain's bashing pretty well; I liked his line about the lives celebrities lead vs. his own, a classy response. But this is not to say that he didn't get his hands dirty. He gave the press several soundbites to work with.

Here are a few of the most effective in my opinion:

John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a ten percent chance on change.

Snayap!

We are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On November 4th, we must stand up and say: "Eight is enough."

Aw damn!

Now, I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know.

You go girl! I uh, mean, boy.


He did a good job of equating McCain with Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners" quote, only briefly mentioning that an adviser said it, and then proceeding as if the words had come directly from McCain's mouth. A Republican tactic but hey, they started it.

My favorite line of the night was this Clintonesque quip:

In this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us - that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.

This wasn't an inherently risky speech - which is why it won't exactly go down in history as one of his best - but you don't save your surprises for the convention. The speech had to be smooth, confident, and tasteful for the swing-voters who suddenly found Obama on all of their TV channels one night. It was a good closing to a convention that started out mediocre and ended with a bang (literally, you see those fireworks? damn.). I'm pretty sure Obama is going to win the election. Obama/Biden is a smart, charismatic ticket. They are confident and rather clear on where they stand. These are all things that the Gore/Lieberman (!) and Kerry/Edwards tickets sorely lacked.

Let's hope they win anyway, or this is one stupid fucking country.

Ummmm... is he being sarcastic? Is he being sincere?? I mean, I consider myself a master of irony and sarcasm, but McCain is fucking with my brain right now.

Seriously dude, what the fuck?

Well it definitely seems to be getting better doesn't it? It had its ups and downs (ouch to be that lady who followed President Clinton!), but the headliners were pretty effective. Of course to the general population they were only as effective as the mainstream media will allow them to be through soundbites.

Harry Reid was as usual, sharp and biting but filtered through his soft-spoken manner. If only we could mix his message with Kucinich's delivery...




As everyone - except the mainstream media - has already noted, Kerry was on top of his game, holy crap. He spoke with more life and fervor than I had ever seen him do. I kept thinking, much like with Gore circa 2003-ish: Where the fuck was this passion when he was running for fucking president? Damn!




Biden was charismatic and smooth. He speaks in a casual manner that will hopefully balance out the ticket with those who are daunted by Obama's gravitas. It seems that the Democrats are making this the charisma ticket: two very likable men with a flair for public speaking. This wasn't Biden's best speech ever, but it got the job done I think:




Unsurprisingly though, it was Clinton who stole the show. Easily the most effective speech so far, historic actually. The line that will make history:

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

It's a brilliant quote - quintessential Clinton wordplay - that should appeal not only to anti-war liberals, but also to traditional conservative and libertarian isolationists. True, he didn't exactly govern with that principle 100%, but he is free to make the statement simply by comparison to the current Bush's brazen interventionism. Sorry to say that Bill Clinton completely outshone Hillary Clinton - he will never admit it, Obama will never admit it - but it's true. Who knows how effective it will be - again mangled through the media filter - but it was inspiring nonetheless. The only person I could see rivaling the speech will be Obama in his acceptance speech tonight, which makes for a nice political narrative.

Here is Clinton's speech:



PS. Watch around 1:28 where Bill actually starts getting pissed at the audience. Not surprising I guess, I kinda wanted to give those corny sign-waving Democrats a collective slap across the convention floor...

Federal authorities say they have arrested a blogger suspected of streaming songs from Guns N’ Roses unreleased album, “Chinese Democracy,” on his Web site.
FBI agents arrested 27-year-old Kevin Cogill on Wednesday morning on suspicion of violating federal copyright laws. Federal authorities say Cogill posted nine unreleased Guns N’ Roses songs on his Web site in June.

Nice to see we're using our federal power where we most need it, to stop reckless bloggers from uploading new music from dated 90s metal bands. Good job guys.

A helpful illustration:



There. All clear now?

Now that I've got all my bitching out of the way (hopefully!), I'll focus on what was productive.

Kennedy had a nice opening:




I thought Hillary's speech did what it had to do. It seemed to lack passion, but I don't find her the most passionate speaker. But hopefully she'll smackdown the batshit crazy Dems who are actually considering voting for McCain.
This was a nice point:

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

But I was pretty blown away by Michelle Obama's speech. I never realized what a great passionate public speaker she is, actually rivaling her husband. She brought a sense of heart to the convention - which it sorely needed - and livened it up, not just with her charisma but with her beautiful words. I'll admit it was a little sappy at times, but I was kind of a sucker for it, especially when she would talk about her mom and they would show her mom looking proudly from the audience. I think that made a lot of people cry. Funny that it got more criticism than Hillary's speech, but I think that it was mainly from analysts who by the nature of their profession do not allow themselves to be emotionally swayed. Hillary's was definitely more functional, but Michelle's more affective in my opinion.



PS. Props to PoliticsTV for posting all of these videos.

Here's that creepy prayer from last night's Democratic Convention:



Here's the text:

"Father God,

This week, as the world looks on, help the leaders in this room create a civil dialogue about our future.

We need you, God, as individuals and also as a nation.

We need you to protect us from our enemies, but also from ourselves, because we are easily tempted toward apathy.

Give us a passion to advance opportunities for the least of these, for widows and orphans, for single moms and children whose fathers have left.

Give us the eyes to see them, and the ears to hear them, and hands willing to serve them.

Help us serve people, not just causes. And stand up to specific injustices rather than vague notions.

Give those in this room who have power, along with those who will meet next week, the courage to work together to finally provide health care to those who don’t have any, and a living wage so families can thrive rather than struggle.

Hep us figure out how to pay teachers what they deserve and give children an equal opportunity to get a college education.

Help us figure out the balance between economic opportunity and corporate gluttony.

We have tried to solve these problems ourselves but they are still there. We need your help.

Father, will you restore our moral standing in the world.

A lot of people don’t like us but that’s because they don’t know the heart of the average American.

Will you give us favor and forgiveness, along with our allies around the world.

Help us be an example of humility and strength once again.

Lastly, father, unify us.

Even in our diversity help us see how much we have in common.

And unify us not just in our ideas and in our sentiments—but in our actions, as we look around and figure out something we can do to help create an America even greater than the one we have come to cherish.

God we know that you are good.

Thank you for blessing us in so many ways as Americans.

I make these requests in the name of your son, Jesus, who gave his own life against the forces of injustice.

Let Him be our example.

Amen."

Yeah, it's tame. But a political convention supposedly bringing many different types of people together is also really not the place for it. It's exclusionary and kind of offensive.

For the last, oh, 6 months or so, my BlackBerry has been in the most pathetic of states. I've gradually lost control of the "pearl", which for my phone is the central navigation tool. It started getting really bad around the time the warranty on my phone expired (how funny!), so I've been stuck with this increasingly dysfunctional phone, making my life a living hell, as my iPhone jerk friends multi-touch to their heart's content. It's kinda like being stuck in traffic and watching people zip by in the carpool lane, in fact I had been developing some serious "phone rage" of late, which I'd offer as a serious competitor of road rage.

I tend to divide people into two camps based on a fictional scenario I invented:

You are walking down a path and you encounter an obstacle - let's say a chair. Do you climb over the chair or do you move the chair out of your path before proceeding?

Think about it.

I am the type of person who would climb over the chair and proceed down the path without a second thought.

As my BlackBerry steadily degraded in quality, I simply developed a series of workarounds. Luckily my phone doesn't rely wholly on the pearl, it just makes you jump through a hundred fucking hoops to get anything done without it. After each successive loss of functionality I would cringe and then figure out a sufficiently annoying way to, for example, look at the picture I just took, which would take about 10 times the length of time as before.

Eventually though, especially in the last couple weeks, almost every function was lost, as I lost pretty much all control of the pearl - basically allowing me to make calls and answer. I'm paying 20 bucks a month data! I needs muh google maps and shit!

My partner in crime also owns the same model of BlackBerry as I, but hers just simply didn't turn on one day, so she shunned the information age completely and bought an old Samsung (which she loves). For months her old BB sat on her dresser, a relic of a more complex time.

So last night I sat in bed, subjecting her to another one of my "my BB sucks - the world is out to get me" talks. She casually offerred up this suggestion: "why don't you try replacing your pearl with my old one".

It was like that scene from Coffee and Cigarettes with Jack and Meg White. I was like: "No... Um, well maybe actually... Yeah, that just might do it. Hell yeah!!"

It totally worked. I'm mobile blogging again on my vintage BlackBerry (which may or may not be good news for you Dear Reader...). Yay! Its alive!

See, Melly's not the type to casually climb over that chair in the path. Some chair appears in her path, girl is gonna pull out a bazooka and OBLITERATE that shit.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Um, I just flipped on the end of the convention and caught the tail end, just enough to catch the PRAYER. WTF?? Hello, separation of church and state? Some douche named Don Miller asking "our father" "in the name of Jesus Christ" to bless the Democratic Party or some shit? Come on guys. Quit sucking up to the evangelicals. It just looks fake and pisses off the rest of us who prefer our politics and religion as far apart as possible.

Please God make it stop:



Can't. Take. Self-righteous. Celebrities. Any. More.

Seriously. This corny Hallmark bullshit isn't going to change anyone's mind. On the contrary, I think it turns the people on the fence against Obama. The tone is so smug, so condescending, so sappily idealistic. As Wired Listening Post notes, it's like a 'We Are the World' for the 2000s. No more. All done.

Thanks.

Ok. I'm sorry. Disregard that last post. Immediately after posting MSNBC's attempt at rockin' my world with their awesome headlines I headed over to CNN and came across the grandaddy of them all:

Cheerleader skirts too tiny for school

Um... There is NO WAY a straight guy can see that link and NOT click.

Wow, MSNBC.com Video is really taking a crack at overshadowing my CNN Headline of the Day series.

Check out these gems:

Turtle born with 2 heads, 6 legs

Fake Rockefeller fuzzy on past

Wiener dogs race

Two-headed turtle stolen (unrelated to other 2-headed turtle story)

Georgia Aquarium houses giant manta ray

Barbie fishing pole hooks a winner

Sizzling summer dishes

Stunning weight-loss secrets

Secrets of a makeup master


To be fair, there are a couple serious headlines. Um, here's an example:

Mo’ houses, mo’ problems for McCain


Cool.

Ugh... please, can we have no more of these celebrity Obama videos? I really have no idea who these are aimed at, aside from the celebrities themselves. And this one isn't even a halfway decent song, at least the Yes, We Can song was kinda unique. There is just something so sickening to me about smug, self-assured celebrities smiling and nodding at me in black and white - it really makes me want to hide back into my non-voting anarchist hole again. Can they honestly think that swing voters have any interest in seeing a bunch of Gap ad-ass motherfuckers condescendingly inviting viewers to join them in the exalted enlightenment of the Obama team? It's bullshit, and it's the kinda bullshit that plays right into this argument:

I was on Fandango looking up movie times and I came across a film whose trailer I wished to watch. I clicked on the 'Watch Trailer' link and prepared to watch. I then was subjected to an ad to watch before my trailer, of another trailer. Ummm... a trailer is an ad. I just watched an ad for an ad.

I've been playing a new game I just invented. You can play too!

Here are the instructions:

Go to Pitchfork Media

Look at the list of reviews

Without knowing anything about the specific album, try and guess whether each album got a high or low rating.

It's remarkably fun and I'm doing pretty well.

See, Pitchfork is the epitome of the new subjective style of criticism. All reviews are based solely on that reviewers personal reaction to the album. The article is then written in a lively, florid manner in support of that utterly subjective reaction. After reading enough of these you can see the trend. Grittily-produced rap and indie rock = high rating. Grittily-produced rap that the mainstream critical press has been praising recently = low rating. Well-produced complex music, such as modern classical, jazz re-issues, dense rock = low ratings, but not low enough to be dismissive. Re-issues of obscure 70s and 80s rock = stellar reviews.

I also like guessing the rating based on the name of the band (if I'm completely unfamiliar with them). The more ironic, the better the rating.

Play along at home!

Fuck this bitch.

For some reason addiction has been a reading theme of mine in recent days. I am lucky to not have an addictive personality. It doesn't really run in my family and I've never felt too much of the intense need for a substance/behavior. I often joke with myself that I don't have the commitment for addiction. If there is one thing that runs in my family it is a commitment to constantly-shifting passions and interests. The men in my family tend to delve intensely into certain hobbies/subjects/ideas for a couple months at a time and then discard them for new ones (anyone who has read this blog for a significant amount of time will recognize this in me).

I often try to feed productive addictions though. Horn is a notoriously difficult addiction for me to sustain. Composing is catching on surprisingly well, but we'll see how long that lasts. I like the feeling of desperation and loss that comes when I haven't been creative for a time. The pain of fruitful withdrawals can be productive.

Anyway, here are a few perspectives on addiction I've come across in recent days:

From one of my favorite reads, Crispin Sartwell's site, comes an intensely personal description of addiction:

Hating inanimate objects seems entirely senseless. Mere things have no intentions, make no decisions, commit no crimes. They aren't guilty of anything. Why or how would you hate elements of the periodic table, clouds, liquids, rocks?

Nevertheless, far more than I hate any person, I hate alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, methamphetamine, heroin. These stuffs or substances, these chemicals and vegetables and the fumes they emit when immolated, take away everything I have and everyone I love, every time. They are mindless, worthless, without value. They are empty. Meaningless. But they are the theme of my life. I came here to think, to study, to write. I came here to make love, to make babies, raise children, make a home, a garden, find some quiet joy. And my life has been dedicated to alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and annihilation.

Addiction, I tell you, isn't an epic tale of redemption, material for your amazing memoir and appearance on Oprah. It isn't a James Dean movie, a Hemingway story, or a Jimi Hendrix/Kurt Cobain song of suffering, hyper-intense genius. It's dying by choking on your own vomit. It's common as excrement and as profound: reeking, valueless, purposeless, pointless, meaningless.

There's no little essence of wisdom suspended in the whiskey, no sparkling geode crystals inside the rock, no signal in the smoke. There just is nothing there.

Read on. It gets quite personal and very devastating.

A more light-hearted take from Caveh Zahedi:



And a completely ridiculous take by the awesomely-named Kim Komando on so-called Digital Drugs:

We all know that music can alter your mood. Sad songs can make you cry. Upbeat songs may give you an energy boost. But can music create the same effects as illegal drugs?

This seems like a ridiculous question. But websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.

All your child needs is a music player and headphones.

Understanding Binaural Beats

There are different slang terms for digital drugs. They're often called "idozers" or "idosers." All rely on the concept of binaural beats.

It is incorrect to call binaural beats music. They're really ambient sounds designed to affect your brain waves.

For binaural beats to work, you must use headphones. Different sounds are played in each ear. The sounds combine in your brain to create a new frequency. This frequency corresponds to brain wave frequencies.

There are different brain wave frequencies. These frequencies are related to different states like relaxation and alertness.

Digital drugs supposedly synchronize your brain waves with the sound. Hence, they allegedly alter your mental state.

It would be really annoying if it weren't so hilarious.

It's 3:30 AM. Why not post one of my new favorite songs?

I will be performing excerpts from my Post-Christian Nihilist Pop Musical, The Little Death, on the East River Music Project this Saturday. Doors open at 2:30pm and I am opening, best of all it's free! It is a showcase for New Amsterdam Records, that awesome new label you've all been hearing so much about. It should be an awesome show - it is the debut of my Lil Death Band, featuring Mellissa Hughes, Caleb Burhans, James Moore and Pete Wise, four of my favorite people on the planet. I am sharing the bill with some awesome acts as well: itsnotyouitsme, Timberbrit, Mark Dancigers, and Alex Sopp.

For the occasion I am putting up a few new songs from The Little Death on my Myspace, as well as on my New Amsterdam page:

OMG Suite - An epic nihilist pop anthem

I Like Stuff - A gun-to-the-temple smile-fest from start to finish

He Touched Me (new version) - A hyper-sexualized cover of a gospel favorite

All of these songs feature soprano Mellissa Hughes, an amazing singer and my main collaborator on the musical.

I am also interviewed in the latest New Amsterdam Podcast, give it a listen to hear me speak with authority on subjects such as sexual undercurrents in Christian music and the use of Auto-Tune as a method of clearing ones soul free of sin.

Hope to see you on Saturday!

Wow, this is pretty essential for anyone who owns a laptop period.

Hey, so you might be thinking that I gave up on my Happy Week quest, but unfortunately I had some interference, by my body. Yeah, I had to go back to the hospital for another transfusion (I got my transfuse on!). Waa waaaa. Whatever, it was fine. Annoying and lame of course, but it's done. I feel better, stronger. Not exactly ready to lift the world stronger, but not exactly standing up and walking across the room makes my heart pound either. So that's good.

One of the pleasant surprises was that the ER has TVs now, for each individual bed! Part of what made my last trip suck so much was that an entire room full of ailing people, left only to stare at the ceiling, will generally act like crazy assholes. I mean, I still had my share of shrieking old ladies and whimpering grown men, but add Monday Night RAW and Murder, She Wrote into the equation and the cacophony drops tenfold. Also, Mell was with me pretty much the whole time so that made it infinitely better. It really helps having another person there, especially when I'm weak from the HHT - it can kind of cloud my head. The last time I went I described my condition as "Severe Anemia", and spent hours in the waiting room. We got there on Monday evening and the place was more packed than I have ever seen it. I had Mell fill out my description and she wrote: "Rare blood disorder, requires immediate transfusion". We got in there in about 20 minutes. Awesome.

The rest of the stay was as usual: tedious, frustrating, boring, lotsa pokes by the needle, lotsa doctors, lotsa Cartoon Network. I spent a good deal of it writing Sibelius parts for The Little Death, feeling a little like J Dilla. They gave me one unit of blood on Tuesday, which made be feel better. My blood count was consistently higher than it felt, which was odd. It dipped down to an 8.5 at it's lowest point, which is by no means good, but not as bad as it has been (I've been down to a 4.5 before!). When I left the hospital it had come up to a 9.9 and I felt better, but still pretty weak and loopy. I'm on a heavy red meat diet (could be worse!) for the next week or so while I try to pull it up further. Normal for me is around 12. 13 is great.

Anyway, I'm spending most of my time at home, resting up for a crazy next week. This is giving me a good chance to do some mastering of some of my tracks, so I'm planning on releasing a few new songs from The Little Death, in advance of my Saturday show at The East River Music Project, on Monday so keep an eye out!

An interesting Adbusters article on hipsters, my most reviled of the subcultures:

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over.

It's a decent article, especially for Adbusters, who I believe can be way annoying and pretentious themselves. (Must. Stay. Positive!) But he makes a lot of good points about this strangest of trends. My favorite line from the article is "The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks." Mafoo likey.

Alex Payne distinguishes the hipster from nihilism:

What distinguishes hipsters for me is that they believe in nothing, but unconsciously so. It's not nihilism, because nihilism is well-considered position. Hipsters are, to my mind, the first utterly apolitical, a-philosolphical subculture of the postwar era.

Even the slacker generation believed in, well, slacking: they valued an opposition to the competitive mindset of the preceding generation. That may be a shallow thing to value, but it provides the groundwork for some sort of political/cultural stance. Hipsters have no such political or philosophical foundation. I'd go on to argue that they lack even the cultural foundation to contribute meaningfully to the arts.

I'd slightly differ in that many of them show a dabbling interest in politics, but mainly as a tool to remain competitive in social situations, much like staying current with underground indie rock bands, artists, etc that may or may not have any redeeming cultural value. Hopefully the trend is dying out. It seems about time. Unlike Adbusters I don't believe that it is the end of the world that hipsters are around (Adbusters actually does believe it is the end of the world, much like they believe eating fast food is and shopping is). They're just taking a long time to go away...

Fuck yeah. This is what I'm talking about. I really think that the trend of arranging classic 'unplayable' works like this (and Revolution 9 :) ) are part of the new paradigm of commonplace interactivity. 10-15 years ago, when our entertainment was still primarily based on consumption, we were perfectly happy to accept a recorded piece such as this was simply unplayable, just as we accepted that we couldn't interact with our TV and that our songs were locked onto a CD. As the web matured and as users gained significant power over their entertainment, we've started to see people asserting control over things they never dared to before. Thus, the explosion in sampling, mashups (for what they're worth), audio and video remixing. Even those annoying YouTube videos that have, like, footage from Dragonball Z with a song by Jack Johnson over it is still an expression of freedom and increased control. And in fact, the great thing about YouTube is that it allows someone with an interesting idea to have that idea spread virally between millions of people in a matter of days.

It's unsurprising then that artists would want to take the experience of such 'unplayable' pieces into their own hands. To some extent it's the same reason the new Ghostbusters video game is coming out. We always dreamed of taking part in the experience, but never imagined it to be a reality. I hope to see more interesting projects along these lines. Some of them are better than others, some feel more futile than others, but overall they are expressions of joy. The ones that pride themselves on audacity tend to be the ones that miss this mark, the projects that seem more like marketing decisions than artistic ones. But that's enough about that (I'm staying positive this week!). Anyway, the urge for interactivity is a creative one, even if it means the dissection, indeed the destruction of the piece, in it's reconstruction. It can never replace the piece or top the piece, and should never aspire to. I love good covers - I plan on releasing a Covers album after I finish The Little Death - so I've been thinking a lot about what a good cover is and does. A good cover should exist in its own right as a new and unique piece of music, but it should also make you appreciate the original ever more. Even the seemingly destructive, parodical covers by The Dead Kennedys, of songs such as I Fought The Law and Viva Las Vegas, still make me want to listen to the originals.

A sweet story by Justin Davidson, who wrote up AWS's performance of my Revolution 9 arrangement at The Kitchen, about his experience taking his son to the various concert he sees and reviews.

He mentions the performance:

So, for the past year, Milo has become my semi-regular escort. Before each outing he worries that he will be the only child in attendance, and sometimes he is. He has heard the Berlin Philharmonic open the Carnegie Hall season with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel make his electrifying New York debut with Beethoven’s Fifth; and tenor Juan Diego Flórez nail his nine high C’s in the Met’s new production of La fille du régiment. He suffered through an amateurish evening of Renaissance dance music in a church, and was baffled by a live orchestration of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” by the group Alarm Will Sound. He loved South Pacific enough that he could sing most of it from memory after one performance. He will wait a year or two for the full-throated tragedies of love and fate. He has heard me remark how much his beloved J.R.R. Tolkien absorbed from Wagner’s four-opera excursion into Norse mythology, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and he’s expressed interest in seeing it. Not yet, I think. In the meantime, the Met has plenty to offer a 10-year-old: the creepy, saccharine horrors of Hansel and Gretel, the over-the-top wizardry of Julie Taymor’s Magic Flute, and the antics in The Barber of Seville. Whether all this stimulation will coalesce into affection or merge in an undifferentiated memory of sitting silently among rows of old people in red velvet chairs, I have no idea.

To be honest I would have been baffled at that age as well. In fact I'm baffled by it now.

Read the whole article though. It's a cool description of a childhood saturated with exposure to many varieties of music. I often wish I had this type of upbringing. Had I grown up with an innate interest in cars I would have been in hog heaven, as I'm sure my brother was, who eventually joined the family business. But I was lucky enough to have parents that encouraged my fledgling interest at a young(ish) age, even though they had no experience with the performing arts. So while it may have been unexpected for me to ask my parents to take me to the ballet (unspeakable to my friends!) they totally obliged me. I often think about the education I would give my child, though. My kid'll be programming synths at 8 years old!

Wow, after that mention in my last post about the "elusive Ponyo trailer" I did a little more sleuthing and I finally found it! Here it is, in Japanese, watch it before Studio Ghibli takes it down for unknown reasons again: