The 52nd Revolution

Hello.  Still here.

Vote. Or Not.

I have gotten into this issue before, and I probably will again.  I don't necessarily stand by the old rant point-by-point, but it's close enough to where I am now.

There is an argument for not voting, and it's not a specious argument.  It is, however, naive and wrong.  "Whenever we choose to take part in a collective enterprise of any kind, we necessarily grant that enterprise legitimacy."  Well, bucko, vote or not, you are an accessory in Obama's drone murders.  If you pay rent, buy food, watch TV, buy a record, drive a car, go to the doctor, have a job, buy ANYTHING, you are complicit.  You don't get the luxury of sitting back and saying "not my fault . . . didn't vote for the guy" (though I do appreciate the fine distinction made here, that a vote for ANY candidate is an affirmation of a system which manufactures these atrocities).  You don't legitimize the system by voting; electoral voting is one of the least important functions of our capitalist system. You legitimize the system the first time a dollar bill passes from your hand to another hand.  You legitimize it by breathing American air.  You legitimize it by being here.  The only way you escape blame is by escaping America (and arguably not even then).  We are all complicit.  It's the new old model of accountability, by way of Martin Luther and original sin: we are all accountable.  Get over it.

Accountability is nothing more than a bourgeois buzzword, gummed tonelessly by mealy-mouthed middle managers.  Accountability is a scene in an Ayn Rand children's puppet show.  Accountability is monotheistic in its aspect, and reactive in its exercise. Automatically suspect anyone who starts babbling on about accountability, from any point of view.

Getting to the core of a system, understanding how a system works, and determining the good of a system has little to do with accountability.  Any real analysis will take an accounting of a system (making evaluations on who/what is responsible for various factors/effects/outcomes), but judgement is a secondary order of action, and a reactive one at that.

*          *          *          *          *

So, assuming you find change valuable, what do you do to change?

I'm not going to be a wealth of wisdom on that point, not tonight. Obviously, voting isn't going to change anything in any real sense, but neither is not voting, so you can throw that argument out the window.  I have no interest in busting chops on people who refuse to vote, since voting is such a small, small part in improving things.  I will tell you, however, why I will vote tomorrow.

I will vote Barack Obama for President of the United States.  I do so (as Charles Pierce said) "without enthusiasm, and without a sliver of doubt in my mind".  The primary reason: we need to get this conservative cultural bullshit off the table once and for all.  We need to stop fussing over public ideology so we can get to work on what is really creating suffering across the entire world: money, and those that hold it.

I've said before that the greatest triumph of the right wing in the US is how they have pulled the entire dialogue into their camp.  Not only have they managed to move the middle so far right that people actually consider a center-right pro-business Democrat a left-winger (yes, for those of you keeping score at home, that means Obama), but they also have managed to successfully engage the entire country in a game of Pin the Tail on the Ideology.  We are so busy talking about human rights in terms of access to marriage that we forget about human rights at a more basic level, or even (god forbid!) how our actions affect fundamental human rights outside our national borders.  We are so busy arguing over so many things that should be fait accompli by now that the real issues are obscured.

The real brain trust behind the right doesn't give a shit about abortion.  They don't give a damn about gay marriage, funding Planned Parenthood, the ten commandments in the schools, where mosques get built, or anything like that.  They don't care about the national debt, because when the time comes, that debt just means they'll be able to buy America for pennies on the worthless dollar.  They don't even care about welfare, because any real politician knows that a few crumbs off the tables of the rich keep the poor from congregating in the streets with rifles in their hands.  What the right really wants is for vast portions of the country to be arguing about these cultural issues and screaming about getting like-minded citizens into voting booths.  They want citizens to ignore the fact that their Republican culture warrior heroes will gut the very social institutions that they depend on, creating a dependence on the "private" sector that they find somehow tolerable because it isn't a "government handout".  They want millions of mindless "rebels" heading into the arms of so-called "Libertarians" babbling about no wars and open access to drugs, all the while smashing, in the name of FREEDOM, all the levees erected against corporate control.  They want helpless leftists scrambling to nominate "electable" Democrats who share the pro-corporate agenda of the right just so they aren't the "losers" in the culture wars.  I've got news for y'all: in the culture wars, like many more conventional wars, there are no real winners.

Most of all, after setting the table so that there is no real way to change the system by voting, they want you to believe (and feel proud!) that you've done what you can to change things when you walk out of the polls with a little red, white, and blue "I voted!" sticker.  If, indeed, you believe in the "bloodless revolution" of American democracy, if you believe that by voting you really are participating in change, then perhaps you do need to step away from the lever.

For the rest of us, voting is one small means to an end.  You need to get a school board that won't wipe Darwin from the textbooks.  You need to get state legislators who won't gut union rights, who won't approve hostile takeovers of elected municipal governments, who won't legislate the Christian version of sharia law.  We need to hammer anti-human public ideology into the same dark corners currently occupied by its brethren in the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi parties.  We need to do all this, and much more besides, just so we can file away our public silliness and start talking about the real core issues of repression.

I feel for those who say that voting isn't a real choice, because any choice we are given is a matter of degree, not a choice on the fundamental conduct of our lives.  I've got sympathy for the idea that voting validates a bad system, but again, we already do so much more to validate that system just by living here.  Ultimately,  I feel we need to keep voting so we can drag the national dialogue, kicking and screaming, back toward the center, one vote at a time.  And that may not be change, but at least it is starting to prepare the ground for change.

THEY HAVE FUCKING NAMES!

[UPDATE: This post has been edited for style (it was one hot mess when first posted).  The content remains essentially the same.  If you want to see the original version, it is up at notes toward everything, just so you know that the post still says the same thing, only it no longer runs in circles.]


The captions:

Leah-Lynn Plante

“Today is October 10th, 2012, and I am ready to go to prison,”announced 24-year-old Leah-Lynn Plante yesterday. By Thursday morning, the Portland activist was in custody and could remain incarcerated in a U.S. federal prison for 18 months, although she has not been charged with a crime.

Along with two others in the Pacific Northwest, Plante was remanded into federal custody for her refusal to provide a grand jury testimony regarding activists in the region. Matt Duran and Kteeo Olejnik were jailed in previous weeks for, like Plante, refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. All three are now being held in U.S. federal prison, not because they are being punished for crime, but, as the National Lawyers Guild’s executive director Heidi Boghosian told me earlier this year, “to coerce cooperation.”  -- Natasha Lennard, SALON

Pussy Riot

This is a member of Pussy Riot.  You already knew that because that's how western controlled media works.

Wake up.

Another bullshit meme.

• This sets a false opposition between Leah-Lynn Plante and Pussy Riot (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich).  Defenders will point to this as a critique of mainstream media, and it is clearly intended as such; however, the two terms "Leah-Lynn Plante" and "Pussy Riot" are definitively placed in opposition to each other.  Whoever put this together establishes a false dialectic with "Plante" and "Pussy Riot" at the poles: why are these two terms opposed?  They are both symbols of oppression . . . more than mere symbols, they are both locations of oppression.  The explicit charge here is that the term "Plante" designates an authentic location of oppression, while the term "Pussy Riot" designates a false (media manufactured) location of oppression.  This is simply not true: both terms are very real locations of oppression; and as such, they have no business being opposed to each other.
• So we already know all about Pussy Riot "because that's how the western controlled media works" . . . oh, really?  Then what are their names?  THEY HAVE FUCKING NAMES! Nadezhda Tolokonnikova!  Maria Alyokhina!  Yekaterina Samutsevich!  Use the names!  The person who put this meme together wants to critique "western controlled media" for creating a false symbol of oppression.  But in the process of "critiquing" the media this person makes the same mistake that he/she indicts the media for making: by dislocating the oppression of the term "Pussy Riot", a real location of oppression is converted into an empty and compromised symbol.  As this meme self-realizes (by becoming more popular on tumblr., facebook, etc.) it becomes part of the master narrative, thereby adding yet another reterratorialized symbol into the lexicon.
• At a certain point, "critique" of "western controlled media" becomes a reterritorializing mechanism when it is deals in such empty symbols.  These symbols become slotted into master narrative, and get dealt with in ways that serve that narrative, such as dialectical/polar oppositions, the privileging of the ideological over the specific, the transcendent over the immanent, etc.  Critique is not useful when it reinforces the ideological imperatives of the controlling narrative; and, again, by opposing two locations of legitimate oppression, this meme not only trivializes genuine locations of oppression, but it supports a master narrative by dislocating true critique.
• Any critique of specific media revolves around the unreliability of that media. An accusation of unreliability assumes that there is such a thing as reliable media.  "Reliability" in its turn assumes assumes the receiver or audience (or "consumer", in the truest sense of the word) of media is passive, and therefore dependent on the media to be reliable.  This is a false hope.  An accurate critique of media starts from the assumption that ALL media is unreliable; a true critique will mark an entry point into the media's ideology as well as how that ideology functions in the real world (such as it is).
• The Leah-Lynn Plante caption is from SALON.  How the HELL is that not mainstream media?  This whole piece of shit collapses under its own contradiction even before we get to any of these other objections!
• And anyway, exactly what is mainstream media anymore?  It's hard to focus on locations like network television, major western news outlets, etc., as mainstream when facebook is more popular and ubiquitous than any of them.  Media has become atomized to the point that "mainstream" has very little meaning in any general sense: one only has to look at Fox News's indictment of "lamestream media" to see that.
• On top of everything else, it is ridiculous and petty to try to establish one level of suffering by opposing it to another . . . yet another case of internet infantilism.  

Western media did indeed create "Pussy Riot" in the sense it functions above.  It did violence to the real legacy, the real location of oppression that is Pussy Riot.  This meme does exactly the same thing.  It is naive, stupid, and ridiculous.

The western media has also, through its criminal silences, done violence to the ongoing legacy of Leah-Lynn Plante.  This meme also does violence to Plante by reducing her to a symbol in a base dialectic of authenticity, by turning her into "Plante" and paralleling the dislocated symbol "Plante" to the dislocated symbol "Pussy Riot".

In the process, both Leah-Lynn Plante and Pussy Riot (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich) are demoted from true locations of oppression to mere symbols of exchange.  In other words, BOTH are dehumanized.

Untitled

all those pretty little pictures
so . . . wrought
these little things
            portraits of
            nothing, insignificance

Be not a star that burns
  -- heat and corruption
sweat and dank
            the small things are not easy

Gubbey!

So, I'm old enough that 7"s were the way you bought your music, or at least if you were an AM radio kid that's how you did it.  Now, of course, 7"s are a little more esoteric.  This little nugget is the second edition of Gubbey Records' split series: the series places Gubbey chief Dave Rucinski's Furlong on Side A, with a special guest on Side B.  The first edition featured dark troubadour Anderson on Side B (with a solo version of Sean Garrison's "White Flag") along with Furlong's "Egg McMan" on Side A (also including a very nice cover of Leadbelly's "They Hung Him on the Cross" as a special bonus).  The latest edition takes an altogether different tack, pairing Furlong with Louisville improv/NRG jazz monsters Sick City Four.

Furlong rips into the proceedings with "Sex Bunker", a stoner metal sprint that plays a bit like a Saint Vitus LP on 45 rpm.  There's only one thing to ask from this, really . . . ROCK! . . . and, rock it does.  But that's not all . . . the more you listen to Furlong in general, the more you notice the little things, and not just the little production-type details that make a "professional" sounding record: sure, Furlong stacks up the guitar tracks, but they stack up the ideas, too.  So, you get the stoner metal lunge at the core of "Sex Bunker", but you also  get the punk velocity, nods to shit as diverse as Edgar Winter, Spinal Tap, Seattle sludge, the Stooges, and a whole bunch more sunk so deep into ideological mix as to be mere texture.  Perusal of the bonus track on the digital download, "Hoarder Fire", leads you down the same road by a different path: Zeppelin by way of Stone Temple Pilots, with the nervy guitar(s) tweaked into a psychotic benzedrine edge instead of STP's insipid junkie redolence.  Taking Zeppelin bombast and translating it into punk rock is no simple task, and Furlong nails it here.

This is, no question, a tricky path to walk down.  The only thing worse than pastiche is rock pastiche.  But Furlong never falls into that hole: everything here serves the purpose, and that purpose is . . . ROCK.  Having said that, Rucinski does manage a lot of mileage out of a deceptively simple surface.  Three songs is an extremely limited sample size; but is he (as Dan Willems has implied) transforming into a punk rock Brian Wilson?

Side B roars to life with the bellowing growl of Dan Willems's baritone sax (and that's a low B-flat baritone to you, bitches!), with the horns and guitar falling behind into a menacing cord, and Bart going apeshit on drums underneath.  Starting out very much like early 90's Ken Vandermark-era Flying Luttenbachers NRG jazz, "Burundi Punch Clock" establishes its head and quickly falls off the table as horns, drums and guitar slide all over each other briefly, only to tumble even further into a brilliantly abstract Chris Willems guitar break.  While the "solos" stack up in a way that roughly approximates jazz, this is less about musicians taking their turn, and more about each adding another piece to the jigsaw puzzle, for each part is inextricably linked . . . and, in spite of the amazing playing throughout, "Burundi Punch Clock" is about the links.

Essentially, the band forms four poles, and "Burundi Punch Clock" writhes in between.  Bart Galloway (drums) and Chris Willems (guitar) are the staccato jab, throwing accents and pulses all over the place (somewhat ironic, considering the traditional rhythmic role of both instruments in jazz).  While not specifically melodic (though very close), Bart's percussion lines alternate between small masterpieces of phrasing and spiky contrapuntal texture.  Falling into a dialogue with Bart's drums, Chris ups the ante by continually frustrating any expectations of melody and rhythm: you will always find Chris's guitar where you don't expect it, and when you're there with him, he hits you jaw dropping fragment and is gone again.

That leaves Dan Willems and Heather Floyd to define the other two poles.  Dan's baritone supplies the main riff of the head, as well as a lot of texture (not to mention a lot of the character of the song, given the singular sound of the baritone).  Dan's parts on this cut have a familiar "out" jazz sound to them (and he's as good on his horn as just about anybody you care to name), but his lines are pulled apart by the other polarities in play, making them more abstract and richer for their incompleteness/abstraction.  Heather, on the other hand, cuts across and through everything with her trumpet like a dry laser: the economy of her line organizes the chaos around her like metal shavings around a magnet.  Quite often, through the force of her playing, it is Heather who organizes/defines the Sick City Four.  Except, of course, when she chooses not to.

Antithetical to the ordered unfolding of jazz improv as well as to the fire-and-reload nature of most other free improv, "Burundi Punch Clock" is a small masterpiece of interlocked improvised parts that form a dramatic whole.  And the Sick City Four managed to squeeze all that onto a 7" record (!); usually their pieces are dramatically longer.  BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: buy this Furlong/Sick City Four single, and you get not only a slice of Furlong stoner punk heaven, not only a roiling Sick City Four miniature demon, not only a free download for a head-pounding Furlong bonus track, BUT ALSO SICK CITY FOUR'S "THE ANACREONTIC SONG" - AN INTERPRETATION OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER!  I'll leave that one to your imagination, at least until you buy the single.

NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?!

Furlong and the Sick City Four are joining Humongous for a double record release party at Astro Black/Quills Coffeehouse on Saturday, October 13th.  $3 gets you admission PLUS a free copy of the Furlong/Sick City Four 7"!

Beefheart Live on Television, 1980

A hard-to-find video of Captain Beefheart on a certain famous weekend comedy show that featured musical guests (no names, please, don't want to make it easy for the bots who seek and destroy this video every time it surfaces).  If they would just release it already, I wouldn't post it.

Or if it's out, someone let me know please.

Crappy video quality, riveting performance.

John Cage is 100

Today would have been John Cage's 100th birthday.  He is, to my mind, one of the two most important American composers of "serious" music (what we call "classical" music to differentiate it from pop music).  Only Charles Ives is his peer.

Unlike Ives, essentially a romantic who took orchestral music and completely blew it up, Cage threw the rules out the window.  Or rather, he wrote his own rules to subvert (the results of) the rules already on the books.  Cage and Ives are polar opposites; one listen to the Sonatas and Interludes followed by Ives's Fourth Symphony tells you all you need to know.

Cage studied in Los Angeles under Arnold Schoenberg, whom he adored.  Schoenberg and Cage, however, did not exactly see music the same way:

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."

And beat his head against the wall he did.

Zen Buddhism is at the core of Cage's life as well as his music, and Buddhism's defining tension - the reality that it takes great discipline and practice to achieve the nothingness at the center of Buddhism - was also the defining tension of his music.  Years back I wrote a piece about the destruction of the common in music, contrasting the explosiveness of John Coltrane's free jazz with the discipline of Cage's compositional games:

 In the quest for music which eaches beyond the mundane, the tension [between "free" playing and composition] gets accelerated into an existential problem: Coltrane sought to reach other worlds by obliterating the ego, and he chose to obliterate the ego by exploding it (in a sense, maximizing it until it became something beyond ego). Cage sought to reach other worlds by obliterating the ego, and the method he chose was simply to erase the ego. Both would say their methods involved maximum amounts of freedom: for Coltrane, there were no rules. For Cage, there were no decisions.

This was written in the context of 80s and 90s "noise" music, when the stated aim of "noise" artists was to break down the current musics so something new could be built in its place.  The common way to do that was to move as far away from anything resembling music as possible, which quite often meant taking musical instruments (primarily guitars, due to the flexibility of electric guitar setups) and actively making them sound non- or anti-musical.  Breaking down music also meant ignoring pop song structures, and quite often those breakdowns were improvised.  Following the lead of noise artists from Borbetomagus and Derek Bailey to Z'ev and No Wavers like Mars and DNA, those retreating from music leaned more and more on improvisations, leading to a free improv movement that closely parallels, but is not necessarily the same as, free jazz.

But here, again, the specter of John Cage stood as a cautionary tale to improvisers:

the “free” player is one who doesn’t allow her/himself to be limited by commonly accepted laws of harmony, rhythm, melody, etc. But, post-Ornette, post-Coltrane, post-Cage, it seems to mean both more and less than that … more, because the logic of the allowable has exploded beyond the furthest reaches of even Ayler. Less, because the element of the random seeks, a la Cage, to remove the humanity of music altogether (perhaps therein lies the ultimate freedom: the freedom from ordering sound, the freedom from making music). In fact, as Cage has insisted, the common conception of freedom leads to music of habit, or music of the known … music which, more often than not, turns into a banal Grateful Dead orgy. 

Cage demonstrated that composition is essential in breaking down the plaque of centuries of rules, norms, and ideas about what good music is supposed to be.  Along the way, he made music from the abrasive Cartridge Music to the completely over the top HPSCHD (early computer music, back when computers were run with punch cards), to the sensitivity and beauty of the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.  Not to mention, of course, 4' 33", the "silent piece" . . . one of the most infamous works of music ever written.  And yes, I do mean written: I have the score for 4' 33" sitting on the music stand of my broken down piano upstairs.

On top of all that, he was a pretty good poet, as well as one of the world's foremost authorities on wild mushrooms.  Mushroom hunters worldwide knew exactly who John Cage was, though most of them didn't find out he was a composer until they read his obituary.

In the end, I don't think he really did end up beating his head against Shoenberg's wall.  I think he turned that wall into nothing.

     John Cage 

     back in Kentucky, 3 am

     Cheap Imitation

     John Cage is the desert

     a sip of bourbon

     dim light by an open window

     cars up on 64 outside

     the notes flower

     as the desert, after a shower