Luckily I'm from the generation that (cough) eschews tatoos, or I'd be heading to the parlor right now to get me one.
From Gadget Lounge
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I never thought I would say this, but I think it might, in fact, be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would say that, that we have become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come to force us to apply the rule of law. I never imagined that a Congress, a Democratic-led Congress would refuse to take actions, even with the preeminent institution of the Red Cross saying, this is clearly torture and torture is a war crime. They are still refusing to take meaningful action.
So, we've come to this ignoble moment where we could be forced into a tribunal and forced to face the rule of law that we've refused to apply to ourselves.
I'm not normally one to argue for the prosecution and incarceration of anyone. However, the current administration's human rights violations are so grievous that there is no other remedy which has a prayer of restoring the rule of law other than prosecution.
Blanket pardons are likely forthcoming during the last few days of the administration, and a spineless Democratic congress seems averse to prosecuting its constitutional duty.
The only entity that will not be constrained to honor the president's pardon would be an international tribunal convened to prosecute the war crimes of the past 7 years.
Read the Greenwald post. It's a road map to a just government and an America I could support.
]]>]]>
I Don't Get It
(Margo and Michael Timmins)
Breaking away to the other side
I wanna make sense of why we live and die
I don't get it, I don't get it
I ask my friends if they understand
They just laugh at me and watch another band
They don't worry, they don't worry
Lookin' for a way to lose my load
I wanna make it easy to walk this road
I can't find it, yeah I can't find it
Yeah, I'm looking for answers in so many places
I open my mind
I don't get it
Walkin' this earth and keepin' my peace
I do what I want but the price is steep
It don't seem right, it don't seem right
My mama she told me "One step at a time
and sooner or later you'll walk that line"
I don't want to, I don't want to
Takin' my time to live and die
I wanna find a way to do it right
and I ease on, and I ease on
They say "One thing always leads to another"
I open my mind
I don't get it
Breaking away to the other side
I wanna make sense of why we live and die
I don't get it, I don't get it
I don't get it, I don't get it
I don't get it
Have you ever been ransacked by it? Were that it weren't necessary, but it seems that it is, and, without it, we mortals don't appear to have the capacity for the quality of humility, compassion, nor caring that really matters.
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Witness
by Sarah McLachlanMake me a witness.
Take me out
out of darkness
out of doubt.I won't weigh you down
with good intention,
won't make fire out of clay
or other inventions.Will we burn in heaven
like we do down here?
Will the change come
while we're waiting?Everyone is waiting.
And when we're done
soul searching
as we carried the weight
and died for a cause,
is misery
made beautiful
right before our eyes
will mercy be revealed
or blind us where we stand?Will we burn in heaven
like we do down here?
Will the change come while we're waiting?
Everyone is waiting.
America needs more Jeremiads, more truth tellers, not less.
]]>Thanks to Kira for knowing how much her dad would enjoy it.
Interestingly, last night there was an exception to this ideological whitewashing. As Glenn Greenwald notes, last night's Charlie Rose show unwittingly gave a platform to voices from beyond the ideological pale.
Rose's interview with Ali Fadhil and Sinan Antoon unwittingly contests the premises that led us to invade Iraq in the first place, not to mention the tragic aftermath of our invasion and subsequent occupation.
These are voices to which we should attend. Mainstream assumptions about what is and what is not acceptable are fundamentally flawed, and, as long as we believe them, our policies are doomed to failure.
What's exceptional is that these voices of dissent were ever aired.
Please enjoy this brief moment of truly free speech. Thanks to Greenwald for his excellent analysis.
]]>My friend Rob forwarded this excellent article to me from the Huffington Post. It appears that American Morning producer Chez Pazienza has been dooced by CNN.
To say that Mr. Pazienza has not gone quietly into that dark night would be a bit of an understatement, but perhaps I'm a bit biased, since he's so deftly skewering an institution that I feel has been so cynically screwing the self-same viewing public that it's ostensibly serving.
I'll provide this brief excerpt, which will hopefully whet your appetite for what is one of the best political tracts that I've read in a long time.
During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.Yes, Virginia, the news media are political entities, and it's damned important that we remember that fact.]]>
The Zebra StorytellerOnce upon a time there was a Siamese cat who pretended to be a lion and spoke inappropriate Zebraic.That language is whinnied by the race of striped horses in Africa.
Here now: An innocent zebra is walking in a jungle, and approaching from another direction is the little cat; they meet.
“Hello there!” says the Siamese cat in perfectly pronounced Zebraic. “It certainly is a pleasant day, isn’t it? The sun is shining, the birds are singing, isn’t the world a lovely place to live today!”
The zebra is so astonished at hearing a Siamese cat speaking like a zebra, why, he’s just fit to be tied.
So the little cat quickly ties him up, kills him, and drags the better parts of the carcass back to his den.
The cat successfully hunted zebras many months in this manner, dining on filet mignon of zebra every night, and from the better hides he made bow neckties and wide belts after the fashion of the decadent princes of the Old Siamese court.
He began boasting to his friends he was a lion, and he gave them as proof the fact that he hunted zebras.
The delicate noses of the zebras told them there was really no lion in the neighborhood. The zebra deaths caused many to avoid the region. Superstitious, they decided the woods were haunted by the ghost of a lion.
One day the storyteller of the zebras was ambling, and through his mind ran plots for stories to amuse the other zebras, when suddenly his eyes brightened, and he said, “That’s it! I’ll tell a story about a Siamese cat who learns to speak our language! What an idea! That’ll make ’em laugh!”
Just then the Siamese cat appeared before him, and said, “Hello there! Pleasant day today, isn’t it!”
The zebra storyteller wasn’t fit to be tied at hearing a cat speaking his language, because he’d been thinking about that very thing.
He took a good look at the cat, and he didn’t know why, but there was something about his looks he didn’t like, so he kicked him with a hoof and killed him.
That is the function of the storyteller.
Thanks to Margaret for placing this fable in my path.
]]>I hear tell that the drawing might make its way into the magazine.
]]>From Gadget Lounge
]]>He reminds us of something we've lost sight of what it is that we're doing when we're making and listening to music.
First, a definition of terms. What is it we're talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).
We'll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only "our kind of people" can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.
All this is what we talk about when we talk about music.
All of it.
Notice that none of this has anything to do with record labels.
Don't lament digital music. Don't lament music downloads. Don't lament the demise of the record company. Not one little bit. If you're doing so, please don't think you're doing it to "save" music or to save musicians. Music isn't going anywhere and neither are the people who make it.
Let's stop fetishizing economic models that privilege large multinational corporations and start envisioning how digital economies--economies where distribution costs approach zero as the number of downloads increases--might change the way we collaborate and do business around music, text, and graphic art. As Brian Eno notes in the article, the only thing record companies provide is capital.
The only thing record companies provide is capital. Remember that and you'll feel a whole lot less threatened by piratebay.org.
]]>My daughter Kira and I were hanging out last night, doing what has become our post Christmas feast ritual: working and playing on our laptops. At one point she laughed out loud, which is her way of motioning for me to come over and read what she'd found. She shared this cartoon from the very smart web-comic Cat and Girl.
Notice the text on the scooter's rear in the last panel. When I read this, I realized that Dorothy (the author of Cat and Girl) had given me a crucial piece to the difficult art problem I'm wrestling with. Though she's careful not to explicitly state it, the artist could be accused of suggesting that Pynchon's work is interactive. It's certainly the case that my experience of reading Thomas Pynchon's work is one of interactivity, not unlike what I've experienced at the best concerts I've attended. Just as music can lead the audience and the musicians into a space in which they're negotiating and, in a sense, co-creating their experience of the performance, there's a sense in which writing can do the same thing, despite the fact that the writer may have written the words days, weeks, months, or even years earlier.
Now understand that I don't mean to say that the writer experiences this interactivity directly, in real time, as the reader reads their writing. Not at all (though I don't discount the possibility of it). I do believe, however, that certain writers are able to create texts that encourage readers to interact with the texts in ways in which the allow the reader to co-create their experience of the text, Under such a theory of reading, the writer is no longer strictly "responsible" for the reader's experience (as some very naive theories of reader response theory would posit), but the reader takes on a larger responsibility for the experience and becomes aware of the interactivity and that the writer's words are manifesting in the reader's experience. I also believe (and here's the part that ties back to last week's post) that those texts which perform this textual interactivity most reliably tend to play with signification in ways that defer--rather than gratify--our attempts at ascribing meaning to them. They resonate with plural meanings and in doing so move the reader into a space in which resonance with the reader's lived experience in the present moment is possible, though not guaranteed.
As I've noted elsewhere, Pynchon's novels, especially V and Gravity's Rainbow, have been an extremely important books for me, and this is so precisely because they were able to enact this interactivity and that I was able to experience them (in some sense) as texts that were manifesting in my world as I was reading them.
Understand, that I don't think this type of reading is likely to occur with every reader who comes along. On the contrary, my first reading of Gravity's Rainbow was a fairly typical, even pedestrian, experience. I enjoyed it--enough that I ended up rereading it less than a year after first completing it--but it didn't jolt me into the interactive space I'm describing.
I'm going to end this post with an assertion that attempts to answer some of the questions I posed in my first post on this topic: Texts that frustrate our attempts at making meaning can jar us into states of mind that, under certain conditions, bring the texts to life for the reader. I also assert that some writers consciously fashion their texts to achieve this, though not to the exclusion of other, more traditional ends.
I'm aware that this is a very risky and infinitely problematic assertion to make and that it posits an non-rationalist framework and aesthetic. So be it.
To what end this experience? If I'm right about this, why do these writers bother?
]]>I saw Tracy Grammer perform in Corvallis back in 2005 when this song had been just released. This is not difficult music. Transparent and extremely well written. Tracy Grammer's voice has a purity that I've rarely experienced in a recording let alone live. The sound quality of this Youtube video leaves a bit to be desired, but you can get a sense of how great her voice is.
Hey Ho
by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer
performed by Tracy Grammertv’s on, the favorite son is
watchin how the west was won
daddy, please, a plastic gun
get brother one for twice the funlittle camo helmet-heads
makin brave and playin dead
missiles made of gingerbread
dollars on the dimechorus
hey ho, so it goes, the point of sale, the puppet show
the merchant kings of war and woe have turned their hands to labor
sound out the trumpet noise, the cannons bark and jump for joy
someone’s dread and darlin boy has fallen on his saberanother world across the sea
home for little busy bees
sweatin in some factory
hurry, please, more of theseaction dolls with laser sights
robot planes that shoot at night
faster, kid, and get it right
they’re rollin down the linehey ho...
these days the spin machine
is always on the silver screen
secret plots and submarines
foreign fiends and magazineswave the flag, watch the news
tell us we can count on you
mom and dad are marchin too
children, step in timehey ho...
bring your kids and coddled pets
bouncin babes in bassinets
we’ll play a game with tanks and jets
better yet – bayonets!marchin bands and color guards
funerals in your own backyard
don’t forget your credit card –
johnny, hold the linehey ho...
Namaste
]]>13. T'ung Jen / Fellowship with Men
----------
---------- above Ch'ien The Creative, Heaven
----------
----------
---- ---- below Li The Clinging, Flame
----------
The Judgment
Fellowship with Men in the open.
Success.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
The perseverance of the superior man furthers.
The Image
Heaven together with fire:
The image of Fellowship with Men.
Thus the superior man organizes the clans
And makes distinctions between things.
The Lines
() Nine in the fifth place means:
Men bound in fellowship first weep and lament,
But afterward they laugh.
After great struggles they succeed in meeting.
30. Li / The Clinging, Fire
----------
---- ---- above Li The Clinging, Flame
----------
----------
---- ---- below Li The Clinging, Flame
----------
The Judgment
The Clinging. Perseverance furthers.
It brings success.
Care of the cow brings good fortune.
The Image
That which is bright rises twice:
The image of Fire.
Thus the great man, by perpetuating this brightness,
Illumines the four quarters of the world.