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Democracy Now
Noam Chomsky: Palestinian Hunger Strike a Protest Against "Violations of Elementary Human Rights"
We begin our hour-long interview with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky by discussing the Palestinian hunger strike. A tentative deal has reportedly been reached to end a landmark action that’s seen an estimated 2,000 jailed Palestinians go without food to pressure Israeli prison authorities to end the use of solitary confinement and ease a wide range of restrictions. "The hunger strikes are a protest against ... violations of the elementary human rights," Chomsky says. He is Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of dozens of books, most recently, "Occupy."
Chomsky: Occupy Wall Street "Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist" in U.S. — Solidarity
Noam Chomsky says the Occupy movement has helped rebuild class solidarity and communities of mutual support on a level unseen since the time of the Great Depression. "The Occupy movement spontaneously created something that doesn’t really exist in the country: communities of mutual support, cooperation, open spaces for discussion ... just people doing things and helping each other," Chomsky says. "That’s very much missing. There is a massive propaganda—it’s been going on for a century, but picking up enormously—that you really shouldn’t care about anyone else, you should just care about yourself. ... To rebuild [class solidarity], even if it’s in small pieces of the society, can become very important, can change the conception of how a society ought to function." Chomsky also gives his assessment of President Obama, whom he says has attacked civil liberties in a way that has "gone beyond [George W.] Bush."
Noam Chomsky on WikiLeaks, Obama’s Targeted Assassinations and Latin America’s Break from the U.S.
As the United States carries out another deadly drone strike in Yemen, Noam Chomsky compares the counterterrorism policies of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. "If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers," Chomsky says. "If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them." Chomsky also praises the whistleblowing activities of WikiLeaks, as well as the ongoing Latin American shift away from Washington’s long-running political and economic dominance.
To Watch the Interviews
30 Mayıs 2012 Çarşamba
Benjamin Shingler: Protesters finding creative ways around controversial new Quebec law
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Protesters finding creative ways around controversial new Quebec law
by Benjamin Shingler
The Star
Only a day after becoming law, protesters were finding creative ways around Quebec’s controversial legislation aimed at restoring order in the province.
In an attempt to avoid hefty fines, one prominent student group took down its web page Saturday that listed all upcoming protests. Another anonymous web page with listings quickly popped up in its place — with a note discouraging people from attending.
The disclaimer is meant to evade new rules applying to protest organizers, who must provide an itinerary for demonstrations and could be held responsible for any violence.
The website also accepts submissions for future protests and suggests using software that blocks a sender’s digital trail.
Meanwhile, Montreal police were trying to figure out how to use the legislation without heightening tensions during the city’s nightly marches through the city.
Spokesman Ian Lafreniere said the force was still considering its options.
“I’ve got a lot of people working on it now,” Lafreniere said in an interview. “We don’t want to cause a commotion, we want to prevent one.”
Lafreniere said police would likely set up a website or email address where organizers could submit planned protest routes.
Bill 78 lays out strict regulations governing demonstrations of over 50 people, including having to give eight hours’ notice for details such as the protest route, the duration and the time at which they are being held.
Failure to comply could bring stiff penalties for the organizers, but the law could be difficult to enforce.
A late night protest has started in the same downtown square at 8:30 p.m. every night for nearly a month. There’s no clear organizer for the march, and the route is determined by the marchers on a street by street basis.
Still, the law says that student associations who don’t encourage their members to comply with the law could face punishment. Fines range between $7,000 and $35,000 for student leaders and between $25,000 and $125,000 for student unions or student federations.
To Read the Rest of the Article
by Benjamin Shingler
The Star
Only a day after becoming law, protesters were finding creative ways around Quebec’s controversial legislation aimed at restoring order in the province.
In an attempt to avoid hefty fines, one prominent student group took down its web page Saturday that listed all upcoming protests. Another anonymous web page with listings quickly popped up in its place — with a note discouraging people from attending.
The disclaimer is meant to evade new rules applying to protest organizers, who must provide an itinerary for demonstrations and could be held responsible for any violence.
The website also accepts submissions for future protests and suggests using software that blocks a sender’s digital trail.
Meanwhile, Montreal police were trying to figure out how to use the legislation without heightening tensions during the city’s nightly marches through the city.
Spokesman Ian Lafreniere said the force was still considering its options.
“I’ve got a lot of people working on it now,” Lafreniere said in an interview. “We don’t want to cause a commotion, we want to prevent one.”
Lafreniere said police would likely set up a website or email address where organizers could submit planned protest routes.
Bill 78 lays out strict regulations governing demonstrations of over 50 people, including having to give eight hours’ notice for details such as the protest route, the duration and the time at which they are being held.
Failure to comply could bring stiff penalties for the organizers, but the law could be difficult to enforce.
A late night protest has started in the same downtown square at 8:30 p.m. every night for nearly a month. There’s no clear organizer for the march, and the route is determined by the marchers on a street by street basis.
Still, the law says that student associations who don’t encourage their members to comply with the law could face punishment. Fines range between $7,000 and $35,000 for student leaders and between $25,000 and $125,000 for student unions or student federations.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Inside Job Director Charles Ferguson: Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
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"Inside Job" Director Charles Ferguson: Wall Street Has Turned the U.S. into a "Predatory Nation"
Democracy Now
Two years after directing the Academy Award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” filmmaker Charles Ferguson returns with a new book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.” Ferguson explores why no top financial executives have been jailed for their role in the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We also discuss Larry Summers and the revolving door between academia and Wall Street, as well as the key role Democrats have played in deregulating the financial industry. According to Ferguson, a "predatory elite" has "taken over significant portions of economic policy and of the political system, and also, unfortunately, major portions of the economics discipline."
Guest:
Charles Ferguson, the Academy Award-winning director of Inside Job, a documentary about the financial crisis. His film on the war in Iraq, No End in Sight, was nominated for an Academy Award. His new book is called Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.
To Watch the Interview
Part 2: “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America”
We continue our conversation with Charles Ferguson, director of the Oscar award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” about the 2008 financial crisis. In his new book, “Predator Nation,” he argues “the role of Democrats has been at least as great as the role of Republicans” in causing the crisis. Ferguson notes the Clinton administration oversaw the most important financial deregulation, and since then, “we’ve seen in the Obama administration very little reform and no criminal prosecutions, and the appointment of a very large number of Wall Street executives to senior positions in the government, including some people who were directly responsible for causing significant portions of the crisis.” Ferguson also calls for raising the salaries of senior regulators and imposing stricter rules for how soon they can lobby for the private sector after leaving the public sector.
To Watch the Interview
Trailer for Inside Job
Watch Inside Job online for free at Film for Action
Democracy Now
Two years after directing the Academy Award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” filmmaker Charles Ferguson returns with a new book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.” Ferguson explores why no top financial executives have been jailed for their role in the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We also discuss Larry Summers and the revolving door between academia and Wall Street, as well as the key role Democrats have played in deregulating the financial industry. According to Ferguson, a "predatory elite" has "taken over significant portions of economic policy and of the political system, and also, unfortunately, major portions of the economics discipline."
Guest:
Charles Ferguson, the Academy Award-winning director of Inside Job, a documentary about the financial crisis. His film on the war in Iraq, No End in Sight, was nominated for an Academy Award. His new book is called Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.
To Watch the Interview
Part 2: “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America”
We continue our conversation with Charles Ferguson, director of the Oscar award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” about the 2008 financial crisis. In his new book, “Predator Nation,” he argues “the role of Democrats has been at least as great as the role of Republicans” in causing the crisis. Ferguson notes the Clinton administration oversaw the most important financial deregulation, and since then, “we’ve seen in the Obama administration very little reform and no criminal prosecutions, and the appointment of a very large number of Wall Street executives to senior positions in the government, including some people who were directly responsible for causing significant portions of the crisis.” Ferguson also calls for raising the salaries of senior regulators and imposing stricter rules for how soon they can lobby for the private sector after leaving the public sector.
To Watch the Interview
Trailer for Inside Job
2010 Oscar Winner for Best Documentary, 'Inside Job' provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.
Watch Inside Job online for free at Film for Action
Jim McGovern: Rescuing "We the People"
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Rescuing 'We, the People'
by Representative Jim McGovern (MA)
Huffington Post
Defenders of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and the ascendant corporate rights doctrine that underlies it must be getting nervous.
Why else would George Will resort to arguing, as he so outrageously does ("Taking a scythe to the Bill of Rights", May 6) that the bipartisan People's Rights Amendment I have introduced in the House is "comparable" to condoning infanticide?
A large majority of Americans believe that corporations exert too much influence on our daily lives and our political process. A Hart Research poll released last year found that nearly four in five (79 percent) of registered voters support passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Resolutions calling for such an amendment have passed in several states and cities across the country. Eleven state attorneys general have written to Congress demanding action.
We are already witnessing the corrosive effects of Citizens United: an election system awash in a sea of millions of dollars in unregulated money, drowning out the voices of individual citizens. Politicians are increasingly beholden to wealthy special interests. A multi-national oil company that doesn't like a particular member of Congress can now simply write a big, undisclosed check to "Americans for Apple Pie and Puppies" and watch the negative advertisements work their magic.
But the effects of the corporate rights doctrine go far beyond campaign finance. A Vermont law to require that milk products derived from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be labeled to disclose that information was struck down as a violation of the First Amendment. A federal judge has found that tobacco companies have a free speech right that prevents the government from requiring graphic warning labels on cigarettes. A pharmaceutical corporation has claimed that their corporate speech rights protect them from FDA rules prohibiting the marketing of a drug for "off-label" uses.
As Justice Stevens rightly noted in his dissent in Citizens United (and contrary to what Mr. Will would have us believe), the majority ruling was "a radical departure from what has been settled First Amendment Law." These corporate "rights" are relatively new, appearing in the last few decades. They overturn centuries of established jurisprudence and national consensus. The Supreme Court used to repeatedly affirm that the elected governments of the states and the nation could regulate corporations. Chief Justice John Marshall described the corporate entity as "an artificial being ... existing only in contemplation of law." No less an authority than James Madison viewed corporations as "a necessary evil" subject to "proper limitations and guards." Thomas Jefferson wished to "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
To Read the Rest of the Commentary
by Representative Jim McGovern (MA)
Huffington Post
Defenders of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and the ascendant corporate rights doctrine that underlies it must be getting nervous.
Why else would George Will resort to arguing, as he so outrageously does ("Taking a scythe to the Bill of Rights", May 6) that the bipartisan People's Rights Amendment I have introduced in the House is "comparable" to condoning infanticide?
A large majority of Americans believe that corporations exert too much influence on our daily lives and our political process. A Hart Research poll released last year found that nearly four in five (79 percent) of registered voters support passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Resolutions calling for such an amendment have passed in several states and cities across the country. Eleven state attorneys general have written to Congress demanding action.
We are already witnessing the corrosive effects of Citizens United: an election system awash in a sea of millions of dollars in unregulated money, drowning out the voices of individual citizens. Politicians are increasingly beholden to wealthy special interests. A multi-national oil company that doesn't like a particular member of Congress can now simply write a big, undisclosed check to "Americans for Apple Pie and Puppies" and watch the negative advertisements work their magic.
But the effects of the corporate rights doctrine go far beyond campaign finance. A Vermont law to require that milk products derived from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be labeled to disclose that information was struck down as a violation of the First Amendment. A federal judge has found that tobacco companies have a free speech right that prevents the government from requiring graphic warning labels on cigarettes. A pharmaceutical corporation has claimed that their corporate speech rights protect them from FDA rules prohibiting the marketing of a drug for "off-label" uses.
As Justice Stevens rightly noted in his dissent in Citizens United (and contrary to what Mr. Will would have us believe), the majority ruling was "a radical departure from what has been settled First Amendment Law." These corporate "rights" are relatively new, appearing in the last few decades. They overturn centuries of established jurisprudence and national consensus. The Supreme Court used to repeatedly affirm that the elected governments of the states and the nation could regulate corporations. Chief Justice John Marshall described the corporate entity as "an artificial being ... existing only in contemplation of law." No less an authority than James Madison viewed corporations as "a necessary evil" subject to "proper limitations and guards." Thomas Jefferson wished to "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
To Read the Rest of the Commentary
Casseroles - Montréal, 24 Mai 2012
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[There have been daily protests in Quebec for over a 100 days by hundreds of thousands of people. Starting over steep increases in student fees/tuition, accelerated by the citizen response to bill 78 which attempted to force students to get permits for any march over 50 people (and fines of 7,000 for student leaders and at least 25,000 for student groups that didn't do this), it has now become a broad based public protest of citizens (one nights march was app. 400,000 people). Watch this five minute video and see something amazing -- I think it is beautiful and ask myself, why does the Canadian government fear it ......? ]
by Jeremie Battaglia
by Jeremie Battaglia
26 Mayıs 2012 Cumartesi
Jake Olzen: Police Entrapment of Nonviolent Movements
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Police Entrapment of Nonviolent Movements
by JAKE OLZEN
Counterpunch
The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.
The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.
The mainstream media and blog reports, both nationally and in Cleveland, have emphasized that the young activists were part of Occupy Cleveland and self-identified anarchists (here, here, and here). The men — Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of nearby Lakewood; Connor C. Stevens, 20, of suburban Berea; and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, and Anthony Hayne, 35, both of Cleveland — were arrested and remain in jail after they attempted to detonate a false bomb that they had set, in conjunction with the FBI.
It’s an old script: Violence-prone anarchists devise a nefarious plan and, just before they can carry it out, law enforcement swoops in to save the day, catching them red-handed. But there’s another script being acted out here too, one much more sinister, complex, and morally and legally dubious: Agents of the state infiltrate an activist group and, through techniques of psychological manipulation, lead its most vulnerable members into a violent plan — for which explosives, detonators, contacts and case mysteriously become available — until SWAT teams and prosecutors suddenly arrive and haul the accomplices off to jail for the rest of their lives. In both cases, at the end of the story, officials congratulate each other for their bravery and bravado and the public breathes a sigh of relief as more of their civil liberties are stripped away.
I recently spoke with Richard Schulte, a veteran activist who has known the Five from groups like Food Not Bombs and is helping to organize their legal and jail support. Schulte explained that under the influence of undercover federal agents and informants, the activists — particularly the youngest, Baxter and Stevens — found themselves increasingly vulnerable and reliant on their informant. Baxter’s lawyer, a public defender named John Pyle, recently identified the informant working with the group as Shaquille Azir, a 39-year old ex-con.
“[Azir] became something of a role model, stepping in as a father figure, offering guidance on emotional and social stuff,” said Schulte. “Connor and Brandon thought he was a rad dude but getting more and more pushy.”
Collectively, according to accounts from friends and associates, statements from lawyers, and the FBI affidavit, members of the Cleveland Five have backgrounds that include mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness and social marginalization.
Brandon and Connor had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it “passive gradualism” — the Five were encouraged by Azir to break off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, “The People’s Liberation Army.” At first it was mostly just a graffiti crew — tagging the phrase “rise up” around the city and putting up stickers, said Schulte.
Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by JAKE OLZEN
Counterpunch
The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.
The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.
The mainstream media and blog reports, both nationally and in Cleveland, have emphasized that the young activists were part of Occupy Cleveland and self-identified anarchists (here, here, and here). The men — Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of nearby Lakewood; Connor C. Stevens, 20, of suburban Berea; and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, and Anthony Hayne, 35, both of Cleveland — were arrested and remain in jail after they attempted to detonate a false bomb that they had set, in conjunction with the FBI.
It’s an old script: Violence-prone anarchists devise a nefarious plan and, just before they can carry it out, law enforcement swoops in to save the day, catching them red-handed. But there’s another script being acted out here too, one much more sinister, complex, and morally and legally dubious: Agents of the state infiltrate an activist group and, through techniques of psychological manipulation, lead its most vulnerable members into a violent plan — for which explosives, detonators, contacts and case mysteriously become available — until SWAT teams and prosecutors suddenly arrive and haul the accomplices off to jail for the rest of their lives. In both cases, at the end of the story, officials congratulate each other for their bravery and bravado and the public breathes a sigh of relief as more of their civil liberties are stripped away.
I recently spoke with Richard Schulte, a veteran activist who has known the Five from groups like Food Not Bombs and is helping to organize their legal and jail support. Schulte explained that under the influence of undercover federal agents and informants, the activists — particularly the youngest, Baxter and Stevens — found themselves increasingly vulnerable and reliant on their informant. Baxter’s lawyer, a public defender named John Pyle, recently identified the informant working with the group as Shaquille Azir, a 39-year old ex-con.
“[Azir] became something of a role model, stepping in as a father figure, offering guidance on emotional and social stuff,” said Schulte. “Connor and Brandon thought he was a rad dude but getting more and more pushy.”
Collectively, according to accounts from friends and associates, statements from lawyers, and the FBI affidavit, members of the Cleveland Five have backgrounds that include mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness and social marginalization.
Brandon and Connor had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it “passive gradualism” — the Five were encouraged by Azir to break off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, “The People’s Liberation Army.” At first it was mostly just a graffiti crew — tagging the phrase “rise up” around the city and putting up stickers, said Schulte.
Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Rick Perlstein: Chicago History Repeats Itself As Cops and Protesters Clash
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Chicago History Repeats Itself As Cops and Protesters Clash
by Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone
In 1972, writing in Rolling Stone about a looming confrontation between protesters and police in the streets in front of the Republican National Convention in Miami, Hunter S. Thompson described the moment he slipped off his watch. "The first thing to go in a street fight is always your watch, and once you've lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know it's time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket." Times have changed: Few people wear watches any more. So when the first objects starting flying in Chicago yesterday night on the corner of Cermak and Michigan, I buttoned my cell phone into my cargo pants pocket instead.
I'd begun marching, four hours earlier, from the bandshell behind the Art Institute of Chicago to a temporary protest zone with 2,000 people (by city estimates) protesting NATO’s role in the Afghanistan war. Our destination was a half mile east of the NATO summit taking place at the south-of-downtown McCormick Place Convention Center; it had been an awkward traipse. I was following legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild; they were watching the police, who were everywhere: thousands were deployed for the summit, plus ringers from forty other agencies from as far away as North Carolina. At least a few hundred were in my field of vision at all times. Volunteers surrounded the parade column with yellow cord; just outside that perimeter hundreds of officers kept stride, all of us starting, stopping, slowing up at a pace dictated by the police wagons inching along ahead.
Up ahead, from sidewalk to sidewalk, marched another row of cops, walking backward, sometimes joining hands red-rover style. Flying squadrons of riot police in those fearsome security-visored blue helmets, chest-protectors that make them look like black turtles, and massively bulging shiny shin guards sometimes appeared, then disappeared down abandoned side streets. Then, at the march's culmination at a makeshift stage 800 yards and innumerable eight-foot-tall steel security barriers west of where 65 world leaders were gathering to talk, largely about the course of the war in Afghanistan, they were suddenly among us, en masse: black turtles, row upon row, arrayed on the elevated median strips that afforded them the high ground for whatever battle might ensue.
This was Chicago in May of 2012, where all week citizens have been cordially invited by authorities to savor what it would feel like to live in a police state – 7.5 miles of street closings; several "maritime security zones"; the thwukthwukthwuk of helicopters and the continuous scream of jet fighters overhead; those infamous "Long Range Acoustic Devices" that make it too painful to stand, poised at the ready; and, in one particularly surreal touch in my tranquil Hyde Park neighborhood, a misplaced suitcase that shut down the 57th Street train station as well access to the two adjacent nerdy used bookstores, a full forty blocks from the NATO zone. (An email to every University of Chicago student, staffer, and faculty member: "Police activity 57th Street at Metra. Avoid area. Additional information to follow." Thirty-nine minutes later: "All clear 57th Street and Metra. Will resume normal operations.")
Just as intended, the city thrummed with fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the most effective tool the powerful possess to keep the rest of us in line; so pervasive was the dread that people working downtown wore jeans on Thursday (no one showed up to work on Friday), lest they be randomly attacked by "self-described anarchists" – in the news media's odd formulation – mistaking them for members of "the 1%."
That night, it all came to a head with the warrantless violent police raid of an apartment in the gentrifying neighborhood of Pilsen, followed by the "disappearing" – no other term for it – of three anarchists, Jared Chase, 27, Brian Church, 22, and Brent Betterly, 24, for over twenty-four hours. They resurfaced Saturday in a Cook County courtroom, where they were charged with "conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit," including "plotting to attack President Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters, the Chicago mayor's home and police stations." What the suspects said was home-brew equipment the city insisted was the makings of Molotov cocktails. Bail was set at $1.5 million.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone
In 1972, writing in Rolling Stone about a looming confrontation between protesters and police in the streets in front of the Republican National Convention in Miami, Hunter S. Thompson described the moment he slipped off his watch. "The first thing to go in a street fight is always your watch, and once you've lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know it's time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket." Times have changed: Few people wear watches any more. So when the first objects starting flying in Chicago yesterday night on the corner of Cermak and Michigan, I buttoned my cell phone into my cargo pants pocket instead.
I'd begun marching, four hours earlier, from the bandshell behind the Art Institute of Chicago to a temporary protest zone with 2,000 people (by city estimates) protesting NATO’s role in the Afghanistan war. Our destination was a half mile east of the NATO summit taking place at the south-of-downtown McCormick Place Convention Center; it had been an awkward traipse. I was following legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild; they were watching the police, who were everywhere: thousands were deployed for the summit, plus ringers from forty other agencies from as far away as North Carolina. At least a few hundred were in my field of vision at all times. Volunteers surrounded the parade column with yellow cord; just outside that perimeter hundreds of officers kept stride, all of us starting, stopping, slowing up at a pace dictated by the police wagons inching along ahead.
Up ahead, from sidewalk to sidewalk, marched another row of cops, walking backward, sometimes joining hands red-rover style. Flying squadrons of riot police in those fearsome security-visored blue helmets, chest-protectors that make them look like black turtles, and massively bulging shiny shin guards sometimes appeared, then disappeared down abandoned side streets. Then, at the march's culmination at a makeshift stage 800 yards and innumerable eight-foot-tall steel security barriers west of where 65 world leaders were gathering to talk, largely about the course of the war in Afghanistan, they were suddenly among us, en masse: black turtles, row upon row, arrayed on the elevated median strips that afforded them the high ground for whatever battle might ensue.
This was Chicago in May of 2012, where all week citizens have been cordially invited by authorities to savor what it would feel like to live in a police state – 7.5 miles of street closings; several "maritime security zones"; the thwukthwukthwuk of helicopters and the continuous scream of jet fighters overhead; those infamous "Long Range Acoustic Devices" that make it too painful to stand, poised at the ready; and, in one particularly surreal touch in my tranquil Hyde Park neighborhood, a misplaced suitcase that shut down the 57th Street train station as well access to the two adjacent nerdy used bookstores, a full forty blocks from the NATO zone. (An email to every University of Chicago student, staffer, and faculty member: "Police activity 57th Street at Metra. Avoid area. Additional information to follow." Thirty-nine minutes later: "All clear 57th Street and Metra. Will resume normal operations.")
Just as intended, the city thrummed with fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the most effective tool the powerful possess to keep the rest of us in line; so pervasive was the dread that people working downtown wore jeans on Thursday (no one showed up to work on Friday), lest they be randomly attacked by "self-described anarchists" – in the news media's odd formulation – mistaking them for members of "the 1%."
That night, it all came to a head with the warrantless violent police raid of an apartment in the gentrifying neighborhood of Pilsen, followed by the "disappearing" – no other term for it – of three anarchists, Jared Chase, 27, Brian Church, 22, and Brent Betterly, 24, for over twenty-four hours. They resurfaced Saturday in a Cook County courtroom, where they were charged with "conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit," including "plotting to attack President Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters, the Chicago mayor's home and police stations." What the suspects said was home-brew equipment the city insisted was the makings of Molotov cocktails. Bail was set at $1.5 million.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Michael D. Yates: The Great Inequality
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The Great Inequality
by Michael D. Yates
Monthly Review
...
Schutz’s approach here is ingenious, and it takes us directly to a consideration of class not just as a condition—as in, you and I are in different social classes—but as a dynamic relationship in which one class exercises power over another so that society is structured in such a way that there can be no escape from persistent inequalities unless the power (class) relationship is confronted directly and abolished. As we make our choices, we also collectively make “social choices,” that is we structure the very society that faces us with constraints when we choose. However, to say this is to suggest that we are not at all equal in terms of how society itself is constructed. At the level of society, power is critically important. Here is how Schutz defines power: “If person A can get person B to do something in A’s interest by taking advantage of some situation or set of circumstances to which B, were he or she free to choose with full knowledge from among all possible alternatives, would not give full consent, then A has power over B” (66).
While this is a general definition, it is still possible immediately to say some particular things about power. First, power allows a person unilaterally to change another’s constraints, and it can, when exercised long enough, change the habits of subordinates so that the latter act automatically in the interests of their masters. Second, those with personal power will inevitably also have social power, and this will allow them to make the rules that all must obey, and these will benefit the powerful. These rules, in turn, may come to seem normal, which lowers any costs the powerful would have to incur to maintain their power. Third, wherever there is power, there can be no democracy, since if there were, such power would be abolished by majority rule.
After defining power, Schutz examines it in a capitalist context. The most important kind of power is that which employers exert at the workplace. The power advantage capitalists have vis-Ã -vis their employees is as obvious as it is neglected by mainstream economists. Workers do not have the wealth to withstand periods without employment, and while they might quit a particular job, they cannot quit all jobs. In addition, the ownership of businesses gives capitalists the legal right to structure their workplaces (through detailed division of labor, mechanization, close monitoring to ensure maximum intensity, and so forth) so that the amount of labor used is always a good deal less than the supply of workers. This pool of surplus labor, Marx’s “reserve army,” serves to keep the employed in line, from making excessive wage and hour demands on the bosses. Employers also create artificial job hierarchies to split workers and keep them from seeing their common interests. In larger firms, seemingly impersonal bureaucracies make rules that come to be accepted as inevitable and even fair. All of these things allow employers to extract a surplus of work from their hired hands, a surplus that the employers get to keep. Power always involves a “taking” by the powerful from those without it. What is taken is the fruits of the exercise of their labor time. The control of the labor power of others over a definite period of time, in other words, is the principal basis of economic profit and power under capitalism.
Of course, a “pure” model of power in capitalism, one in which the capitalists merely exploit workers and the analysis stops there, is too simple, even if it remains the essential starting point, and Schutz devotes chapters to other classes, such as managers and professionals, to the hierarchy of businesses (with the largest monopoly capitals at the top), to political power, and to the power represented by complex social networks and cultural institutions such as colleges and universities and media. Each of these other power hierarchies has a certain degree of independence from the basic economic hierarchy, but each is, in the end, connected to it. Together, they serve inevitably to reinforce it; they make it more impregnable to change by, in large part, making it appear normal, the consequence of human nature, and creative of the best world possible. All of these other power structures make our economic system extraordinarily complex and difficult to penetrate, but they do not negate the essential importance of the capital-labor power inequality. They come into being because of it, and they make it stronger. We cannot understand any of them if we do not grasp it.
Once Schutz has laid out his theoretical position on inequality, he addresses the question of why it has risen so dramatically in the United States. He critiques several mainstream hypotheses, the most important of which is that the information technology revolution has raised the skill requirements (education and training costs) at the upper end of the wage hierarchy, while these costs at the lower end have either not risen or fallen. Since, according to neoclassical theory, wages equal the costs of entry into an occupation, this implies that wages at the top are rising disproportionately to those at the bottom. Schutz points out that wage equality began to rise at least a decade before the IT revolution took off. Also, education and training have become more equally distributed, and this should have been reflected in more equality. And if we consider a particular skill group, say those with college degrees in a certain field, inequality has risen within such groups. Schutz might have noted as well that the de-skilling practices associated with Frederick Taylor are deeply ingrained in what all managements do, so that any argument concerning widespread and long-lasting increases in skill requirements is implausible.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Michael D. Yates
Monthly Review
...
Schutz’s approach here is ingenious, and it takes us directly to a consideration of class not just as a condition—as in, you and I are in different social classes—but as a dynamic relationship in which one class exercises power over another so that society is structured in such a way that there can be no escape from persistent inequalities unless the power (class) relationship is confronted directly and abolished. As we make our choices, we also collectively make “social choices,” that is we structure the very society that faces us with constraints when we choose. However, to say this is to suggest that we are not at all equal in terms of how society itself is constructed. At the level of society, power is critically important. Here is how Schutz defines power: “If person A can get person B to do something in A’s interest by taking advantage of some situation or set of circumstances to which B, were he or she free to choose with full knowledge from among all possible alternatives, would not give full consent, then A has power over B” (66).
While this is a general definition, it is still possible immediately to say some particular things about power. First, power allows a person unilaterally to change another’s constraints, and it can, when exercised long enough, change the habits of subordinates so that the latter act automatically in the interests of their masters. Second, those with personal power will inevitably also have social power, and this will allow them to make the rules that all must obey, and these will benefit the powerful. These rules, in turn, may come to seem normal, which lowers any costs the powerful would have to incur to maintain their power. Third, wherever there is power, there can be no democracy, since if there were, such power would be abolished by majority rule.
After defining power, Schutz examines it in a capitalist context. The most important kind of power is that which employers exert at the workplace. The power advantage capitalists have vis-Ã -vis their employees is as obvious as it is neglected by mainstream economists. Workers do not have the wealth to withstand periods without employment, and while they might quit a particular job, they cannot quit all jobs. In addition, the ownership of businesses gives capitalists the legal right to structure their workplaces (through detailed division of labor, mechanization, close monitoring to ensure maximum intensity, and so forth) so that the amount of labor used is always a good deal less than the supply of workers. This pool of surplus labor, Marx’s “reserve army,” serves to keep the employed in line, from making excessive wage and hour demands on the bosses. Employers also create artificial job hierarchies to split workers and keep them from seeing their common interests. In larger firms, seemingly impersonal bureaucracies make rules that come to be accepted as inevitable and even fair. All of these things allow employers to extract a surplus of work from their hired hands, a surplus that the employers get to keep. Power always involves a “taking” by the powerful from those without it. What is taken is the fruits of the exercise of their labor time. The control of the labor power of others over a definite period of time, in other words, is the principal basis of economic profit and power under capitalism.
Of course, a “pure” model of power in capitalism, one in which the capitalists merely exploit workers and the analysis stops there, is too simple, even if it remains the essential starting point, and Schutz devotes chapters to other classes, such as managers and professionals, to the hierarchy of businesses (with the largest monopoly capitals at the top), to political power, and to the power represented by complex social networks and cultural institutions such as colleges and universities and media. Each of these other power hierarchies has a certain degree of independence from the basic economic hierarchy, but each is, in the end, connected to it. Together, they serve inevitably to reinforce it; they make it more impregnable to change by, in large part, making it appear normal, the consequence of human nature, and creative of the best world possible. All of these other power structures make our economic system extraordinarily complex and difficult to penetrate, but they do not negate the essential importance of the capital-labor power inequality. They come into being because of it, and they make it stronger. We cannot understand any of them if we do not grasp it.
Once Schutz has laid out his theoretical position on inequality, he addresses the question of why it has risen so dramatically in the United States. He critiques several mainstream hypotheses, the most important of which is that the information technology revolution has raised the skill requirements (education and training costs) at the upper end of the wage hierarchy, while these costs at the lower end have either not risen or fallen. Since, according to neoclassical theory, wages equal the costs of entry into an occupation, this implies that wages at the top are rising disproportionately to those at the bottom. Schutz points out that wage equality began to rise at least a decade before the IT revolution took off. Also, education and training have become more equally distributed, and this should have been reflected in more equality. And if we consider a particular skill group, say those with college degrees in a certain field, inequality has risen within such groups. Schutz might have noted as well that the de-skilling practices associated with Frederick Taylor are deeply ingrained in what all managements do, so that any argument concerning widespread and long-lasting increases in skill requirements is implausible.
To Read the Entire Essay
Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations: Peace and Conflict Studies Archive
To contact us Click HERE
Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations
Apodaca, Greg. Greg's Digital Portfolio (Professional website for his digital retouching services with examples of his work: 2012)
Benton, Michael. "Astroturf and Front Group Research: The Center for Union Facts Dialogic (February 22, 2012)
The Century of the Self (UK: Adam Curtis, 2002)
Christina, Greta. "Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, Packing Endless Hard-Ons: The Impossible Ideals Men Are Expected to Meet." AlterNet (June 20, 2011)
Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture Media Education Foundation (Sut Jhally:2010)
"Domestic violence: still not chic, artistic or cutting edge." Feministing (August 31, 2011)
Eisenstein, Charles. "The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies" Reality Sandwhich (June 24, 2009)
Gender Ads Project (Created by Scott Lukas, 2002)
Klein, Melanie. "Make-up and Hot Pink Toenails- Not Just a Girl Thing." WIMN's Voices (April 10, 2011)
Apodaca, Greg. Greg's Digital Portfolio (Professional website for his digital retouching services with examples of his work: 2012)
Benton, Michael. "Astroturf and Front Group Research: The Center for Union Facts Dialogic (February 22, 2012)
The Century of the Self (UK: Adam Curtis, 2002)
Christina, Greta. "Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, Packing Endless Hard-Ons: The Impossible Ideals Men Are Expected to Meet." AlterNet (June 20, 2011)
Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture Media Education Foundation (Sut Jhally:2010)
"Domestic violence: still not chic, artistic or cutting edge." Feministing (August 31, 2011)
Eisenstein, Charles. "The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies" Reality Sandwhich (June 24, 2009)
Gender Ads Project (Created by Scott Lukas, 2002)
Klein, Melanie. "Make-up and Hot Pink Toenails- Not Just a Girl Thing." WIMN's Voices (April 10, 2011)
Matthew J. Iannucci: Postmodern Antihero -- Capitalism and Heroism in Taxi Driver
To contact us Click HERE
Postmodern Antihero: Capitalism and Heroism in Taxi Driver
by Matthew J. Iannucci
Bright Lights Film Journal
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is a gritty, disturbing, nightmarish modern film classic that examines alienation in urban society. From a postmodernist's perspective, it combines the elements of noir, the Western, horror, and urban melodrama as it explores the psychological madness within an obsessed, inarticulate, lonely antihero cab driver, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). The plotline is simple: Travis directs his frustrated anger at the street dwellers of New York and a presidential candidate, and his unhinging assault is paired with an attempt to rescue a young prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster), from her predatory pimp. Historically, Taxi Driver appeared after a decade of war in Vietnam (1976), and after the Watergate crisis and subsequent resignation of Nixon. Five years later, when it was linked to would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley and his obsession with Jodie Foster, it became prima facie evidence for those on the political right who believed that violence in film translates into crime in real life. It is now almost impossible to separate Taxi Driver from this debate. However, Bickle's antiheroic character is more directly related to a failure of a capitalist system that pits his working-class position as a cab driver against those who have already been disenfranchised according to socioeconomic class, gender, and/or race.
As the film opens, Travis emerges from a forgotten Midwestern form of Americana that appears as obsolete as Travis himself in a big city heterogeneously composed of corporate financiers, political patrons, gun dealers, and prostitutes. In order to survive, he wants to "become a person like other people" as he puts it, but his own disenfranchisement from this nation has left him both intellectually and emotionally bankrupt from the Vietnam War. Freedom, the very nucleus of the American dream, is dependent on individual socioeconomic choices that inform and shape one's identity. But Travis's lack of a distinct identity compels him to cut and paste together what he believes is a heroic identity from an external menu of personages such as the "gunslinger" and the Indian. In actuality, what he does is stitch together a postmodern antiheroic identity that is nostalgic and pop culture-oriented, evidenced by the Mohawk haircut that he sports in the penultimate sequences — because he possesses no internal self.
Taxi Driver implies that identity is not genuine but always synergistic, a kind of potpourri of idolatry and maxims drawn from popular culture, especially from violent movies and television news. In this vein, Robert Ray views Taxi Driver as a postmodern "corrected" Right film, the type of film generally aimed at a naïve audience. Ray explains that a "Right" film presents a traditional conservative philosophy that promotes the application of Western-style, individual solutions to complex contemporary problems. He writes, "Taxi Driver's basic story followed the right wing's loyalty to the classic Western formula: a reluctant individual, confronted by evil, acts on his own to rid society of spoilers. As played by Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver's protagonist had obvious connections with Western heroes…even his name, Travis, linked him to the defender of the Alamo."1 Ray's notion that the film is a "correction" of the right-wing concept of justice is accurate because of its odd plot twist at the conclusion. Normally, such a story would identify Travis's complicity with these criminals and thereby relegate him to some form of institutional punishment. But the film's underlying theme reveals how absurd the Western idealistic depiction of heroism is because the news media in the film not only ignores his actions but also glorifies a psychopathic killer as a noble warrior.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Matthew J. Iannucci
Bright Lights Film Journal
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is a gritty, disturbing, nightmarish modern film classic that examines alienation in urban society. From a postmodernist's perspective, it combines the elements of noir, the Western, horror, and urban melodrama as it explores the psychological madness within an obsessed, inarticulate, lonely antihero cab driver, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). The plotline is simple: Travis directs his frustrated anger at the street dwellers of New York and a presidential candidate, and his unhinging assault is paired with an attempt to rescue a young prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster), from her predatory pimp. Historically, Taxi Driver appeared after a decade of war in Vietnam (1976), and after the Watergate crisis and subsequent resignation of Nixon. Five years later, when it was linked to would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley and his obsession with Jodie Foster, it became prima facie evidence for those on the political right who believed that violence in film translates into crime in real life. It is now almost impossible to separate Taxi Driver from this debate. However, Bickle's antiheroic character is more directly related to a failure of a capitalist system that pits his working-class position as a cab driver against those who have already been disenfranchised according to socioeconomic class, gender, and/or race.
As the film opens, Travis emerges from a forgotten Midwestern form of Americana that appears as obsolete as Travis himself in a big city heterogeneously composed of corporate financiers, political patrons, gun dealers, and prostitutes. In order to survive, he wants to "become a person like other people" as he puts it, but his own disenfranchisement from this nation has left him both intellectually and emotionally bankrupt from the Vietnam War. Freedom, the very nucleus of the American dream, is dependent on individual socioeconomic choices that inform and shape one's identity. But Travis's lack of a distinct identity compels him to cut and paste together what he believes is a heroic identity from an external menu of personages such as the "gunslinger" and the Indian. In actuality, what he does is stitch together a postmodern antiheroic identity that is nostalgic and pop culture-oriented, evidenced by the Mohawk haircut that he sports in the penultimate sequences — because he possesses no internal self.
Taxi Driver implies that identity is not genuine but always synergistic, a kind of potpourri of idolatry and maxims drawn from popular culture, especially from violent movies and television news. In this vein, Robert Ray views Taxi Driver as a postmodern "corrected" Right film, the type of film generally aimed at a naïve audience. Ray explains that a "Right" film presents a traditional conservative philosophy that promotes the application of Western-style, individual solutions to complex contemporary problems. He writes, "Taxi Driver's basic story followed the right wing's loyalty to the classic Western formula: a reluctant individual, confronted by evil, acts on his own to rid society of spoilers. As played by Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver's protagonist had obvious connections with Western heroes…even his name, Travis, linked him to the defender of the Alamo."1 Ray's notion that the film is a "correction" of the right-wing concept of justice is accurate because of its odd plot twist at the conclusion. Normally, such a story would identify Travis's complicity with these criminals and thereby relegate him to some form of institutional punishment. But the film's underlying theme reveals how absurd the Western idealistic depiction of heroism is because the news media in the film not only ignores his actions but also glorifies a psychopathic killer as a noble warrior.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
23 Mayıs 2012 Çarşamba
Rusty Morrison - After Urgency
To contact us Click HERE
The type of writing often called “experimental” is especially good at accessing personal crisis. Why this is, I’m not sure. What I’ve heard from some people is that they don’t know what to do with these poets usually, that they can’t figure out what they’re writing about, what the necessary moment is.
I’m talking about books like Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy and Rae Armantrout’s Next Life. These are books that place their question, the artistic question, out front in a way that some people say their other books don’t. This allows people who wouldn’t usually be drawn to the work of these poets a “way in.” Once in, the “experimental” nature of their poetry, the fragments, ellipses, and all, are seen not as exclusionary or off-putting as they had been called in the past, but, rather, helpful, meaning-laden.
It’s an interesting question about what and how the poet frames the art, and how this framing is then perceived. What’s especially interesting to me is that neither Bang nor Armantrout actually changed their art, or the way they make it. It’s just that this content, this subject matter, more people can hold onto.
I’m thinking about this as I’m reading Rusty Morrison’s excellent After Urgency. It’s also a book of a person in crisis, a book on mourning, beautifully rendered.
Here are a couple poems:
from Nowhere to say “daughter”
“My father and mother,” I say. As if words were a promontory.
What is it that I want to see from them? How far down,
I will bury two urns of ashes. But not to distinguish gods
from objects, objects from gods.
The answerer, who stands behind my grief, signals archly.
A linen to morning’s lingering, which I hasten to call morning light.
of gravel gather to become nothing more than pure distance
What disrupts even the most obstinately ordinal; fallen twigs
into what was once an abandoned nest.
Small opossum carcass at roadside.
Too simple to call that death—a something more solid than flesh.
Today, the tinsel flicker of saying anyone’s name aloud cuts
How long before I achieve the calloused fingers that can strum
After Urgency
There is no end to waiting, no mind outside the mind
startled by even a seabird’s wing-extended shadow,
wooden stairs, a dark odor as though the clouds were
the sky a whitewashed plaster that fractures and falls away
pebbles and shells that are not the ocean
The type of writing often called “experimental” is especially good at accessing personal crisis. Why this is, I’m not sure. What I’ve heard from some people is that they don’t know what to do with these poets usually, that they can’t figure out what they’re writing about, what the necessary moment is.
I’m talking about books like Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy and Rae Armantrout’s Next Life. These are books that place their question, the artistic question, out front in a way that some people say their other books don’t. This allows people who wouldn’t usually be drawn to the work of these poets a “way in.” Once in, the “experimental” nature of their poetry, the fragments, ellipses, and all, are seen not as exclusionary or off-putting as they had been called in the past, but, rather, helpful, meaning-laden.
It’s an interesting question about what and how the poet frames the art, and how this framing is then perceived. What’s especially interesting to me is that neither Bang nor Armantrout actually changed their art, or the way they make it. It’s just that this content, this subject matter, more people can hold onto.
I’m thinking about this as I’m reading Rusty Morrison’s excellent After Urgency. It’s also a book of a person in crisis, a book on mourning, beautifully rendered.
Here are a couple poems:
from Nowhere to say “daughter”
“My father and mother,” I say. As if words were a promontory.
What is it that I want to see from them? How far down,
I will bury two urns of ashes. But not to distinguish gods
from objects, objects from gods.
The answerer, who stands behind my grief, signals archly.
A linen to morning’s lingering, which I hasten to call morning light.
of gravel gather to become nothing more than pure distance
What disrupts even the most obstinately ordinal; fallen twigs
into what was once an abandoned nest.
Small opossum carcass at roadside.
Too simple to call that death—a something more solid than flesh.
Today, the tinsel flicker of saying anyone’s name aloud cuts
How long before I achieve the calloused fingers that can strum
After Urgency
There is no end to waiting, no mind outside the mind
startled by even a seabird’s wing-extended shadow,
wooden stairs, a dark odor as though the clouds were
the sky a whitewashed plaster that fractures and falls away
pebbles and shells that are not the ocean
Getting All Misty Over Fear Fun
To contact us Click HERE
J. Tillman as Father John Misty
Far and away the biggest surprise for me, and my favorite album of the year so far, is J. Tillman's new project as Father John Misty. I wasn't a big fan of either Tillman or Fleet Foxes, but boy do I like this Father John Misty thing.
And here I was thinking 2012 was going to be a competent, unexciting year in music.
Here's a typical review:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/father-john-misty-fear-fun,73222/
“But the myths that most fascinate Tillman derive from his new home, a famed hillside community that immediately conjures all kinds of hippie dreams and Hollywood nightmares. The death-obsessed folk-rocker “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” is a direct homage to Young’s On The Beach, a record that shares Fear Fun’s sense of spiritual confusion and sardonic cynicism about the canyon’s tweaked culture. “I’m Writing A Novel” takes this weariness in a likeably lighthearted direction—this is where the talking dogs show up—that carries over to the whole of Fear Fun. Tillman soaks up the sounds, smells, and free-floating strangeness of his environment, and revels in its humanity.”
You can listen to the whole thing on SoundCloud (and rip it if you're clever, but you should buy it instead) through this site:
http://faronheit.com/2012/05/snapshot-review-father-john-misty-fear-fun-sub-popbella-union/
Seriously good music. Just saying.
Here’s a clip of what promises to be an eccentric and excellent stage show:
Is J. Tillman going to turn out to be a Bowie-like chameleon? Who knows. I just hope Tillman keeps this Father John Misty thing going awhile.
J. Tillman as Father John MistyFar and away the biggest surprise for me, and my favorite album of the year so far, is J. Tillman's new project as Father John Misty. I wasn't a big fan of either Tillman or Fleet Foxes, but boy do I like this Father John Misty thing.
And here I was thinking 2012 was going to be a competent, unexciting year in music.
Here's a typical review:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/father-john-misty-fear-fun,73222/
“But the myths that most fascinate Tillman derive from his new home, a famed hillside community that immediately conjures all kinds of hippie dreams and Hollywood nightmares. The death-obsessed folk-rocker “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” is a direct homage to Young’s On The Beach, a record that shares Fear Fun’s sense of spiritual confusion and sardonic cynicism about the canyon’s tweaked culture. “I’m Writing A Novel” takes this weariness in a likeably lighthearted direction—this is where the talking dogs show up—that carries over to the whole of Fear Fun. Tillman soaks up the sounds, smells, and free-floating strangeness of his environment, and revels in its humanity.”
You can listen to the whole thing on SoundCloud (and rip it if you're clever, but you should buy it instead) through this site:
http://faronheit.com/2012/05/snapshot-review-father-john-misty-fear-fun-sub-popbella-union/
Seriously good music. Just saying.
Here’s a clip of what promises to be an eccentric and excellent stage show:
Is J. Tillman going to turn out to be a Bowie-like chameleon? Who knows. I just hope Tillman keeps this Father John Misty thing going awhile.
Aftermodern!
To contact us Click HERE
In which one gets one's ducks in a row.
Once again, the world would be a more interesting place if poets were taken as seriously as visual artists. In the meanwhile, we have to extrapolate:
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2009-03-17/altermodern-a-conversation-with-nicolas-bourriaud/
from Altermodern: A Conversation with Nicolas Bourriaud
NB: The Radicant , which is now out, is . . . . a critique of postmodernism as an ideology and as a historical narrative, and an attempt to define what’s next, that I name the ‘altermodern’. But to answer your question, The Radicant also prolongates and deepens some aspects of Postproduction, clarifying the political statement of this earlier book. Basically, it insists on the difference between appropriating and what I call ‘formal collectivism’, and attributes a positive value to precariousness as a cultural phenomenon. In a way, it is about the value of programming and deejaying as methods: what does it mean? What do artists actually do when they use already existing forms? What ideology does it relate to?
To cut a long story short, what we traditionally call reality is in fact a simple montage. On the basis of that conclusion, the aesthetic challenge of contemporary art resides in recomposing that montage: art is an editing table that enables us to realize alternative, temporary versions of reality with the same material (basically, everyday life). Thus, artists manipulate social forms, reorganize them and incorporate them in original scenarios, deconstructing the script on which the illusory legitimacy of those scenarios was grounded. The artist de-programs in order to re-program, suggesting that there are other possible usages for techniques, tools and spaces at our disposition.
The cultural or social structures in which we live are nothing more for art than elements to be used, objects that must be examined and formally addressed. That, to my mind, is the essential content of the political program of contemporary art: maintaining the world in a precarious state or, in other words, permanently affirming the transitory, circumstantial nature of the institutions and the rules that govern individual or collective behavior. The main function of the instruments of communication of capitalism is to repeat a message, which is: we live in a finite, immovable and definitive political framework, only the decor must change at high speed. Art questions this message, and reverses it. It is an idea that was actually the core of Relational Aesthetics already, the Marxist idea that there is no stable “essence” of humankind, which is nothing but the transitory result of what human beings do at a certain moment of history. I think this might be the cornerstone of all my writings, in a way.
In which one gets one's ducks in a row.Once again, the world would be a more interesting place if poets were taken as seriously as visual artists. In the meanwhile, we have to extrapolate:
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2009-03-17/altermodern-a-conversation-with-nicolas-bourriaud/
from Altermodern: A Conversation with Nicolas Bourriaud
NB: The Radicant , which is now out, is . . . . a critique of postmodernism as an ideology and as a historical narrative, and an attempt to define what’s next, that I name the ‘altermodern’. But to answer your question, The Radicant also prolongates and deepens some aspects of Postproduction, clarifying the political statement of this earlier book. Basically, it insists on the difference between appropriating and what I call ‘formal collectivism’, and attributes a positive value to precariousness as a cultural phenomenon. In a way, it is about the value of programming and deejaying as methods: what does it mean? What do artists actually do when they use already existing forms? What ideology does it relate to?
To cut a long story short, what we traditionally call reality is in fact a simple montage. On the basis of that conclusion, the aesthetic challenge of contemporary art resides in recomposing that montage: art is an editing table that enables us to realize alternative, temporary versions of reality with the same material (basically, everyday life). Thus, artists manipulate social forms, reorganize them and incorporate them in original scenarios, deconstructing the script on which the illusory legitimacy of those scenarios was grounded. The artist de-programs in order to re-program, suggesting that there are other possible usages for techniques, tools and spaces at our disposition.
The cultural or social structures in which we live are nothing more for art than elements to be used, objects that must be examined and formally addressed. That, to my mind, is the essential content of the political program of contemporary art: maintaining the world in a precarious state or, in other words, permanently affirming the transitory, circumstantial nature of the institutions and the rules that govern individual or collective behavior. The main function of the instruments of communication of capitalism is to repeat a message, which is: we live in a finite, immovable and definitive political framework, only the decor must change at high speed. Art questions this message, and reverses it. It is an idea that was actually the core of Relational Aesthetics already, the Marxist idea that there is no stable “essence” of humankind, which is nothing but the transitory result of what human beings do at a certain moment of history. I think this might be the cornerstone of all my writings, in a way.
Songs from Books of Poetry
To contact us Click HERE
It looks like I’ve stopped making song versions of books of poetry. I was hoping to get to ten, but I only got to five. Maybe I’ll go back to it. But, either way, it was fun. So here’s my EP then. If you want, you can download them. Freebies!
“Next Life”
Derived from Rae Armantrout’s book of the same name.
“A Joke I Keep Telling Myself”
Derived from Johannes Goransson's A New Quarantine Will Take My Place.
“What’s Amazing”
Derived from Heather Christle’s book of the same name.
“Your Father on the Train of Ghosts”
Derived from the Waldrep/Gallaher book of the same name.
“No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear”
Derived from the book of the same name by J.A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods.
It looks like I’ve stopped making song versions of books of poetry. I was hoping to get to ten, but I only got to five. Maybe I’ll go back to it. But, either way, it was fun. So here’s my EP then. If you want, you can download them. Freebies!
“Next Life”
Derived from Rae Armantrout’s book of the same name.
“A Joke I Keep Telling Myself”
Derived from Johannes Goransson's A New Quarantine Will Take My Place.
“What’s Amazing”
Derived from Heather Christle’s book of the same name.
“Your Father on the Train of Ghosts”
Derived from the Waldrep/Gallaher book of the same name.
“No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear”
Derived from the book of the same name by J.A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods.
Any Given Wednesday
To contact us Click HERE
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
I’ve been having an interesting time reading the new issue of the literary journal Fifth Wednesday, as it came in while I was thinking more about Marjorie Perloff’s complaint in Boston Review, which got me back to thinking about very different takes and complaints by Tony Hoagland, etc.
And so here is a journal with several of the poets I think of as “the general aesthetic” of our contemporary version of American poetry: Kim Addonizio, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, and Dean Young. They are not “Pulitzer prize winner” popular (though any of them could be at any moment), but they are the ones I often see on the marquee of AWP advertizing and other festivals and PBS News Hour emails. So here are four “A-listers” together in a journal with new poems. The issue has many other poets as well, not quite as well known, but also part of what I would think of as the general middle of the zeitgeist: Allison Joseph, J. Allyn Rosser, James Harms, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, and Mark Halliday. And then there’s Donald Revell, certainly well-known, though I’m not sure how “popular” he is.
If I’m right in categorizing these poets as representative of where mainstream poetry is at, then finding similarities in their work would describe the tendencies of mainstream poetry.
(Disclaimer: I also have work in this issue of Fifth Wednesday, but I’m going to ignore it.)
The poems I read by these poets do seem to indicate a (maybe slight, but still readily apparent) turn away from the description of poetry that many have been using to describe Post-confessional, pseudo autobiographical poetry for the past decade or three, namely, a poetry of small domestic measures, that through vaguely heightened language and heavy use of simile, bring the reader to an elevated epiphany, some general statement on the union of souls, or somesuch. At least that’s a version of the negative description I’ve heard of the tendency, and it seems to be the one Perloff is still working from in her Boston Review essay. Contrary to that, Hoagland, in several essays over the last few years, has postulated a “skittery poem of our time” in which all things were shifty and provisional, ironic, and aphasic. At least that’s my version of the negative extreme of his position.
This is mostly a waste of time, this chasing a description of a period, but people keep doing it. So here I am sitting here with this journal, looking at these poems. In many ways it’s a random journal of a random group of poets, but, in a way, maybe that’s a better way to take the temperature of the times.
In this issue, Kim Addonizio has two poems. The first, titled “Divine,” is addressed to a “you” who could easily be an “I,” described as in the “middle of your life,” who then meets a man and then has a bad go of it and finally is left alone again. It’s a love/loss poem, but what makes this different is that Addonizio has decided, rather than to use autobiographical-sounding language, to use more dreamlike and self-aware language, so the you, after outrunning all the werewolves of youth, ends up in a field:
There was one man standing in it.
He held out his arms.
Ping went your iHeart
so you took off all your clothes.
After a time, the relationship sours. Or, for the poem’s purposes, it must sour:
Something bad had to happen
because no trouble, no story, so
Fuck you, fine, whatever,
here come more black trees
hung with sleeping bats
like ugly Christmas ornaments.
What’s interesting to me in this and the other poems in this issue is the way Addonizio is incorporating what would be described as the methods of Skittery poetry to write a very Not-Skittery poem. Why this is interesting is because it changes the way people tend to want to describe contemporary poetry. “One type of poetry writes this way while another writes a different way.” That sort of thing. When really the consideration is different. Addonizio is using imagery more akin to the poetry of those skittery younger poets like Heather Christle or Zachary Schomburg (as my two super easy examples), but to retain her desire for the reader to always know exactly what she’s saying.
What we should and could be talking about is less the methods and strategies of poetry writing and more the values the poems exhibit. Addonizio and Hoagland and Young and Hicok all share the value of communication. They, even as they’re playing with image and association, are not trying to dislocate the reader, but to bring the reader to stay on track to the inevitability of the poem’s conclusion. This is not, in strategy, the way Perloff is describing the mainstream poetry of our time, but it is in value.
That’s one example, but the poetry of most of the other people above fits generally in that same description. Hoagland has a poem titled “Warning for Shoppers” where he addresses a “you” in a life that’s a version of a fantastic supermarket, full of real things such as “wasp spray that smells like fresh citrus” as well as more metaphorical things such as “a capsule that eliminates / ambivalence,” but what you can’t get is a way to keep the “hope and disappointment / of being human / from rising and rolling / / off you in waves.”
Method-wise this poem, as well as Addonizio’s, is working in the role of the imagination to advance the poem, while value-wise, its wanting to transfer a common experience back to the reader, relocating the reader where the reader already was: You can’t buy happiness.
It’s poetry such as this that defies the easy categories, when talking about modes and strategies.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.I’ve been having an interesting time reading the new issue of the literary journal Fifth Wednesday, as it came in while I was thinking more about Marjorie Perloff’s complaint in Boston Review, which got me back to thinking about very different takes and complaints by Tony Hoagland, etc.
And so here is a journal with several of the poets I think of as “the general aesthetic” of our contemporary version of American poetry: Kim Addonizio, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, and Dean Young. They are not “Pulitzer prize winner” popular (though any of them could be at any moment), but they are the ones I often see on the marquee of AWP advertizing and other festivals and PBS News Hour emails. So here are four “A-listers” together in a journal with new poems. The issue has many other poets as well, not quite as well known, but also part of what I would think of as the general middle of the zeitgeist: Allison Joseph, J. Allyn Rosser, James Harms, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, and Mark Halliday. And then there’s Donald Revell, certainly well-known, though I’m not sure how “popular” he is.
If I’m right in categorizing these poets as representative of where mainstream poetry is at, then finding similarities in their work would describe the tendencies of mainstream poetry.
(Disclaimer: I also have work in this issue of Fifth Wednesday, but I’m going to ignore it.)
The poems I read by these poets do seem to indicate a (maybe slight, but still readily apparent) turn away from the description of poetry that many have been using to describe Post-confessional, pseudo autobiographical poetry for the past decade or three, namely, a poetry of small domestic measures, that through vaguely heightened language and heavy use of simile, bring the reader to an elevated epiphany, some general statement on the union of souls, or somesuch. At least that’s a version of the negative description I’ve heard of the tendency, and it seems to be the one Perloff is still working from in her Boston Review essay. Contrary to that, Hoagland, in several essays over the last few years, has postulated a “skittery poem of our time” in which all things were shifty and provisional, ironic, and aphasic. At least that’s my version of the negative extreme of his position.
This is mostly a waste of time, this chasing a description of a period, but people keep doing it. So here I am sitting here with this journal, looking at these poems. In many ways it’s a random journal of a random group of poets, but, in a way, maybe that’s a better way to take the temperature of the times.
In this issue, Kim Addonizio has two poems. The first, titled “Divine,” is addressed to a “you” who could easily be an “I,” described as in the “middle of your life,” who then meets a man and then has a bad go of it and finally is left alone again. It’s a love/loss poem, but what makes this different is that Addonizio has decided, rather than to use autobiographical-sounding language, to use more dreamlike and self-aware language, so the you, after outrunning all the werewolves of youth, ends up in a field:
There was one man standing in it.
He held out his arms.
Ping went your iHeart
so you took off all your clothes.
After a time, the relationship sours. Or, for the poem’s purposes, it must sour:
Something bad had to happen
because no trouble, no story, so
Fuck you, fine, whatever,
here come more black trees
hung with sleeping bats
like ugly Christmas ornaments.
What’s interesting to me in this and the other poems in this issue is the way Addonizio is incorporating what would be described as the methods of Skittery poetry to write a very Not-Skittery poem. Why this is interesting is because it changes the way people tend to want to describe contemporary poetry. “One type of poetry writes this way while another writes a different way.” That sort of thing. When really the consideration is different. Addonizio is using imagery more akin to the poetry of those skittery younger poets like Heather Christle or Zachary Schomburg (as my two super easy examples), but to retain her desire for the reader to always know exactly what she’s saying.
What we should and could be talking about is less the methods and strategies of poetry writing and more the values the poems exhibit. Addonizio and Hoagland and Young and Hicok all share the value of communication. They, even as they’re playing with image and association, are not trying to dislocate the reader, but to bring the reader to stay on track to the inevitability of the poem’s conclusion. This is not, in strategy, the way Perloff is describing the mainstream poetry of our time, but it is in value.
That’s one example, but the poetry of most of the other people above fits generally in that same description. Hoagland has a poem titled “Warning for Shoppers” where he addresses a “you” in a life that’s a version of a fantastic supermarket, full of real things such as “wasp spray that smells like fresh citrus” as well as more metaphorical things such as “a capsule that eliminates / ambivalence,” but what you can’t get is a way to keep the “hope and disappointment / of being human / from rising and rolling / / off you in waves.”
Method-wise this poem, as well as Addonizio’s, is working in the role of the imagination to advance the poem, while value-wise, its wanting to transfer a common experience back to the reader, relocating the reader where the reader already was: You can’t buy happiness.
It’s poetry such as this that defies the easy categories, when talking about modes and strategies.
17 Mayıs 2012 Perşembe
MyCloud
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There's been a lot of talk lately about cloud-based music services. [Editor's note: all of those links are worth reading, if you have some time. You know you do.] If the concept is new to you, here's the gist: instead of storing your MP3s (or ideally, FLAC files) on your computer, you store them on someone else's server, and access them over the internet. It's not a new concept, but recently it's gotten a lot of buzz and helped revive the horrendously overused term "cloud" to mean "something that lives on a remote server." All web sites live in the cloud, and you access them from wherever you are. The big difference here is that music used to be something you owned, not something to which you (essentially) rented access.
I've had my own version of the cloud for a while now. Before there was Google Music, Apple's iCloud, or Amazon Cloud Player, there was the Squeezebox. For years now, I've used some simple server software, a decent home internet connection, and a dynamic DNS service to let myself stream my music from any other computer. The benefit for me is that I don't have to upload my sizable music collection (most of which is in FLAC, meaning the files take up a lot more space) to someone else's servers. This could realistically take days if not weeks, since I have a pretty low upload speed at home. Second, I'm not relying on a third party to give me access to my music. If Google or Amazon decides that they don't trust the provenance of one of my tracks, that's too bad for me - I simply lose access to it. Or if they decide that cloud-based music services are no longer a good business for them to be in, that's the end of that. Third, I have control over how my files are organized, tagged, listed, sorted, etc. - basically I am in control of the metadata and how I access it. And as we all know, metadata is cool [PDF].
But it goes deeper than that. At heart, I'm a collector, and I like the idea that I own my music. I don't want to give up control over to it to someone else, nor am I remotely comfortable with the idea of renting my music from a service like Rhapsody. I used to feel the same way about DVDs - I wanted to own them (I still do), because owning them feels good. A DVD library, much like a book library and certainly a music library, says something about its owner. I know this is somewhat ridiculous, especially in my case because all of my DVDs are in crates (New York apartments aren't huge on storage space), not visible to the public. I have similar qualms about switching from printed books to the Kindle (which I love). It just doesn't feel the same to be renting access to books as opposed to actually owning them. And yet I couldn't wait to move from physical CDs to digital files.
But despite all that, I do download books to the Kindle. And I love streaming movies from Netflix. But music is different - I'm not reading a book or watching a movie for 8 hours a day, but I have music on non-stop during my workday. And on my headphones when I ride the subway or walk the dog (unless I'm listening to the radio or a podcast). Music occupies a unique and very large place in my media consumption pantheon, and so for now, at least, I'm not willing to give mine up to someone else. I will suffer for this, I'm sure. For example, there is still no good, reliable way to stream from the Squeezebox to my Android phone (I've tried other services like Subsonic, with less-than-great results). And while it's easy for me to stream my music to any computer, it takes some setup and a bit of work - not a lot, but not as little as just downloading and installing the Google Music player, for example. But despite some drawbacks, maintaining my own "cloud" just feels right to me, and so that's how I'll be rolling. At least until something better comes along.
How do you store/manage/stream your music? Tell me in the comments.
 |
| Cloud wisps by flickr user turtlemom4bacon |
I've had my own version of the cloud for a while now. Before there was Google Music, Apple's iCloud, or Amazon Cloud Player, there was the Squeezebox. For years now, I've used some simple server software, a decent home internet connection, and a dynamic DNS service to let myself stream my music from any other computer. The benefit for me is that I don't have to upload my sizable music collection (most of which is in FLAC, meaning the files take up a lot more space) to someone else's servers. This could realistically take days if not weeks, since I have a pretty low upload speed at home. Second, I'm not relying on a third party to give me access to my music. If Google or Amazon decides that they don't trust the provenance of one of my tracks, that's too bad for me - I simply lose access to it. Or if they decide that cloud-based music services are no longer a good business for them to be in, that's the end of that. Third, I have control over how my files are organized, tagged, listed, sorted, etc. - basically I am in control of the metadata and how I access it. And as we all know, metadata is cool [PDF].
But it goes deeper than that. At heart, I'm a collector, and I like the idea that I own my music. I don't want to give up control over to it to someone else, nor am I remotely comfortable with the idea of renting my music from a service like Rhapsody. I used to feel the same way about DVDs - I wanted to own them (I still do), because owning them feels good. A DVD library, much like a book library and certainly a music library, says something about its owner. I know this is somewhat ridiculous, especially in my case because all of my DVDs are in crates (New York apartments aren't huge on storage space), not visible to the public. I have similar qualms about switching from printed books to the Kindle (which I love). It just doesn't feel the same to be renting access to books as opposed to actually owning them. And yet I couldn't wait to move from physical CDs to digital files.
But despite all that, I do download books to the Kindle. And I love streaming movies from Netflix. But music is different - I'm not reading a book or watching a movie for 8 hours a day, but I have music on non-stop during my workday. And on my headphones when I ride the subway or walk the dog (unless I'm listening to the radio or a podcast). Music occupies a unique and very large place in my media consumption pantheon, and so for now, at least, I'm not willing to give mine up to someone else. I will suffer for this, I'm sure. For example, there is still no good, reliable way to stream from the Squeezebox to my Android phone (I've tried other services like Subsonic, with less-than-great results). And while it's easy for me to stream my music to any computer, it takes some setup and a bit of work - not a lot, but not as little as just downloading and installing the Google Music player, for example. But despite some drawbacks, maintaining my own "cloud" just feels right to me, and so that's how I'll be rolling. At least until something better comes along.
How do you store/manage/stream your music? Tell me in the comments.
I Wrote A New Song!
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Summertime doesn't just mean Mother Nature training a red-hot death laser on us with no end in sight, it also heralds the return of 50/90, which is the summertime cousin of FAWM. Basically it's a web-based community who are taking on the challenge of writing 50 songs in 90 days. Yes, it's crazy. So crazy, in fact, that I have never attempted it, but I do try and write a few songs each summer, in large part because I find that in the absence of a deadline of some sort, my songwriting tends to grind to an unglamorous halt.
Well, now that the heat and air quality have made going outside quite possibly the last thing I will ever do, I spent some time over the past week or so hiding indoors working on a new song. I've had the background music for this one rattling around my head for months, and finally decided to do something with it. The melody line was inspired by 2 things: 1) I recently received this awesome Rode microphone (my first condenser mic!) as a birthday present and needed something with a lot of soaring high notes to justify it, and 2) my wife nudging me to "write something that shows off [my] voice." I don't know if this satisfies #2, but I tried. As usual with my songs when I'm just starting one of these songwriting cycles, the lyrics are more or less about getting off your ass and doing something creative, etc.
The song is called "Set You Free." Enjoy!
Spotify: Awesome, But Not Awesome Enough
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Like a lot of people, I've spent some time over the past couple of weeks trying out Spotify (and no, I don't have an invite to give you, sorry). And I've reached a conclusion: namely, that while Spotify offers a lot, I will never switch all my music to a rental/streaming model. I was already pretty sure of that, and then last week's Netflix streaming outage (on the heels of jacking up their prices to push users towards streaming-only plans) convinced me. Access to music is simply too important to me for me to rely on a rental model where I'm at the whim of a company who is subject to outages, price increases, changes in Terms of Service, etc. But that's not to say there's nothing good about Spotify; on the contrary, it's a pretty amazing service, and I'm glad it's finally available in the US. Here's how my experience with Spotify has gone so far:
I was delighted to get the invite in my inbox. I installed it immediately, and watched as it scanned my music folder (without asking me) and added the music files on my computer to its local database. Well, not all the music files - only the MP3s. For me, this was a big drawback. Most of my music is in FLAC, and so Spotify only picked up about 40% of my local files. This is important not just for playing those files locally, but because Spotify uses the presence of a file in your local library to determine whether or not to play ads to you while you listen - for example, say I searched for "Viva Voce" in Spotify. If their new album
Speaking of those ads, they are horrible. My first 24 hours or so with Spotify was a beautiful, ad-free music playground. I looked up artists I'd wanted to hear more of, I could quickly find bands that a friend had recommended to me, etc. all without hearing or seeing a single ad. Then at some point I closed and restarted Spotify, and when it came back, it was more like listening to commercial radio while browsing the web without AdBlock. The ads were typically either for the latest album from some horrible nu-metal band (rather jarring to hear in the middle of an otherwise nice playlist) or for Spotify Premium. Sometimes the music would just stop after an ad played, and the interface would show me a message saying that my music would resume after the ad had played. I had to restart to fix that.
Now for the good: their music library is nearly unlimited. I've had a hard time stumping it (but when I did, it wasn't always with something obscure - for example, they have The Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" but not Dylan's), and so I've enjoyed exploring the back catalogue of some artists I like. The queuing system is convenient and intuitive, it's simple to make (and share) a playlist, and in general, it works the way you'd expect it to, which is nice. Speaking of playlists, "shared playlists" are a very cool feature - that's the ability to see playlists that your Facebook friends have put together. If their playlists contain songs from their local library that Spotify doesn't have in their rights network, you can't play them, but you can play everything else, so it adds a nice social aspect to the experience. I do wish that it didn't enable sharing of your playlists by default, though - I don't necessarily want to share every random playlist I throw together. But it is cool to see the list of Facebook friends growing as more and more people get access to invites.
Speaking of shared playlists, they made me realize that for me, Spotify is missing a key feature: recommendations. I found myself looking to shared playlists as a way to find some new music, or something that I might like (the old-fashioned way, i.e. "what are my friends into?"). I know that recommendation isn't in Spotify's core path, and that makes sense...but I was hit with the conundrum of "now I have access to nearly every song, ever....what the hell do I listen to?" Fortunately, I found Spotibot, which generates Spotify playlists for you based on various information from your Last.FM profile. This is just one of many mashups and integrations that Spotify highlights here. All of this is made possible via the Spotify Metadata API, which appears to be pretty great - though I'm not sure yet how it compares to the one from Echo Nest in terms of depth of data.
After playing with Spotify for a while, I did notice some unexplained UI things that were not intuitive to me (and not well explained in their documentation) - e.g. the music note icon (which I think means that a file is in your local library), the "Unlink Tracks" context-menu item, the "Go To Replacement" context-menu item, and a few others. But on the whole, Spotify is a great addition to the world of digital music players/streamers/aggregators. With the ads playing, I can't see myself using the free version every day - it's just too annoying. And I can't really see paying for access to thousands and thousands of tracks I don't want to listen to just to get access to a few more that I do.
How about you? Have you used it yet? What did you think? What's great? What's missing? Tell me in the comments.
Web Developer's Lament
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This one's for all the web developers out there...
I'm on a "working vacation" for a couple weeks up in Belfast, ME, staying in a house on the bay. Somehow working from here doesn't feel quite as much like work as it does when I work from my usual office location. However, events have conspired to make it feel as much like work as it possibly could - namely, a client has been doing their best to make sure that no piece of code I write this week is ever actually done, due to the specifications changing daily, not unlike clouds shifting in a summer breeze.
So I wrote this song to explain how I feel. [This isn't all about this particular project, but that was a good starting point.]
This is a live recording made down by the water.
Lyrics:
They changed the specs again
Just when I was nearly finished
Said the client changed their mind
I don't know if I can take this
They changed the specs again
I've already written so much code
And the thought of starting over
Makes my sanity erode
Chorus:
Why won't they just let me finish?
Why can't I just be done?
Why won't they just let me finish?
Is this their idea of fun?
They changed the specs again
Pushed the launch up by 2 weeks
They've added a shopping cart
God, my knees are feeling weak
They changed the specs again
To match the new designs
They want it to just "work like Google"
Lord, I'm losing my mind
[Chorus]
I give up, I give up.
I give up, I give up.
Let's add some features, I give up.
Let's build a CMS from scratch, I give up.
Let's refactor every function, I give up.
Let's start calling ourselves agile, I give up.
Let's have a status meeting, I give up.
Let's adopt a framework, I give up.
Let's add members' only area, I give up.
Let's change databases, I give up.
Let's review my timesheet, I give up.
Let's never document anything, I give up.
Let's outsource to India
Still More Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck
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"Christmas music." "Holiday tunes." "Mind-numbing winter-themed muzak pabulum." Call it what you will, our ears are subjected to a lot of crap every winter. Well, Wired For Music is here to help, with yet another edition of our patented "Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck" playlist.
This year's playlist has some songs that a lot of you will probably already know, but I've had enough people ask me about them in the past that I finally decided to put them on. Hopefully there'll be some surprises on here too for more "advanced" listeners, whatever that means. And it even features one song I swore I would never, ever include (it grew on me).
Enjoy, and be sure to check out the playlists from previous years!
Hungry for more? Check out some of these awesome holiday playlists:
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| SK Holiday Open House by flickr user vastateparksstaff |
This year's playlist has some songs that a lot of you will probably already know, but I've had enough people ask me about them in the past that I finally decided to put them on. Hopefully there'll be some surprises on here too for more "advanced" listeners, whatever that means. And it even features one song I swore I would never, ever include (it grew on me).
Enjoy, and be sure to check out the playlists from previous years!
- Dean Martin - A Marshmallow World
"The King of Cool" gives us his take on this sugary classic. Dean's version was never as popular as Bing Crosby's, but it does feature some of his trademark near-drunken slurring, particularly on the last verse's "take a walk-with-yourfav-or-itegirl." This song makes me wish it was snowing right now. - Gruff Rhys - Slashed Wrists This Christmas
This is the first track of the Super Furry Animals' frontman's brilliantly titled "Atheist Xmas EP." It's a bit repetitive, but then, so this this whole season, isn't it? - The Futureheads - Christmas Was Better In The 80s
Not entirely sure why these guys are so nostalgic given that I think they're younger than I am, but it's still a great song. Apparently it's a big deal in the UK to release a single at Christmas time, which explains the existence of a few tracks on this playlist. Some of them work out great, and others...don't make it to this playlist. - The Gasoline Brothers - Hungover Boxing Day
This Dutch band really nails that feeling of waking up on Boxing Day and realizing - wait, what the hell is Boxing Day? Europe is weird. - Badly Drawn Boy - Donna and Blitzen
This song definitely sounds like it was written a few days before the deadline for getting on the Xmas single charts or something like that. The lyrics read like he was doing a holiday-themed Mad Libs and just plugged in words like "sleigh ride" and "reindeer" here and there. But the music saves it, especially those massive timpanis. - Marvin Gaye - Purple Snowflakes
Nothing says Christmas like (a presumably high) Marvin Gaye singing about "purple snowflakes" while his backup singers sprinkle phrases like "chestnuts roasting" and "tootsies toasting" all over the place. This song is ridiculously good, and his voice is just angelic. - Okkervil River - Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas
I can't decide if this is more depressing than Tom Waits's "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis" (featured on 2008's playlist), but it's damn depressing regardless. Seriously, go read the lyrics, I'll wait. Can you imagine if Jeff Tweedy still wrote songs like this? Wow, that would be awesome. - Morphine - Sexy Christmas Baby Mine
Still not depressed? Listen to a dead man croon "Merry for you. Not too merry for me./I want you here with me. Misery loves company." You're welcome. - The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York
I resisted this song for the past 5 years - in fact, I really hated it until late last year when it suddenly just clicked for me. I don't know if it's living in New York or what, but one of my most-hated Christmas songs ever has finally wormed its way into my heart. This one's a classic that I'm sure you've heard a million times, but it still belongs on this playlist. - Barenaked Ladies - I Saw Three Ships
Just a pretty little palate cleanser. They really should have let Steven sing first, but that's being nitpicky. - Lord Nelson - A Party For Santa Claus
Feeling chilly? Let the hot island rhythms of Tobago (by way of Brooklyn) of this little ditty warm you up (or go drink some cocoa, I don't care). I like the message of this song - how come no one ever gets presents for Santa? - The Beach Boys - Little Saint Nick
Of course The Beach Boys would write a song about Santa's sled. This song is stupid, but I love it. And it features the brilliant line: "Christmas comes this time each year." Deep. - Aimee Mann - I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas
A happy little song about getting off the ol' drugs for Christmastime. Isn't that sweet? - Ella Fitzgerald - Good Morning Blues
Leave it to Ella to have a bad time at Christmas. "Don't send me nothing for Christmas but my baby back to me" - it's a great time of the year to be alone, isn't it? - dj BC - Waltz Of The Flowers (reflower)
An interesting mix of a classic, from dj BC's "A Very Re:Composition Christmas." Lots of interesting stuff on that album, it's really worth checking out if you like classical music, remixes, or both. - The Ramones - Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight)
A message of love and peace for the holidays from Joey Ramone. [Presumably he and the person to whom he was singing were allowed to resume fighting on Boxing Day.] - Kanye West ft. CyHi Da Prynce & Teyana Taylor - Christmas In Harlem
Despite famously being from Chicago, which does not include Harlem, Kanye does a serviceable job with this sequel to Louis Armstrong's "Christmas Night in Harlem" (featured in 2008's playlist). I think the best verse here belongs to CyHi Da Prynce, who raps in character as Santa Claus. This song gets extra credit for the part at the end when Teyana Taylor starts singing the melody of "Strawberry Letter 23." - Milly & Silly - Getting Down For Xmas
Looking at Santa's outfit, I'd say that playing funk music at this time of year is pretty much a no-brainer. - Frightened Rabbit - It's Christmas So We'll Stop
These guys really do a great job with the whole "suicidal but catchy" thing. Sample lyric: "Oh it's Christmas so we'll stop/'Cause the wine on our breath puts the love in our tongues/So forget the names/I called you on Christmas Eve/In fact forget the entire year/Don't reflect just pretend and you won't feel scared." Yikes. - David Bowie & Bing Crosby - Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy
For a song that was conceived of, written, rehearsed, and performed in a little over an hour, this is pretty amazing. If you haven't heard this before, you're probably going to like it. I think it's all the more incredible considering the backstory (see link above). - Lovebyte - Auld Lang Syne
I actually cut another electronic instrumental song off this list, but I just had to give a nod to the robot inside me with this overly upbeat, bizarre version of the New Year's classic. - Sarah McLachlan - Song For A Winter's Night
Sarah McLachlan's take on Gordon Lightfoot's beautiful little song is spare and beautiful, and I find it really evokes the feeling of a cold winter's night effectively. Great harmonies, too.
Hungry for more? Check out some of these awesome holiday playlists:
- Annals of Spacetime
- Fuel/Friends
- ilovethis
- Wired For Music
6 Mayıs 2012 Pazar
Under 35 in 1989
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I'm moving my office this month, and look at the sorts of things I'm finding!
Nicholas Christopher introduced the new generation of poets in 1989 in Under 35: the New Generation of American Poets.
It’s not really how right or wrong he was about specific poets (some of these poets have continued to be widely anthologized and talked about and some haven’t, which is always the case), but more, what interests me is the slice of American poetry he saw then.
America is an “[e]mpire in decline, from all indications,” he says in the introduction. And “every poet is writing his or her personal history, but also a history of his [or her] times.”
Here they are, or were, then:
Judith Baumel
Bruce Beasley
April Bernard
Lucie Brock-Broido
Cyrus Cassells
Henri Cole
Connie Deanovich
Lynn Doyle
Cornelius Eady
Martin Edmunds
Elaine Equi
Martin Espada
Kathy Fagan
Suzanne Gardinier
Martha Hollander
Lynda Hull
Vickie Karp
Wayne Koestenbaum
Victoria Kohn
Robert McDowell
Askold Melnyczuk
Carol Moldaw
Karen Murai
Jane Oliensis
Brenda Marie Oxbey
Jacqueline Osherow
Donald Revell
Mary Jo Salter
Vijay Seshadri
Jason Shinder
Jack Skelley
Mark Svenvold
Cole Swensen
David Trinidad
James Ulmer
Valerie Wohlfeld
Cynthia Zarin
So what version of the forming canon was Christopher seeing? This anthology is weighted heavily to poets who looked a lot like, in their content and form, the poets of the generation before them, typified by the poetry of Sharon Olds.
Here’s a poem, which opens and is typical of the anthology, by Judith Baumel:
The New York City World’s Fairs
1939 and 1964
for my mother
We visited the world’s fair
thirteen times and saved a brochure
from every pavilion.
When you were my age then,
with a Heinz pickle pin
on a brownie collar,
you trooped through the Dawn of a New Day,
the World of Tomorrow;
marched up the Helicline
and saw Billy Rose’s Aquacade.
You went back for the thrill
of stepping on a board that yelled,
“ouch, that hurts” or “don’t tread on me.”
GM’s bright Futurama between
the Great Depression
and the Second Great War.
I put 50 cents in a machine
at the Sinclair pavilion and it produced
a fresh warm plastic dinosaur.
That was man and science—
dinosaur to oil, oil to plastic.
I wanted and got another.
You wanted to teach the family possibilities,
to show man’s clever exhibitions,
but the future I came away with
was an entire house
of impermeable Formica where I wept
because my brother was lost
for the fifth time that season
and you’d gone to some hamburger-
shaped tent to pick him up again.
But, what’s equally interesting about this anthology is the inclusion of poets like Cole Swensen, Donald Revell, and Elaine Equi, who would go on to typify a very different strain of American poetry.
If there was any truth in Christopher's description of America in 1989, it's only more true now, so it's not surprising, then, that looking at this anthology now, it’s hard for me to say much has changed in American poetry in the last 23 years. Whatever the debate was is still the debate.
Something to think about, at least, while waiting for the complex transformation to get here. I'm going to the porch now to watch for the foederati.
I'm moving my office this month, and look at the sorts of things I'm finding!Nicholas Christopher introduced the new generation of poets in 1989 in Under 35: the New Generation of American Poets.
It’s not really how right or wrong he was about specific poets (some of these poets have continued to be widely anthologized and talked about and some haven’t, which is always the case), but more, what interests me is the slice of American poetry he saw then.
America is an “[e]mpire in decline, from all indications,” he says in the introduction. And “every poet is writing his or her personal history, but also a history of his [or her] times.”
Here they are, or were, then:
Judith Baumel
Bruce Beasley
April Bernard
Lucie Brock-Broido
Cyrus Cassells
Henri Cole
Connie Deanovich
Lynn Doyle
Cornelius Eady
Martin Edmunds
Elaine Equi
Martin Espada
Kathy Fagan
Suzanne Gardinier
Martha Hollander
Lynda Hull
Vickie Karp
Wayne Koestenbaum
Victoria Kohn
Robert McDowell
Askold Melnyczuk
Carol Moldaw
Karen Murai
Jane Oliensis
Brenda Marie Oxbey
Jacqueline Osherow
Donald Revell
Mary Jo Salter
Vijay Seshadri
Jason Shinder
Jack Skelley
Mark Svenvold
Cole Swensen
David Trinidad
James Ulmer
Valerie Wohlfeld
Cynthia Zarin
So what version of the forming canon was Christopher seeing? This anthology is weighted heavily to poets who looked a lot like, in their content and form, the poets of the generation before them, typified by the poetry of Sharon Olds.
Here’s a poem, which opens and is typical of the anthology, by Judith Baumel:
The New York City World’s Fairs
1939 and 1964
for my mother
We visited the world’s fair
thirteen times and saved a brochure
from every pavilion.
When you were my age then,
with a Heinz pickle pin
on a brownie collar,
you trooped through the Dawn of a New Day,
the World of Tomorrow;
marched up the Helicline
and saw Billy Rose’s Aquacade.
You went back for the thrill
of stepping on a board that yelled,
“ouch, that hurts” or “don’t tread on me.”
GM’s bright Futurama between
the Great Depression
and the Second Great War.
I put 50 cents in a machine
at the Sinclair pavilion and it produced
a fresh warm plastic dinosaur.
That was man and science—
dinosaur to oil, oil to plastic.
I wanted and got another.
You wanted to teach the family possibilities,
to show man’s clever exhibitions,
but the future I came away with
was an entire house
of impermeable Formica where I wept
because my brother was lost
for the fifth time that season
and you’d gone to some hamburger-
shaped tent to pick him up again.
But, what’s equally interesting about this anthology is the inclusion of poets like Cole Swensen, Donald Revell, and Elaine Equi, who would go on to typify a very different strain of American poetry.
If there was any truth in Christopher's description of America in 1989, it's only more true now, so it's not surprising, then, that looking at this anthology now, it’s hard for me to say much has changed in American poetry in the last 23 years. Whatever the debate was is still the debate.
Something to think about, at least, while waiting for the complex transformation to get here. I'm going to the porch now to watch for the foederati.
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