Archive for April, 2006

Fifty and still howling

Published April 13, 2006 in Book and Poetry. 0 Comments

HowlI have some really weird stories about Allen Ginsberg, but I’ll save those for a rainy day. Suffice to say that when he was alive I had an argument with him over the word “mondo,” and when he was dead his ghost spoke through my guitar amp. Nuff said.

The task at hand is the yearlong celebration of the Poem that Changed the World: “Howl.” It certainly changed my life. In NYC this weekend (April 17, 2006), there will be a live reading. You can check out some good history of the poem at City Lights.

Listen to Ginsberg “Howl” here.

Listen to some wolves howl here.

Listen to some dogs howl here.

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Village Voiceless, Village of the Damned

Published April 13, 2006 in Newspaper. 0 Comments

Village of damned VS. voice-logo
Some stories lend themselves to great headlines (”Cocaine cola a real buzz” for instance), but the demise of the Village Voice tends to not offer much humor (except in the Twainian sense of “news of my death is greatly exagerated”). I have mixed feelings. For those of you outside the Manhattan echo chamber, the Voice’s storied tradition of radical politics and culture was absorbed by a national chain of weekly urban “independents,” New Times Media based in Phoenix. The company also owns the LA Weekly, Seattle Weekly and SF Weekly among others. Many are alarmed by the firing of long-time investigative reporter, James Ridgeway. Add to the mix resignations, articles with bogus anecdotes, a shift in priorities and the international trend of media consolidation, and you get one pissed off crowd of readers. Plus New Yorkers are a tough audience to please. Go to a Yankees game and you will know what I mean.

Unfortunately, I think the Voice lost its relevance a long time ago. Continue reading ‘Village Voiceless, Village of the Damned’

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Ain’t no TV holiday in Cambodia

Published April 13, 2006 in Activism, Commentary and TV. 0 Comments

TV-WeekIt’s that time of year for the international holiday for freaks, TV Turnoff Week. Sponsored by Adbusters, this has become a calling card for school librarians (yes, they are feeing the pinch) and is a good time to reflect on our addiction to media. A few questions, though. What is a TV anymore? With TiVo, V-cast telephones and Web TV it seems like TVs are very old school as a thought process. It has always been my contention that TVs are structures, not objects. When I suggested to Jerry Mander (author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television) that environmentalists start using media literacy, he said: “It’s a good idea, except that it makes media more interesting, so I’m against it.”
tv-smashIn a past life when I was a student at Berkeley, we used to have a TV smash party on Sproul Plaza. It was quite dangerous, actually. Did you know that tube TVs hold enough of an electrical charge to kill a human? (This is so you can fire it up on demand!) But we put on our goggles and had cathartic fun anyway. What will you do for TV turnoff week? I’ll be recording all my favorite commercials, so I won’t miss a thing anyway.

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Forget the moon, Iraq… it’s a war on Easter!

Published April 12, 2006 in War and Wingnuts. 0 Comments

fox-easterYes, well it was bound to happen. The liberals have declared war on Easter! Good thing we don’t have more important things to think about, like say, World War IV?

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MoveOn.org petition to stop nukes

Published April 12, 2006 in Activism and Politics. 1 Comment

I don’t always agree with MoveOn.org’s tactics (I don’t like their fear-mongering political ad techniques), but we should at least go and sign their petition to Congress to prevent Bush from using nukes on Iran. It may not seem like much, but it’s a start. We need critical mass.

Forget the moon, nuking Iran is on the table

Published April 11, 2006 in War and Wingnuts. 1 Comment

So I was being snarky when I posted on a wingnut’s case to nuke the moon. As I explained in that post, crossing the “insane” threshold is a political and military strategy to make people believe you will do anything to rule the world. After all, when logic fails, why not scare the shit out of people? So what follows is very serious and is not done in the spirit of trying scare but to make sure we understand the grave situation we are in and that as many citizens as possible understand what could potentially happen in the very near future concerning Bush’s desires to use nukes. Hopefully this is just a worst-case scenario and is simply alarming to make the point that there needs to be a cogent response to what appears to be a rather scary mentality at work.

You can read here the AP article on Iran’s enrichment program and reader comments at the Huffington Post.

The following interview with Jorge Hirsch, a professor of Physics at the University of California, on the recent news that Bush plans to nuke Iran should be considered as just one opinion among many. I encourage people to inform themselves as much as possible, and do what ever is possible to create a space for a peaceful resolution to the current situation. (Please send alternatives and I’ll post them.)

ZNet |Iran | Nuking Iran :

“I believe there is a high probability of war with Iran because key people in the administration desperately want it, but I don’t believe it is inevitable. I hope there will be a sufficiently large public outburst of opposition, eg thanks to Hersh’s and other’s revelations, to make it impossible. The dire situation in Iraq of course is making it more difficult, and I hope there will be strong voices in the administration and influential republicans that will recognize the likely disastrous consequences and oppose it. Or perhaps influential old-timers like Bush Sr. and Scowcroft will be able to dissuade President Bush.”

Anti-commie culture jams

Published April 11, 2006 in Fun, Postirony, Propaganda and Wingnuts. 3 Comments

anti-cheWho said all culture jammers are lefties? (Discuss amongst yourselves.) Here’s a T-shirt company unafraid to use our tactics against us, and I love it! Sure they are distasteful, but they are funny in the same way that “Let’s kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out” is funny. But seriously folks, they are spot on with the Che thing. Rather than checking facts at the door, people should reconsider this Che craze. Did you know that Che had his political enemies shot? Just because the most beautiful boy in the world played him in a movie with sepia tones doesn’t mean we should see things through the same crimson glasses. Che is corporate rebellion!

You might also want to check out the Hillary Clinton egg yolk separator and incense burners.

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Nuke the Moon

Published April 11, 2006 in Postirony and Wingnuts. 1 Comment

nuke-moonHere’s the crappy thing about our culture today: I can’t tell anymore if I’m a total sucker. Is this another Yes Men prank?

The campaign is called, “nuke the moon.” Strange thing is, there is some rationality to this irrationality. The argument is that if the US as a superpower acts totally crazy, then no one can predict what it will do and fear its insane, random application of power (sound familiar?). If you have read any Chomski, you will know that this is a real military strategy practiced today. But it doesn’t always work. Think Iraq.

Anyhow, read at your own peril. This poor blogger really hates hippies way too much.

Nuke the Moon:

“My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim,’Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonalds before they think I don’t like them.’

But why stop there. We’ve got like tons of national parks; we surely wouldn’t miss just one if we nuked it. Our excuse will be that we heard a drug dealer was hiding there. Then the foreign nations would be like, ‘Sacre bleu! These Americans are nuking themselves! Surely they will think nothing of bombing us! Let’s adapt their vapid culture as our own so they might consider us one of them.’”

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Duality sucks dept: postirony

Published April 11, 2006 in Postirony. 0 Comments

“…Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it’s beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting. If everything is false, then by the same token anything can be taken as true, or at least as true enough. Truths are no longer absolute; they’re shifting, temporary, whatever serves the purpose of the moment. Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they chooose to ignore….Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable. Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once. And we marketers, in forging a viable mode of postironic consumerism, must seek to foster in the consumer a mystical relationship with consumption. Through consumption consumers will be gods; outside of consumption they will be nothing: a perpetual oscillation between absolute control and absolute vulnerability, between grandeur and persecution.”

The Savage Girl, Alex Shakar

Other postirony commentary found in the Googlesphere:

!!!

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More truthiness stranger than fiction: Invasion of the “Autonomous Security Apparatus”

Published April 10, 2006 in Border Issues and Truthiness. 1 Comment

globalnanoElectronic motes anyone? Designed like something straight out of Neuromancer, US Globalnanospace (you’ve gotta love the name) is engaged in the wacky world of border security, bio decontamination foam and cigarette filters. Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the wrong business; writing, meditating and teaching doesn’t seems nearly as fun as what these guys do. Thinking this stuff up is probably as psychedelic as an editorial meeting for the Weekly World News.

In particular, Globalnanospace’s Autonomous Security Apparatus (MAPSANDS™) has garnered some press of late (most definitely check out this news report). Its electronic wall dispenses sounds, pellets and non-lethal force if necessary, relegating security to data pattern recognition. Ah, if only computers could rule the world, everything would be so peachy!

This fantasy of an electronic border guard once again denies the greater sociopolitical reality: why is the US-Mexico frontier so permeable? I hate to fall back on old cliches, but recall the Chicano slogan, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” To paraphrase Mike Davis, the border region (or Aztlan) is a transient construct.

I’m not against trade but when designating money with more border-crossing rights than humans, something is gonna give. Sci-fi walls of sanitary sound barriers in the middle of the desert is yet one more ridiculous application of xenophobia in a world characterized by immigration, urban slums and climate change. Paranoia seems to need its own border check.

Oh yeah, one last thought. What about the animals we humans share space with? How are they to be regarded as they are bombarded with nauseating sound frequencies as they traverse the border?

USGN :

MAPSANDS™ is an autonomous, intelligent, fully integrated wide area perimeter security and access denial system.

MAPSANDS™ was specifically developed for large wide area perimeter applications such as international and sovereign borders, oil & gas infrastructure and other high value critical asset installations.

MAPSANDS™, unlike traditional perimeter security solutions, is a fully programmable, integrated autonomous system that can monitor, detect, track, target, warn, establish intent, deter, and if necessary deliver a non-lethal response to the would be aggressors, subject to compliance with applicable laws, regulations and treaties.

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A day without Mexicans

Published April 10, 2006 in Border Issues, Film and Review. 0 Comments

Day-without-mexicansToday there will be national demonstrations against revised efforts to “reform” immigration law that are expected to draw over a million folks. This is great news. In an effort to explain why this sleeping jaguar has awakened, some in the mainstream media have finally examined the debate from a Latino perspective. In particular CNN profiled the producers of A Day Without a Mexican (watch the trailer here). The film spoofs the immigration debate by depicting a hypothetical event in which all Mexicans disappear from California. The resulting chaos is predictable and kinda funny. The film itself is a bit of a one trick pony. It tries to extend the one-liner into a feature-length movie when a short would have sufficed. Still, the idea is a great meme that deserves circulation. Indeed our entire system would likely collapse without immigration, and especially from hard-working and industrious Mexicans who for our economy, in the words of Enterprise caption Jean-Luc Picard, “make it go.” So though I personally found A Day Without a Mexican a so-so movie, I’m glad it’s getting revised interest. The title itself should get our brain melons picked.

Visit the filmmaker’s site.

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Space cat-det

Published April 9, 2006 in Magazine. 0 Comments

space-cadetAs a Leo and space cadet, I thought I was the planet’s biggest astro-cat, but I’m outdone once again by the wonderful folks down in Florida who have their paws on the world beat of high weirdness, Weekly World News. As the paper warns its audience, “the reader should suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment,” a truism embracing the “truthiness” of our age. Of course the disclaimer is just a ruse. It’s all true, man, I know it! After all, isn’t this the daily intelligence report that reaches the President’s desk with his morning Postum?

Weekly World News: “SPACE STATION INFESTED WITH MICE - NASA TO SEND UP CAT”

HOUSTON, Tex. — NASA
officials were embarrassed
this week to announce the
Space Station is infested
with mice.
Project Manager Terry
Duckworth told Weekly
World News, ‘The female
mice escaped from one of
our onboard experiments
and the male mice came up
on a Russian supply ship,
hidden in the cargo
hold. Now we have a big
predicament — what we call
UMP, or Unauthorized Mice
Pairing. You might say,
‘Houston we have a pest
problem.’ But I won’t.’
The mice have chewed
through wires and
insulation, and the patter
of their feet has disturbed
astronauts as they’ve
slept.

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Overheard at a funeral today

Published April 9, 2006 in Commentary. 0 Comments

“The only thing Americans recycle is fashion.”

Weekly Deconstruction: The “Me” Market

Published April 6, 2006 in Advertising and Deconstruction. 2 Comments

Me-marketI found something kinda creepy about this ad. Here we have a pluralistic panel of various demographics with each person donning a t-shirt inscribed with “me,” presumably as a way of appreciating the uniqueness of our highly individualized society. The ad copy states:

“Find your target with Boston Globe Media. From a narrow target segment to the full sweep of the Boston market, Boston Globe Media can deliver your audience.”

Then it offers a rollover tool to “learn more about our audience” (emphasis mine). So, despite the faux celebration of the hypermediated “me,” the “me” really is not an empowered individual but a nameless data pattern in a market segment defined by the Boston Globe. What the company wants to do is sell its audience; there is nothing “me” about it when your identity is bought and sold by corporations.

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Alex Magocsi, RIP

Published April 5, 2006 in Self-Referential. 1 Comment

alexI just learned some shocking news that my friend and colleague Alex Magocsi was found dead in his car in Santa Fe. Alex was my editor at the Santa Fe New Mexican for many years when I was a music and arts writer for its weekly entertainment supplement, Pasatiempo. We shared a passion for music and for building a scene in Santa Fe. Alex was the hardest worker I knew, and an excellent editor to boot, whose enthusiasm for local musicians was instrumental to creating the music community that exists today. Alex was a behind-the-scenes guy, so my hope is that his contributions to creating Santa Fe’s vibrant music culture won’t be forgotten. Aside from his great passion for music, Alex was one of the sweetest, gentlest guys I have ever met. Unfortunately he was haunted by many demons, and in the end it seems as if he never was able to escape them. It saddens me greatly to hear of his passing. I hope that the folks out in New Mexico will find a way to celebrate his life, as he is deserving of a massive party.

Alex, we’ll miss you!

Steve Terrell’s blog.

Dallas Observer obit.


Musician, writer found dead in car:

“Alex Magocsi, local music writer, Web publisher and one-time leader of what he called ‘Santa Fe’s most dysfunctional band’ has died. Magocsi’s body was found March 27, which according to a database was his 42nd birthday, in his car in Tesuque on property where he had planned to move this month. The cause of death has not been determined, Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano said Monday.”

(Via Santa Fe New Mexican.)

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Punk terrorism????????

Published April 5, 2006 in Commentary and Postirony. 2 Comments

London-CalllingExcuse me while I cry for a moment. Some poor cad in London was hauled in by the police for singing along to The Clash’s London Calling, which begs the question: Had punk been invented today, would it be considered a terrorist movement? Can paranoia withstand the leitmotif of our era, “irony”? Speaking of irony, punk has became a trendy fashion devoid of its serious politics in which it decried war, fascism and racism. This story is a sorry, sad twist and insult to the late-great Joe Strummer who was a tireless advocate for peace and justice. But irony of ironies, wasn’t “London Calling” also used in a Jaguar commercial? Hmmmmmm….

Check the lyrics for yourself here.

Briton held as terror suspect over song - MSNBC.com:

LONDON - British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said on Wednesday.Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport in northern England and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off.The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash’s 1979 anthem “London Calling,” which features the lyrics “Now war is declared — and battle come down” while other lines warn of a “meltdown expected.”

(Via MSNBC.)

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Lipified Bohemia

Published April 5, 2006 in CD, Music and Review. 0 Comments

flaming-lipsOnly the Flaming Lips would have the audacity to cover Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but they did, and you would be remise to not immediately download/purchase/rip/borrow their super awesome epic, At War With The Mystics, containing said magnum opus sacred cow. Only crazy or egomaniacal artists would tackle such a task. Which criteria the Lips fall into, you be the judge.

Meanwhile, I’m going to whine (me? never!) about one little annoying thing: iTunes has to stop making crappy rips of their files. They are the top music retailer in the world and their MP3s totally suck. This is the second album in a row that I purchased on iTunes that distorts on many frequencies. Another download service I use, emusic, has no such problems. Unfortunately they don’t distribute blockbusters, but they’re awesome for indie, jazz, folk, trip hop and weird music. Apple did credit me for the last bad album (I haven’t hit them up for the Lips yet), but the point is, invest some of that marketing money for making decent files meant to be listened to on something other than a stupid phone!

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FYI

Published April 4, 2006 in Activism and Ecology. 0 Comments

polar map

Polar Bears On Thin Ice:

“Perfectly at home in one of the world’s most forbidding environments, polar bears spend their summers roaming the Arctic on large chunks of floating ice. They drift for hundreds of miles, finding mates, hunting for seals and fattening themselves up for the winter. Without these thick rafts of sea ice, the world’s largest bear could not survive. Yet at this moment, the polar bear’s Arctic habitat is literally melting away beneath it due to global warming.”

(Take action Via NRDC.)

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Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, written by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. Occasionally he shoots from the lip, bloviates, misspells and can be tangential.

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