memories...

When I was a freshman at the U of M in 1986/7 there was a campus fad for building "shanties" or little makeshift shacks in the outdoor student gathering place (the "Diag") at the center of the main campus. This mainly had to do with activist efforts to end South Africa's policy of Apartheid. One warm Friday night a couple of friends and I decided that we would build a "Free Charles Manson" shanty. As stupid and offensive as that might sound, we thought it was hilarious. We were in the small segment of world population who believed that Manson was a political prisoner of sorts who had been judged and sentenced not for anything he had done but rather for what he thought and, even worse, said to impressionable young people.

I kind of think the whole OJ Simpson thing is like the Manson thing turned inside out and upside down. It just sucks to me when the wrong people get punished for things. Also, I think it sucks when the rule of law allows or enables (as in the addict-in-recovery term "enabler") stupid, irresponsible behavior on the part of societies and the individuals who inhabit them.

Whatever. Go ahead and disagree with me if you like.

Here's a short documentary in three parts that I think is really very good.


part 1


part 2


part 3

Manson eloquently speaks for himself from 4:47 of part 3.

The "social Darwinists" or "satanists" could benefit from a bit of interpretation, I think...

Nikolas Schreck and Boyd Rice (personally I like Boyd better, maybe just because of his deliberately well-maintained boyish good looks) I think are awesome because they so carefully and purposefully allow (and enable) themselves to be misunderstood by those who would be predisposed to do so.

"Those who would be predisposed to do so" in my way of thinking includes not only the impressionable goth-or-neonazi-or-whatever kids (who think Boyd and Nik are saying "kill all the people we decide are assholes" or "kill all the handicapped and sickly" or "kill this or that ethnic minority" and then think "yeah, dude, that's awesome"), but also the grown-ups of the world (who think they are saying those same things but find it terrifying).

As I see it these guys (especially Boyd, from stories I've read) are two of the sweetest and most caring people you could ever hope to meet who see the world falling apart around them because of assholes who are destroying first themselves and second-through-last all the people who are stupid and ignorant enough to fall in line behind them (whether that "falling in line" looks like discipleship OR blind, reactionary, and worst of all futile "opponent-ship" - like the Democrat/Republican coin that people who know better would like to see tossed to the bottom of history's wishing well).

Their actual and heavily encrypted "point" is that some humans are really capable of wising up and taking care of business as reasonable, caring, honest women and men, and those who are not - well they're fucked and they deserve what they get. Actively, forcefully disregarding and alienating those zombies (as they see them) is just necessary for human evolution because trying to negotiate with zombies is a dead-end, if you'll excuse the pun.

And its okay that the message is heavily encoded and hidden because the self-styled "rebels" of the world who get the wrong message at first but still think it's awesome at least have a better chance of coming around to the real thing than the zombies.

AND maybe a few of the zombies will have such a blinding fit of rage in confronatation with nice-guys Schreck and Rice and others like them that the scales will fall from their eyes and they'll wake up from their trance.

Well, probably not.

Our shanty got torn down by some drunken frat boys who were edging closer to beating the crap out of us when the campus cops (who were sent to our rescue by some other, more sympathetic drunken frat boys) came to break it up. To their credit, the cops didn't taser us for thinking bad thoughts. They didn't care one way or the other about our "political statement" (LOL). They helped us put the shards of wood and cardboard into a dumpster and went on their way.

It takes all kinds.

"I wanted the music to destroy my body." - M. GIRA

I've been looking at old SWANS videos today:


COWARD



LIKE A DRUG (SHA LA LA LA)



BEAUTIFUL CHILD


and a short doc from years later with a mix of performance and interview stuff with Michael Gira:




This is another one of the bands that made me who I am today. I think I've spent some time in my life in different kinds of self-denial. I had almost forgotten how much I LOVE this music or performance art or whatever you might want to call it. I still have a bunch of SWANS stuff on vinyl records, and had pretty much stopped listening to them by the time they started putting out CDs (if you want to know how long ago I was really into them).

For me this kind of shit absolutely defines artistic integrity. SWANS were awesome and beautiful to me. I'm sorry I never got to see/feel them live, but seeing Neubauten and Crash Worship several times each probably makes up for it a little bit at least.

When I was dancing on stage wearing nothing but pieces of raw butcher shop meat (usually puchased from the now long gone butcher shop on Michigan Ave in downtown Ypsilanti) strapped to my groin I was feeling the SWANS music that had damaged my hearing in the preceeding months even if the band playing behind me (Captain Dave and the Psychedelic Lounge Cats) sounded like the Butthole Surfers playing Sergio Mendes (or was that the other way around?).

The internet is a great tool for helping the packrat scrapbooker in all of us keep our closets and basements a little cleaner while still remembering where we came from.

A Little History

I think my blog here might turn into "what I found on YouTube today."

Yesterday I found this interesting interview with a formative influence from my late teens:



I guess in the intervening years since I saw Psychic TV perform in Detroit and subsequently became less interested in them - which is something that used to happen to me when I would finally get to see performers that I'd anxiously waited years to see - this Genesis P-Orridge guy went and got a partial sex change operation. This is evidenced more exlicitly at the end of this video:



It's in Castilian Spanish (I think), which will make it hard even for those who speak American Spanish to understand, but the images combine to create a pretty great rapid-fire history of GPO's career in various projects over the last 30ish years.

The "subsequently became less interested in them" phenomenon I mention above has, fortunately, not been happening so much recently, and has even started to go in reverse in some cases. I hadn't really heard much BECK at all until I saw him do an acoustic show at the Michigan Theater a few years ago and I've been an avid fan ever since. I also started to listen to THE PILLOWS even more fervently in the wake of seeing them play at Anime Central in Chicago about a year and a half ago.

Anyway, the Cornelius video way down at the bottom of the scroll bar is back up (not that anyone noticed it was down) and it's awesome, especially if you're into experimental manga.

More to come...

War on Terror ≠ WWII Part 2

Please understand this: The Bush administration and those who support it believe that the Iraq war and the war on terror are parallel to World War Two from every significant viewpoint. For them, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, so going to extremes (torture) is a necessary evil - they don't understand why anyone has a problem seeing that. For them "bad news" de-moralises the troops and causes them to lose their resolve, while at the same time rallying the enemy (our bad news is their good) and encouraging them to think that they are winning. So rigidly controlling the language of the war is necessary for them ("not a civil war"). Secrecy is also rigidly necessary because the enemy will use whatever they can find out to kill our soldiers and our citizens. The Bush administration and its supporters don't understand why US journalists and citizens want information other than "trust us, we are keeping you safe."

The biggest problem with all this is that the world has changed alot since World War Two. For most people this is probably a no-brainer. For anyone else I'll list just a handful of big changes that make a huge difference in the way war works in the 21st century. 1) Global access to computers and the internet makes information flow very quickly and with little restriction. 2) For those who do not have internet access there are cell phones, which are as popular in virtually every corner of the globe as the are in the US, if not even more so. 3) 24 hour cable/satellite TV news. 4) Newspapers and magazines have the above sources to compete with so compete they do, bringing their own revelations of information to the table. 5) Universal access to powerful weapons and weapon-making technology and information make "the most powerful military in the world" less powerful than it once was. 6) Many nations have lived through, and remember occupations by colonial powers - and they won't just sit down for it again. There is not enough unoccupied territory on the planet anymore for them to move somewhere else. And they're tired of being pushed around - especially in geographical areas that already got brutalized by the post-WWII Allied (which then became colonial) Powers. People and Nations have always wanted to control their own destinies - now more than ever. 7) The fact that individual people all over the world fly to different countries every single day and see how other people live and hear how other people think and share information face to face and bring all this back home with them makes it utterly impossible to successfully hide significant information about people in other countries much less to successfully demonize the population of an entire nation or religion (as was done quite successfully during WWII in the absence of communication resources and technologies available today).

My reason for bringing this up is that those of us who are opposed specifically to the war in Iraq and more generally to the way the war on terror is being fought seem to have difficulty understanding why Bush and his supporters do what they do. No one needs to come up with any devious or conspiratorial theories that demonize Bush and his supporters. As true as some of these theories may turn out to be, they are fundamentally unnecessary. And worse they muddy the rhetorical/political waters by providing Bush and his supporters with endless straw men to attack. If we who oppose these wars could turn to addressing the actual terms with which Bush and his supporters have and want to continue to frame these wars, then we would be able to bring to light their flawed, outdated thinking in a way that has no escape valve of "plausible deniability" or "passing the buck." If they won't make their governance transparent, then we must - and we must do it all the way down to the ideological underpinnings I've outlined above. When we refuse to see inside the minds of Bush and his supporters and when we demonize them or falsely label them idiots, we do so at our own peril because they feel their ideology in their hearts and it patterns the thoughts they have. The ideology of Bush and his supporters truly has divided this nation and set a large part of the world against us and if we hope to change that we will first have to work to reveal the false premises on which their ideology is based. The War on Terror and the War in Iraq DO NOT PARALLEL World War Two in any meaningful way. Pass it on...

update:

Apparently administration denials of their belief that the WWII parallels underlie their tactics have begun. This is quite confusing to me and seems to amount to shooting themselves in the foot in terms of maintaining what little support they have for their wars. Perhaps they will dredge up the whole "this is an enemy unlike any we have ever seen before" line, but then that would, on the surface at least, appear to require resorting to actual study and reseach and intelligence gathering (as opposed making stuff up and 'stovepiping' intelligence) to successfully do battle with this enemy.

New Cornelius!

I just found out today that Cornelius (aka Oyamada Keigo) has a new CD for the first time in years. It's not available domestically in the US (so if anyone can hook me up with a download link...), but there are some great new videos to enjoy no matter where you live: