Weblog Keir Neuringer

LINER NOTES 2011!

2011-12-31T18:57:00.005+01:00

Twenty eleven. I really liked the part where so many people, in so many places, in so many beautiful, creative ways, for so many reasons, in so much solidarity, with so much determination, looked the Establishment in its ugly face & said fuck off already.

An apt theme for the past year, as I experienced & observed it, would be community. It describes the successes of the socio-economic awakenings, the challenges to political establishments, the encampments, the risk-taking of activists for social justice & self-determination, the widening scope of movements against war & to protect water, soil, air, forests, rivers, cultures.

In a year largely defined by people taking to the streets, my year was spent, for better & for worse, less in the street than on the road. I travelled more heavily this year, to perform, than in any other year of my life. It has been utterly fulfilling & I look forward with enthusiasm to more. Everywhere I went I met people eager to create & strengthen the community of experimental & independent music & art. A polemic: real music & art cannot be expressed in market terms, & is a crucial component of societies actively challenging the political, economic, & cultural hegemony of the Establishment.

The following lists are an attempt (probably incomplete) to articulate & thank, in one place, all the wonderful people, venues, & organizations who are nurturing meaningful community in the places I performed & exhibited my work in 2011. What an honor! What a privilege!

THANKS FOR SETTING UP SHOWS! THANKS FOR HOSTING!
Tad Michalak (Burn Down the Capital), Dan Smalls Presents, Tom Orange (Cleveland), Kevin O'Brien Cain (Buffalo), Squeaky Wheel, Brandon Hawk (Dayton), Joel Peterson (Bohemian in Exile series, Detroit), Gabriel Beam (Robinwood Concerthouse), Bubba Crumrine (Ithaca Underground), Martin Blazicek (Bludny Kamen, CZ), DC Sonic Circuits, Vicky Chow (Contagious Sounds, NYC), Santo Pulella (Head West), Mike Kramer ((h)ear Festival), Adam Schatz (Search & Restore), Paul Baldwin (Black Sparrow), Pete Lebel, Stephen Pellegrino, Anne Wellmer, Dewi de Vree, KG Price, Kaleid Series (Chicago), Quiet Cue (Berlin), U-Ex(perimental) (Utrecht), Peter Bradley (Schoolhouse, Guelph), Harold Arts, Jacob Kart (Chicago), Marie Guillerey, Gregory Clow, Joseph Hess, Aaron Hefel (Counter Productions), Thom Elliot (Pleasuredome), Jessica Puglisi, Sam Sowyrda, Rozz Tox (Rock Island IL), Good Style Shop (Madison WI), Nowy Wspanialy Swiat (Warszawa), Bomba (Kraków), Kevin Ernste (Cornell University), Brad Thorla (Anabell's, Akron), Stephen Crowley (Iowa City), Culture Shock & The Westy (Ithaca).

THANKS FOR COLLABORATING WITH ME!
Rafal Mazur, Ensemble Klang, dj sniff, Reuben Radding, Andrew Drury, Red Trio, Joe Sorbara, Paul Dutton, Chad Taylor, Jonathan Goldberger, Alyssa Duerksen, Lindsay Gilmour, Chris Seeds, Michael Stark, Zaun Marshburn, Ryan Zawel, Hank Roberts, Walt Lorenzut, Ross Haarstad (Theatre Incognita), KBD, Dan Friedman, Heather Seggar, Alter Koker, Mark Alban Lotz, Dick Toering, Johanna Varner, Antibody Xtett (Manuel Miethe, Anna Kaluza, Max Andrzejewski, Stephan Bleier, Nico Meinhold, Wolfgang Georgsdorf), Johnny Dowd, Krzysztof Wolek, John Ritz, Margaret Lancaster, Nils Hoover

THANKS FOR SHARING BILLS WITH ME!
Deerhoof, powerdove, Matt Bauder, Hyrrokkin, Nick Millevoi, Fred Thomas, Alter Koker, Seth Graham, Andrew Weathers, Tristan Trump, Forget the Times, Rowan (Shelley Burgon), Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), Holland Hopson, Matta Gawa, Mouth to Mouth to Mouth, Sid Redlin, Arrington de Dionyso, Steve Baczkowski, Sinjo Thraw Mash, Loop Goat, Chris Seeds, Frass Accolades, Wind Farm, Stephen Pellegrino, Joel Peterson, Joe Panzer, Raphael Brim, Mall Mutants, Michael Attias.

THANKS FOR PUTTING OUT AWESOME RECORDS THIS YEAR!
Matt Bauder, dj sniff, Tomek Choloniewski, Matt Wright & Evan Parker, Jason Ajemian & the HighLife, Hyrrokkin, Red Trio, Jennie Stearns, Matta Gawa, Go-Go Beuys Band, Big Mean Sound Machine, Travis Laplante, Colin Stetson

THANKS FOR RECORDING (WITH) ME!
Dana Billings, Michael Perkins, Jason Ajemian, Edward Ricart, Brett Nagafuchi, Danny van Duerm

THANKS FOR HAVING ME TALK TO YOUR STUDENTS!
Krzysztof Wolek (University of Louisville), Marek Choloniewski (Studio of Electroacoustic Music, Academy of Music in Krakow), Michael Hersch & Oscar Bettison (Peabody Conservatory), Joe Sorbara (University of Guelph)

THANKS FOR PLAYING ME ON YOUR RADIO SHOW & WRITING ABOUT ME!
Greg Baise (WCBN 88.3FM Ann Arbor), Needles Numark (Upstate Soundscape, Buffalo), Tom Orange (Brewing Luminous, Cleveland), Taran Singh (Taran's Free Jazz Hour), Ken Waxman (Jazzword), Bartosz Adamczak (Free Jazz Alchemist), Guy Sitruk (Jazz à Paris), Mechanical Forest Sound

THANKS TO THE PEOPLE WHO TURNED ME ON TO THESE NICE OLD RECORDS I NEVER HEARD BEFORE!
This Heat, Deceit; Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden; Cabaret Voltaire, Micro-Phonies; Einsturzende Neubaten, Kollaps; Pere Ubu, Dub Housing; The Stooges, Fun House; Nas, Illmatic; Wire, Chairs Missing and Pink Flag; Death, ...For the World to See; Television, Marquee Moon; Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation.

THANKS THANKS THANKS!

US Stands Up For (Selected) LGBT Folks

2011-12-09T11:24:00.004+01:00

Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state in the Obama Administration -- an administration with a truly repellent record of human rights violations, with a trail of policies aggressive toward civil liberties and civil rights -- made a speech recently at the United Nations in Geneva elaborating the US stance on rights for LGBT folks. As words go, they are good words. Only hateful, vile people want to dictate the private lives of others, sort us by who and how we love. I wonder, though, how the government can dispatch its secretary of state to lecture the world on human rights while so actively and aggressively pursuing human rights for some. What kind of cognitive dissonance does this lady have to be practicing in order to declare that gays are people while America's drone aircraft circle no less than six countries, regularly -- regularly -- murdering children? When people captured as children for the crime of defending themselves from American warlords still await some sort of stilted trial at Guantánamo Bay? When American funding for the immiseration (not to say the eradication) of Palestinian people continues? When Obama's own preference is for an imaginary world happily chumming along on endlessly toxic energy sources? When Americans are targeted by the president for assassination abroad? And target by the system for assasination at home?

A sensible, compassionate person doesn't trust the likes of Hillary Clinton, of course, doesn't trust anyone she's politically associated with, doesn't vote for such people. Skip the pseudo-righteousness and check an excerpt I found that was left out of the speech:

"From Afghanistan to Palestine, from Pakistan to Mexico, from Iran to Guantánamo Bay, the Obama Administration has an important message about the rights of LGBT people. If you live in these places your sexual orientation should not be a barrier to human rights. The US policy of hating and fearing the lot of you, gay or straight, is that barrier. We vaguely tip our hat to civil rights for the gay communities in our client states. The rest of you can eat hot drone."

And here are some reactions from around the world:

"When the flying robot dropped that bomb on my house, killing me and 14 members of my family, I died secure in the knowledge that my sexual orientation played no part in the war crime that was my murder. I died because, well...who the fuck even knows anymore? But not because I was gay. Thanks, Hillary Clinton, for clearing that one up for everyone."
-Gay Afghan Ghost.

"Israel is a mecca for gay people. Very open minded. Even gay soldiers can shoot at us for no reason!"
-Gay Palestinian kid

"When we heard Hillary the Clinton's speech about the importance of equality for gay people worldwide, we realized that the invasion the Obama Administration recently initiated of our country had absolutely nothing to do with the similarly recent discovery of oil here."
-Gay Ugandan environmentalist, in hiding

"We are thankful to Ms. Clinton's declaration that all people have rights, regardless of their sexual orientation. Also Mexicans! We assume the American drone aircraft now hovering overhead are there to protect us from the constant influx of American guns."
-Gay Mexican maquiladora worker

"I always knew there was nothing wrong with my way of life, and grateful to the Obama Administration for all the moral support."
-Gay South American hedge fund manager

Hell No We Ain't Alright

2011-08-30T14:00:00.005+02:00

Hurricane Irene made me think about Hurricane Katrina. I imagine I'm not alone in this. It made me wonder: how have things changed? How have they stayed the same? How have they improved? How have they gotten worse?

Have a listen to the three great tracks below - by Mos Def, Public Enemy, and the Legendary K.O. - made in the aftermath of Katrina. Check the lyrics. These are songs that gave voice to widespread anger and outrage over the Bush Administration's non-response to the tragedy that befell New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005. But they also speak, powerfully and timelessly, to backward national priorities, institutional racism, poverty, police brutality, anti-war sentiment, and other pressing issues that continue to receive scant attention in the post-Bush era.

Intelligent people (but few in positions of power or influence) wrote and spoke insightfully at the time about Katrina's extreme strength and destructiveness as symptoms of climate change. Six years later Hurricane Irene is a manifestation of the same. Though disaster preparedness may have improved, the discussion about climate change has been largely left out of the vocabulary of those who govern and report.

Hurricane Irene coincided with a weeks-long mass mobilization of environmental groups in front of the White House. Hundreds of people from around the US are lining up to be arrested (over 500 arrests as of this writing) to raise awareness of the Keystone XL, a proposed pipeline that will carry highly toxic oil from the Alberta tar sands (an environmental catastrophe in and of itself) in Canada, through fragile ecosystems in the US, to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico for global export. The State Department has signed off on the project and it is up to Obama to make the final decision of whether or not the Keystone XL is in the national interest. Climate scientists and environmentalists have declared loudly and clearly that the mining of the tar sands is an enormous "carbon bomb" and is absolutely counter to the urgent need to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Obama, remember, has signed deepwater drilling permits in the wake of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. His administration stacked a seven-member advisory panel on gas hydrofracking with insiders from the energy industry. He is a recipient of large campaign contributions from the nuclear industry, and a zealous supporter of it.

It is certainly curious. One could see the racism, hatred and deceit of George Bush and his administration unmasked, not only in the whole of his years-long, bloody war on terror, but also in moments like the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Since he entered office Obama has been cultivating his own hatred and deceit, with his bloated war on terror, his ever-expanding drone bombing programs, and horrifically malfeasant energy projects. His refusal to deal honestly with climate change and his willingness to sign off on one environmental disaster after another begs the question: is there anyone he doesn't hate?

(Post script: have a look at this article from the New York Times, about the devastation from Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene to communities in Upstate New York and Vermont. It is also typical of the reporting I listened to on NPR over the weekend: devoid of any mention of climate change. It's like reporting "bombs dropped on houses" but failing to mention who dropped the bombs. Oh but I guess they do that too.)

Another Great Insurrection

2011-08-09T22:44:00.003+02:00

Among the disappointments out there, some are great, some are small. I want to mention one that is a little smaller than those I usually speak to. Amidst the turmoil in the UK this week, 150 independent record labels have had much of their stock destroyed in a warehouse fire in London. (I imagine those labels will appreciate some digital sales to help them bounce back without putting pressure on them to move physical stock, if you're so inclined.)

In London (and other English cities) there is mass civil unrest that some folks call riots and some folks call insurrection. The initial spark was the institutional racism of the police state and the way it intersects with economic oppression and other class issues. These issues often affect musicians and artists whose work is not expressed in contemporary economic terms.

So I hope that people who love the great music on some of the affected labels can appreciate how important it is to lend sympathies (and solidarity, and material support) to the marginalized over the oppressive. I think it is mindless, privileged drivel to dismiss the unrest and property destruction outright as the work of thugs and criminals. Only politicians and the BBC speak with such willful lack of subtlety or understanding.

There are folks venting legitimate grievances. And surely there are people coasting along and enjoying the chaos. And surely there are brutes in the streets taking advantage of it. But these brutes, it must be said, are far outmatched in their brutishness by the people in power, who wage aggressive war in faraway places, who dangle education beyond the reach of those who need it, who force an eternity of nuclear devastation on the soil and water, who enact policies that further marginalize culturally meaningful pursuits (like making good music and getting it to the public).

I think it is important not to vilify the insurrectionists and their legitimate grievances in the same sentence as we regret the damage seen by these independent labels. What is the incidental burning of records to the intentional burning of villages? Speak of strategy and effectiveness in expressing anti-establishment unrest, sure, but not in the absence of a clear, outright condemnation of a systematically racist political establishment that would burn our records, our instruments, and our children in a flash if it was economically expedient.

The Same Wars 2011

2011-08-01T23:31:00.006+02:00

Not long after Barack Obama began his term as US president, I wrote a piece called The Same Wars, the premise being that the Bush Administration wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were indistinguishable from the Obama Administration wars in those same places. I was writing this in the context of the phony torture debate in the spring of 2009, when there were still people around who would look you in the eye and speak well of Obama. Blind faith is so strange. There are fewer of those people around these days.

I think it's time to re-up this notion of sameness. It is uncontroversial to note that the Obama Administration has surpassed its predecessor in the prosecution of illegal, unjustified warfare. The United States now openly commits naked aggression on the people of six countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. Prosecutable acts of aggression in each and every case. There is no justification for the drone attacks, the torture dungeons, the sprawling military bases, the checkpoints, the detentions, the home invasions, the daily humiliation, all the continued killing. Do we respond with tears or rage to the spiralling humanitarian crises in many of the places that the US and its NATO allies choose to either target with ammunition or ignore altogether?

Almost daily we hear of entire extended families wiped out by bombs that some rat-bastard US spokesperson claims were mistargeted, or malfunctioning, or anyway it was the victims' fault for living in close proximity to persons designated targets of illegal, extra-judicial killing. We hear of the US economy tanking but the bombs are made by wealthy corporations in the US. We hear of warlords and dictators whipped into a killing frenzy as though this justifies the invasions, occupations and "surgical strikes", even though it happens every goddamn time and you have to be a complete anti-historical moron to think this time will be different. Beyond the mendacious NPR/CNN blather about local folks "on the ground" praising their own victimization at US gunpoint, we hear from people committed to self-determination and forced to struggle not just against their own local oppressors but against the rogue superpower as well.

And then we hear other things, atrocities committed in other fields, the wars fought on other fronts. Acts of war committed in the form of oil spills. Legislative war against poor people and the working class. Propaganda wars, where Loughner and Breivik are lone crazies but any Arab's righteous anger is taken as evidence of impending jihad, and passengers on ships bearing letters of solidarity to the imprisoned people of Gaza are considered terrorists.

I say this over and over again because it never stops being true: the war is against clean air, clean water, clean soil. We are forced to accept bitter terms of defeat as access shrinks to unpoisoned food not grown on mutated farmland. The Fukushima catastrophe - that the reactor was even built in the first place! - was an act of war against the future, and that war extends to multiple fronts as reactors around the world are allowed to remain open, allowed to leak yet more toxins into our beleaguered ecology. (Where does that miserable asshole Obama stand on nukes? Look into it, it's not pretty.)

The global climate has gone utterly haywire and do-nothing politicians sit on their hands and do nothing but talk about how to enrich the rich. It's a war. They say "debt ceiling crisis" and if you don't hear "phony crisis propaganda" then it's working. I used to read and write about creeping fascism but that adjective - creeping - has become too tame. It's marching full stride. Outright racist religious fundamentalists vie for control of the US government, vie for the opportunity to become beneficiaries of corporate incentives to legislate in corporate favor, and the country's first black president continues to bomb black and brown people and their villages to dust. (The next US president might hate African-Americans, it's true, but will she have the blood of as many Africans on her hands as the current president? Time will tell, if we let it.)

The secretary of state is supposed to be a woman but state governments can choose with impunity to restrict women's reproductive rights. Men and women with soft palms and robust bank accounts deny workers the right to advocate for themselves. The government of my home state of New York decides to extend marital rights to same sex couples, provided they are willing to live in a place held hostage by toxic gas drilling corporations.

Earlier this summer, over in The Netherlands, the government waged what the famous Dutch composer Louis Andriessen correctly called a war on the arts. Arts budgets were slashed or erased in that haven for cultural freedom and funding, even while the US secretary of defense was next door in Belgium exhorting NATO countries to spend more money on the alliance's war machine. My friends and colleagues took to the streets of The Hague to oppose these tragically backward policies. It was an impressive show, both by the committed artists and their supporters and by the security forces, who played out their own little Greek street scene by beating down a few non-violent protesters.

Why has the war extended so far as the cultural sector in a place like The Netherlands? Why has it extended as far as a youth camp in Norway, where a footsoldier of white, racist, misogynist fundamentalism massacred scores of children one morning last week?

These are the same wars. When I marched in Amsterdam and London against the assault on Iraq before it began, none of my musician colleagues marched with me. They shrugged it off. Everyone has their own way to politics and so forth, so I write without judgement. But when it came time for them to take to the streets to agitate for their interests I am not sure that the "anti-war" folks rushed to their side. A little solidarity goes a long way. I take the extraordinary, decades-old struggle playing out in Egypt as an example: diverse groups standing up for each other (even after the Western cameras have gone on summer holidays).

When we realize that these offenses and atrocities are the same wars being fought, we can begin to strategize and not be left scratching our heads in confusion and frustration as we lose yet another battle. I don't have to know a soul in Yemen to understand that the bombs exploding there sound the same as the mountaintops of West Virginia being blown to pieces in some sleazy corporation's relentless pursuit of coal. I don't have to be deeply engaged in the day to day politics of Libya to know that when a mother loses her child to NATO bombs her sorrow is as real as the sorrow of a grieving mother in Oslo in the aftermath of Breivik's American ultra-right influenced killing spree. The children near Fukushima and the whales swimming in the Pacific take in the same radioactive toxins. Malnourishment stings as sharply in Detroit as it does in Mogadishu. Apartheid was as wrong in South Africa as it is in Israel. Freedom movements in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia deserve international solidarity as surely as similar movements in Egypt and Tunisia.

We ought to stop acting as though our daily horrors are some new thing cooked up out of nowhere. I think it's delusional to think we can be successful environmentalists without being committed anti-war activists too. We can't fight successfully for gains in education, or the arts, or civil rights, or reproductive rights, without realizing that we are fighting a war that is fought not only on the legislative level, but with guns and tanks and bombs as well. Worker's rights at home won't cut it if we don't pursue freedom for those enslaved in sweatshops abroad.

Our narrow self-interests will not win the day. The men and women in state and national capitols, and those in the corporate boardrooms, and those in the television studios, and those in uniforms at drone command centers, or in tanks, or at checkpoints, are of a piece with the Loughners and Breiviks. They're all of a piece with the energy fundamentalists at Exxon and BP and the rest who are pouring oil into rivers this summer. For fucking profit! You can probably figure out a more subtle way of saying it. But say it, get with it, because it's true: a war is swirling around you and you have agency over how you engage it.

These are the same wars. Enough with the false dichotomies between different actors in the same suits, between corporations and governments who want the same thing, between adversarial countries. You can fight or flee. But the earth is small, and they've got it surrounded, and you can't flee. So fight.

Thoreau Day

2011-07-13T22:21:00.006+02:00

Yesterday, July 12, was Henry David Thoreau's birthday. I celebrated. I consider Thoreau a hero and a constant source of inspiration. His were practiced examples of how one might live in accordance with their values.

Some people have asked me, if I don't celebrate Thanksgiving, or American Independence Day (July 4th), or religious holidays, what do I celebrate? I think Thoreau's life and work are worthy of celebration.

So I invited twenty friends over, we grilled up some hamburgers, got wasted and lit off a mess of fireworks. I'm kidding of course. I took a walk at Treman State Park, not far from home, by myself. It was a hot, dry day but at five in the afternoon, and in the occasional shade of the woods, the weather was pleasant enough. From the lower park I walked along the Gorge Trail until it split and then I took the Rim Trail to the upper park. From there I took the South Trail back down to the lower park. It's a well marked loop, paved in some places, popular. Some mildly strenuous moments if you're not accustomed to walking uphill. Something like five miles total. It took me a bit under two hours.

The woods around were alive with chipmunks and squirrels busy chasing each other and fussing about in the trees. I did not catch sight of a single bird. I have walked this trail many times, in many seasons, and always see newts and salamanders but this time not one. Mosquitoes and flies were out, and I have been on walks where they drive me nearly to a panic, but they weren't so abundant now. I saw one frog, after an hour or so of walking, and it made me very happy. I see and hear very few of those, though I think they should be plentiful here and in this season.

I saw no fish in Enfield Creek, in the pools that punctuate the falls. On my last walk here I saw many, but they were all dead. I saw no sign of raccoons, or skunks, or foxes, coyotes, deer, yet the roadsides everywhere here are littered with their fresh or rotting corpses. No prints of bear paws in the dirt tracks.

There's so much here I cannot name: trees and plants, soil and erosion patterns, what flowers when. I didn't take the kind of walk that I imagine Thoreau would have taken: slow, deliberate, carefully observing details and relationships. I walk fast, each step a step away from roads and computers, governments and corporations, self-promotion and other peoples' news. Like HDT, I imagine, I spend time in nature to assuage the loneliness and isolation of the contemporary urban (and virtual) environment. Walking alone on a narrow track in the woods (no phone, of course, and no money jangling in my pocket) I feel the opposite of alone. I feel utterly connected, to myself, to my surroundings, to time.

The contemporary urban and virtual environment encroaches on this, and hideously so. I wonder what it would be like if HDT took this walk with me. He would surely point out numerous, wondrous things that I miss. This gorge, its waterfalls, its trees, the way the flora changes, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically as I walk from one glacially formed ridge to another, has much to marvel at. But I hear HDT asking -- or maybe it's the voice of myself as a child, 25 years ago -- "where did everything go?" Fellow mammals are busy dying under the wheels of fuel efficient automobiles, pines disappear as invasive insect species lay siege to them, the water, ever more toxic, chokes the fish, the sky above is littered with airplanes and satellites.

Thoreau spent his 44 years observing and reflecting on the world around him. He called bullshit on the way civilized people treat each other, the way money and property perverts them, the racism and warmongering of politicians. He has inspired generation after generation of environmentalists, civil rights activists, people clamoring for self-determination, people struggling against war. What a hero. What a thing to celebrate.

Independence from America Day

2011-07-03T18:22:00.001+02:00

I propose an Independence from America Day. Can we celebrate that?

I declare independence from the pirate spirit of Christopher Colombus that defines the United States: find abundance that is not yours; subdue or kill anyone enjoying, defending or even willing to share it; transport it elsewhere for personal gain; leave behind you a wasteland, a graveyard, and look for more treasure. As with the Caribbean in the 1490s, so with Iraq today.

I declare independence from the English entrepreneurs who set up camp in Jamestown in 1607. After some rough seasons and plenty of help from the Powhatan people, they managed to establish a global trade in tobacco and force indigenous onto reservations or indoctrinate them in schools and churches.

I declare independence from the religious fanatics who began their invasion of Massachusetts in 1620. I declare independence from their intolerance, their patriarchy, their witch trials. How would they have treated someone like me in the mid 17th century?

I declare independence from slavish adherence to the U.S. Constitution, an old rag written long ago by a group of racist businessmen who didn't get it right -- unless "getting it right" is this, what we've got, after 224 years to perfect it. Raise your hand if you've had enough of these depraved white men in Washington arguing over what "the Founding Fathers" meant in the 1780s. Who gives a shit? They're dead and it's 2011!

I declare independence from slavery. A century and a half after the Civil War was fought (not over slavery, mind you, but state rights) slavery is still rampant. As for African captives in South Carolina in the 1850s, so with the girl who sewed your shirt in a Mexican maquiladora, or assembled my computer in a Chinese "free industrial zone", or scrubbed the toilets at a Saudi oil rig.

I declare independence from the westward "pioneering" that laid waste to culture after culture in the pursuit of what another pathological national movement once called lebensraum. I declare independence from the continued denial of justice to the survivors of the genocide perpetrated on American indigenous people.

I declare independence from the United States flag, because it is the same flag that waves over 1,000 military bases around the world. It is the same flag that NASA astronauts stuck on the Moon, which the US bombed several decades later.

I declare independence from "The Star Spangled Banner". A national anthem about war is a dead giveaway for what the nation is about. And it grates on my ears. And it embarrasses me when musicians perform it. And why don't they sing songs about sports at sports events?

I declare independence from the idea of American citizenship. What besides this connects me to the other 300 million Americans? What besides this connects us to each other and not to those who live and work and study and love in the US without citizenship? What connects me to a technologist in San Francisco, or a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, or an energy consultant in Houston, more than to a poet in Shanghai or a violinist in Damascus?

I declare independence from the oft-repeated hogwash that "nothing is manufactured in the US anymore." Incorrect! From tear gas canisters to bullets, from guns to missiles, from tanks to helicopters, from warships to jet fighters, from satellites to drone aircraft, from nuclear power stations to nuclear bombs, plenty is manufactured in the United States! Business is booming. Automobiles. Prisons. Pharmaceuticals. Oil and gas wells. Logging roads. Genetically-modified seeds. Financial meltdowns and bailouts. Shitty movies.

I declare independence from Capitalism, from the theft of land and resources, the poisoning of rivers, forced labor, consumerism, planned obsolescence, market fetishism, and the rest that turns people's souls into mountains of invisible money. I have in me the genetic and intellectual memory that humans are social creatures. We depend on each other. My family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues are not enriched by the immiseration of others.

I declare independence from sham democracy, from uninformed consent, from indoctrinated idiots droning on about shit they don't understand, from "the democratic process" when we are voting on how to kill the oceans, how to talk about torturing people, how to bomb them, how to eradicate plant and animal species, how to sell out the education of young people, how to cook the planet.

I declare independence from celebrity fetishism, from an industry that rewards political and sexual -- to say nothing of artistic -- criminals with air time, that teaches young girls to become hypersexualized dimwits. I declare independence from the culture of self-obsession and selfishness.

I declare independence from space exploration. It's a bait and switch. Hey, explorer, you want to explore something? Explore how to get all the goddamn plastic out of the oceans and out of everybody's endocrine systems.

I declare independence from nationalism, perpetual war, institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. I declare independence from propping up Israeli apartheid, Saudi tyranny, Afghan warlords. I declare independence from forcing a failed way of life on the poor of world, at gunpoint, every time there's a natural disaster, and making them pay for it, and calling it humanitarian aid.

I declare independence from dropping bombs, setting landmines, firing rockets, issuing weapons, stationing troops, "winning hearts and minds", abandoning veterans, erecting walls and barbed-wire fences, slaughtering innocents, covering it up, doing it again, calling it collateral damage, doing it again, saying "war is hell", doing it again, insisting that the killing is humanitarian in nature, doing it again and getting promoted.

I declare independence from perpetual ecocide, from clearcutting forests, from chemical spills, nuclear tests, monocrop agriculture. We are not stewards of the Earth. Nature doesn't need our "help". Shut down the nuclear power plants, the coal mines, the gas fields, the oil wells. Turn off the lights and sit in the dark for a day and think about how to turn the lights back on. I guarantee you that the sun will rise in a few hours.

I declare independence from state terror, from being afraid to speak out because they'll drag me through mud and leave me in a prison cell, from being forced to insist on "non-violence" while they pummel me with rubber bullets, tear gas, riot gear, or just their shitbrained nationalist ideology.

No flags, no myths, no factory farm animal carcasses charred on gas grills, washed down with fizzy corn syrup, while watching gunpowder explode in the sky.

Fuck all that noise. I declare independence from it, and it feels great, and I'm celebrating when and how I want to.

The Next Revolution is Now

2011-05-20T05:52:00.005+02:00

I just caught this opinion piece by David T. Little in The New York Times. The line of inquiry is eminently fascinating and frustrating to me. After giving some background on himself, Little asks whether music should be political, divides political music into "revolutionary" and "critical" categories, names some historical and contemporary examples, and claims that our "historical moment" is no longer revolutionary. I should clarify he is writing within narrow confines for a series the NYT is running on "21st century classical music". I am still troubled by many of his conclusions, as are some of the commenters online.

I read it and thought "no, no, no". "Political" gets treated as a mannerism, or a device, or something from which to derive content. But music is a social phenomenon. What are the social implications of the way we make music? I don't see this addressed in the piece, and I think this is the most important political question we must ask ourselves as music makers.

We delude ourselves if we think we can walk into the halls of the establishment and decry them to any effect, let alone tear them down -- not to say we shouldn't try. There are repercussions for doing so, of course, and a sense of self-preservation often impels us to find some good in whatever stages we can get access to.

Still, "political" needs to be in the context of our music, not just the content. What are our allegiances? What devils do we make deals with to find an audience? That Thoreau quote I always bring up is relevant here: "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." What's the use of writing a piece about the evils of war without calling out, before the concert, after the concert, the names of those who make war?

I imagine that as compensation for the things I say about American politicians I probably won't be invited to perform at the Kennedy Center anytime soon. That's OK. I just hope that by saying those things (like, for example, Obama is a fucking war criminal for the continued indiscriminate drone bombing and night raids perpetrated on civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan) other folks will be encouraged to live lives of political consequence -- to cast their whole influence. Imagine if I wrote my Elegy for the schoolboys at Ghazi Khan and left it at that! You might know about the atrocity at Ghazi Khan -- ten innocent people, nine of them boys, woken from their beds, handcuffed, and executed by US Special Forces in December 2009 -- but you wouldn't have that reminder from one more person, made at every opportunity I have, that such an action is a war crime and Obama bears culpability.

This is a paragraph in which I take a deep breath. (And parenthetically say that my work is not solely devoted to the trial of the current US president, whoever that may be. This is just an example.)

I suppose what I'm feeling at this moment is that the NYT piece that Little penned played it safe. We need to not do that. We can talk about political music, sure, but then let's talk about politicians. Inevitably, we're going to be talking about war criminals. Inevitably. In our music let's do whatever it is that moves and inspires us and moves and inspires our listeners. But when we write about it, about politics, let's get specific, name names, consider actionable offenses, ask how the Nuremburg laws apply, that stuff.

I imagine that, writing for the NYT, Little was not commissioned to think beyond certain self- and externally-imposed borders, specifically those of the economy and etiquette of classical music. Of course music will be politically benign if from the outset we accept the constraints that cause it to be so. "Political" needs to be context, not merely content. Little imagines that this "historical moment" is not revolutionary. But we are amidst many historical moments right now, making music in shiny concert halls and grungy basements and within and around various ideologies. And I think beyond the constraints and the borders imposed by convention, revolution certainly happens, needs to happen, is happening now.

*

PS: h/t to Dutch composer Samuel Vriezen.
PPS: this is a reaction to Little's opinion piece, not Little or his music.

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 21

2011-04-12T18:30:00.002+02:00

Part of the advantage of starting to tour heavily now in my life, as a "responsible adult", is that I've been over partying for a long time. I like it, I do it, but it is not the aim of the tour, or my involvement in music, as I have seen it be for many younger people. Still, it happens, and when it does, what I really need in the morning is a good cup of coffee. And around the corner from last night's venue, there it is! I start the last day of the tour drinking a cup of Gimme! coffee. (Gimme! is a small company based in Ithaca, and I probably spent as much time preparing this tour at the Gimme on State Street as from my place in Ithaca.) I guess they sell their coffee to this coffeeshop in Dayton. They don't fuck around here. I wait for maybe 15 minutes while the one customer ahead of me has his coffee so carefully prepared by the barista you'd think a too-fast pour would cause the world to explode. Barista and customer discuss the number of "grains" or whatever in various coffee grinds. I like coffee, but not that much.

Four and a half hour drive from Dayton to Pittsburgh. Not much to see until West Virginia, and I regret not having time to take it slow, it's so clearly another world here, time passes differently. I start to think about a different kind of travel, now. I am always gathering and always sharing ideas, but on tour I am consciously disseminating them. So I suppose when I go to listen to music, or visit a gallery or museum, or hear a speech delivered, or explore a city, I am gathering them. I will have a little time to walk in some mountains coming up, to process them.

When I released Unison Lines with my longtime collaborator and friend Rafal Mazur last fall, I was immediately contacted by Stephen Pellegrino, in Pittsburgh, who not only bought a copy for himself but for a local radio station. What a complimentary and generous and encouraging thing to do! I met Steve at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, in Florida, in 2005. We were both associate artists in residence in Henry Threadgill's group. (Quick piece of context: Threadgill has been a massive inspiration to me for years.)

Pellegrino is awesome. He's a radical theater-maker, composer, and accordionist, and a master at the lost art of drywall plastering. He and I have kept in touch, and shared a bill in Pittsburgh a few years ago. The Pittsburgh experimental scene is unfortunately dominated by a very odd character that most folks who have passed through know about, and I did not appreciate the way I was treated last time I came through, so Pellegrino arranged and promoted a concert on his own for me. He opens with his MAN FROM 'NYAYZAR performance, telling stories, overtone singing and playing quirky accordion pieces. The show is at a small art gallery that has some good stuff on the walls, but smells a bit like a New England gift shop. We have a small crowd, mostly men, who sit at the start of my set frowning and with their arms folded. Kind of a huge contrast to most of the tour.

One of the difficulties arranging and promoting this thing is that no one had much of an idea of what would happen. Some folks expected free jazz, others noise, others synth drones, and still others "punk-folk". I didn't really know what would happen either. My set has grown and developed as I've played it. In Pittsburgh my saxophone playing was promoted, so the drums and organs and vocals stuff may have thrown some folks off. Although I emphasized different things in every show of the tour, I decided early on not to make assumptions about "what people would like". I wanted to learn about the music by presenting something similar to a lot of different people, in a lot of different contexts. Although I sense, in this working-class town, for a crowd that is radical-sympathetic, that the messages in the songs are appreciated, I think the folks in Pittsburgh may have been just as happy to hear a saxophone-only set. I would love to do a saxophone only tour, but man does the Farfisa sound good 21 days in. Maybe next time, Pittsburgh!

SET LIST 4/11
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
A Bloodletting
What We Have
Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 20

2011-04-11T16:30:00.000+02:00

In the morning I go for a walk up and down Main Street in Lafayette, Indiana. It's sunny and I think about the start of the tour: heavy snow falling when I left Ithaca, ice on the ground when I got to Montreal. I think maybe I have never travelled across seasons like this before. It's Sunday and people are out for brunch or coffee in the handful of open places. There are also a couple of antique shops, some bars, a bunch of unrented storefronts and some "community services" spots.

In this and other towns in the midwest, and on the radio, I have seen and heard public service announcements that April is "Prevention of Child Cruelty Month". How nice battered kids get a whole thirty days. I wonder if agitating against war counts as "prevention of child cruelty". What about scaling down the war on clean air, soil and water?

I pack up my gear and linger in Lafayette for a bit in a nice coffeeshop that charges 75¢ for a ginormous styrofoam bucket of brewed iced tea. Refills are 25¢. What? I get on the road to Dayton and listen to my newly-acquired copy of the 1975 album "For the Whole World to See" by short-lived Detroit band Death. Holy shit it is so good.

An aside, a pet peeve: your band does not "kill". It does not "melt faces". It is not "crushing". It does not "destroy" or "murder" or "slay" or even "tear the roof off" or anything like that. Let the critics and fans say that about your band if and when you manage it. And now I'm saying it about Death: Death fucking KILLS.

In Dayton I meet up in the Oregon district with Brandon Hawk, a local performer who also organizes shows. How I ended up booking a show in Dayton is one of the nicest stories I have to tell about this tour. Weeks before I hit the road I still had a couple of dates open and that's no fun. I sent a message to Brett Nagafuchi, drummer with the Dayton band Kuan. We met when we shared a bill in Ithaca last September. They blew me away then and I hoped our paths would cross again. Within days I was on the phone with Brett, who was sharing contact info and ideas about various places to play across the Midwest. Another day went by and the Dayton show was set up with Brandon, before I even talked to him! That's some Midwest hospitality, friends.

The Oregon district is not very big, but has a couple of bars and restaurants and shops. It is a little hopping when I arrive at Blind Bob's, the venue where Brandon organized tonight's show. A lot of twenty-somethings hanging out on the outdoor terrace. There are four acts tonight, and the music doesn't start until around ten, so plenty of time to get food, unpack gear, hang out. I am realizing that hanging out is dangerous on tour. It makes me so sleepy. As long as I'm doing something, anything, I don't feel the slightest bit tired. But I'm not on tour to relax.

Two Suns, a local noise duo, play first. Josh plays and processes sounds with a laptop and 'kaoss' pad, deep, ominous loops and sustained chords. Over this Eli floats and interjects, playing pitched and unpitched percussion, guitar, wood flute, switching between them almost manically. Since the club serves food, some people are still eating and I am surprised by the attention the duo gets, but they get it. I only catch a little of the second act, who play on the terrace while I set up onstage. It's very pretty violin and accordion music and they do play one of the themes from the film Amelie. There's a big crowd and folks love it. They also dig the set after mine, a singer-songwriter who impresses me with the independence of his Hendrix-inspired guitar accompaniament (no effects pedals!) and voice.

I'm down with this kind of programming, it's how I listen to music at home. Presumably others do, too, because the crowd digs my set. I like to work hard when I make music, and I work harder tonight than I have all tour, and even though I only have one more show left, I want this to be my starting point. Again, I go through a big p.a. and again, it feels good. This space is even bigger than the Black Sparrow in Lafayette, and it has a raised stage, and lights. The gear looks good up on the stage and I'm full of energy. I do Conquistadors without amplification and play and shout as loud as I can. The rest of the set comes out thunderous through the p.a. There is no vocal monitor: I've been tripped up by this in the past, but now I know the set well enough that it's fine: I can feel where my voice sits with the Farfisa, and it all works. I let the saxophone solo at the end of the set run forever and it feels great. I have this strange impression that the less people are familiar with the "conventional" context for extended technique free improv, the more they appreciate it. I'm learning to trust the way a crowd shows its appreciation, and if they shout and whistle when I play something that, in other contexts, folks normally listen to quietly and intently, it's sincere here.

SET LIST4/10
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
A Bloodletting
What We Have
Strange Lands
Fear / Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 19

2011-04-10T09:48:00.001+02:00

Allison makes pancakes while Krzysztof and I trade mp3s. They are excellent pancakes! I realize I had pancakes earlier on the tour, in Detroit, also excellent, and it feels like a long time ago. It will take some time to process the process of this tour. I already know I want more, more, more of what I've been doing.

Louisville was a great time, but I am happy to be back playing the Conquistadors set tonight. This date was still open when I hit the road a few weeks ago. I have been so fortunate that friends and friends of friends have had their doors open and things have fallen into place. Not that I haven't worked overtime to put the tour together. But I know things don't always work out so well. I got in touch with Paul, who runs the Black Sparrow Pub in Lafayette, Indiana, through my friend Tad in Toronto, and he took me on last minute for a late set. He is pushing boundaries in Lafayette in good ways, it seems, and tonight he keeps telling me: "just do what you want." This is what I want!

I drive from Louisville to Lafayette, three hours north. I had been worried, before the tour, about all of the time driving alone. It's been fine. The drives have been relatively short, the weather and traffic have been easy going. I was worried I would run out of things to listen to. I do not. When I tire of the cds and tapes and mp3s I brought with me I listen to the radio. I have reasonable tolerance for classic rock, which is consistently the easiest to find, but those same 20 songs on every station get to be a drag. No oldies or soul stations in the midwest that I can find. So I'll switch over to the stations that air the fascist-fundamentalist crazytalk of populist millionaires. A highlight of that stuff on this trip was the famous rightwing radio host interviewing the lunatic preacher from Florida who burned a copy of the Koran, casting one idiot/asshole/psycho against another in the battle to most dutifully reflect the will of god and country.

I get to Main Street in Lafayette just after five pm. It's sunny and quiet, most of the shops have closed but restaurants and cafes are open. I drink a coffee, write, take a walk for a while, get some food, wait around. Now it's only nine pm, and I go on around midnight. I hang out at the Black Sparrow. It's packed, and noisy as all get out, lots of people moving in and out, folks from town and the local university and fans of the first band, which is an inter-generational klezmer ensemble. They play spirited versions of the hits without much embellishment to a large crowd of devoted friends and family. The most exciting thing about it is the very short old man in the red baseball cap and "I heart klezmer" t-shirt jumping around the crowd with a tambourine, clearly part of the show, and reflecting an actual old world practice. The music's not terrible but it goes on for a very long time, and I'm tired, and I don't know a soul here, and I'm thinking people are going to walk out or talk through my set, and we're talking three hours of klezmer here, people.

Worries unnecessary, I play perhaps my best set of the tour so far. Casey, who is running sound this night, is a music theorist and sound recordist and really helpful. He mics up the drums, my vocals, my treble amp and takes a direct out from the bass amp. This is the first time on this tour that I'm dealing with a p.a. and I've only agreed to it because of how big and noisy this club is. I usually hate the distance that big sound systems create and whenever possible prefer to avoid them. But the material is so comfortable to me now, and I am so happy to be playing -- instead of waiting around, or even teaching at this point -- that I lean harder on the music. And I open my eyes as I sing. People are into it. I sense them grasping the words, following along, swaying some to the more upbeat stuff. They clap along to A Bloodletting (the trick is to tell them it's a sing-along, and folks clap) and cheer on the saxophone solo at the end. I hardly talk at all, just play and sing the shit out of the material.

I haven't quite figured out what causes people to sometimes shout and whistle when I get into a circular breathing cycle on the saxophone. Perhaps it's a lack of familiarity with the conventions of listening to improvised or experimental music, perhaps it's just the alcohol talking. I used to hate it, it made me feel like more of a stuntman than a musician, but it feels just fine here. At any rate I am surprised by how much attention the sax improv at the end of the set gets in this rowdy place, especially since it is completely acoustic. I play standing out in front of my gear, closer to the audience. It really is a great crowd, boisterous and engaged at the same time, fun to talk to afterwards, too. I would happily go back to Lafayette to play. I suppose I feel that way about everywhere I've been on this tour, for different reasons. At the Black Sparrow there was some crazy, uncertain energy that brought me, and the set, to a new, good place.

SET LIST 4/09
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
A Bloodletting
What We Have
Strange Lands
Fear / Helen Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 18

2011-04-09T16:55:00.000+02:00

Easy day at the University of Louisville. I coach the improvisation class for an hour in the afternoon and am taken to dinner by my hosts Krzysztof Wolek and Allison Ogden. (With very low expectations, we go to a tapas restaurant called "Mojito" that turns out to be excellent. We agree that the flan made with goat milk, with dulce de leche ice cream, is out of this world.) The rest from performing is probably useful but, tired as I am, by evening I would certainly rather rally and perform tonight. I am so home on this tour and dislike the idea of it ending, which it will, and soon.

At the improv class we have perhaps ten students on various instruments. Playing technique and improvisation capabilities vary within the group, but everyone is there because they want to be. We start with a listening excercise that I have written into a pair of pieces (Quiet System and Places, or: The Hague Invasion Act). We play three or four improvisations -- I try not to talk too much, and keep the focus on playing -- and start each one with this excercise. It uses the individual players' inhale/exhale cycle, regardless of instrument, to determine individual rhythms and thus the rhythmic cadence of the entire improvised statement. But listening is the bottom line in improvisation, in the improvisation that I am interested in making and discussing, so with each take we pull further away from "the rules" and rely more on interacting spontaneously. The idea of contemporaneous solo improvisations is not all that interesting to me, nor is the idea of improvisation as fundamentally a cathartic experience for the player(s). I favor rigor, structure, deliberate interaction. Call me conservative.

After the class I am the recipient, over coffee with a new friend in Louisville, of a recording by the proto-punk band Wire. So, so good. New obsession.

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 17

2011-04-08T16:32:00.001+02:00

Academia is exhausting! The day is dedicated to getting tonight's concert together. Rehearsal with an ad-hoc improvisation ensemble, soundchecks for all the pieces on the program. We spend a beautiful, warm, sunny day hidden away in U of L's Bird Hall, one of those academic recital/lecture halls that holds perhaps 150, without a raised stage but rather the chairs leading up, amphitheatre-style.

I have a brief respite of sorts while Krzysztof Wolek rehearses his piece Un Claro Del Tempo with Margaret (flute), Sally (voice), and Tony (piano). I get to mind his 11-month-old baby. We hang out in the garden of the planetarium. Everything is fascinating: the soil, the concrete, the way the stroller moves when she gets out and pushes it herself -- she's walking already. Part of the way I worked my way through grad school in The Hague was at an ex-pat daycare. I had a roomful of kids aged 15-30 months. I love kids! Motivations are so clear: hungry, thirsty, tired, need attention, need a diaper change, need to dance, or sing, or exhibit utter curiosity.

In the concert I am involved with three different works: my video Things You Cannot See is screened, I read a few texts from One is One: Preludes & Fugues, I perform a saxophone improvisation, and participate in the group improvisation. The other works, by Finnish composer Kaaija Saariaho, Krzystof, John Ritz and Zach Thomas, all feature Margaret Lancaster on flute. She is a brilliant performer, with an endless appetite for new music and an extraordinary command of extended technique. She is also an excellent improviser, and in the group improvisation she bounces rapidly between supportive and antagonistic roles.

The works by U of L faculty Krzysztof Wolek and John Ritz impress me. Even the brief solo flute piece by their ambitious student, Zach Thomas, is strong. John's piece, The Umbilicus of Limbo is for flutes, soprano, viola, tympani, and electronics. It should not work but it does, it does, the sounds absolutely matched and complementary. Where the structure of John's work plays, perhaps, with discomfort, Krzysztof's work is completely balanced. I'm always struck by the fluidity with which he writes complex music. We talk after the concert about how a strength can become a weakness. It's possible for us to paint ourselves into a corner and when we get good at something it's not a bad idea to set new challenges.

The texts I read from my book are pointedly chosen. One of them deliberately mixes up snippets of text referencing American war crimes in Iraq, criticism of the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli human rights activist Tanya Renhart, civil disobedience, and the choice of Jews persecuted during World War II of whether to assert their beliefs or hide them. It occassional uses the tenor of combatitive tv news panels like "Crossfire". It centers on a news story from several years ago about a US soldier in Iraq whose "buddy" was hit in the nose with a rock by a kid on the other side of a barbed wire fence. The soldier "knelt down, said a prayer, stood up" and shot down the boy who threw the rock. It is a convoluted piece and I have never performed it before. I felt that in Kentucky, as close as I have been to the epicenter of the twin fundamentalisms of American Imperialism and pseudo-Christianity, I needed to address these without being rude to my hosts. What is the goal of something like this? I want people to understand that things as morally unambiguous for them as the horror of Nazi persecution of Jews and the evil of the SS cast an incriminating light on American treatment of Muslims (at home and abroad), Israeli treatment of Palestinians, Judeo-Christian exceptionalism, and imperialism in general.

I honestly don't know if it worked. But the audience loved my solo saxophone performance, and I think the combination of the energy I put into it and the energy they gave back -- and the fabulous performances the notated works had just received -- breathed fire into the group improvisation at the end of the concert. Mercifully, we played with a sense of humor.

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 16

2011-04-07T20:12:00.000+02:00

I have a rehearsal and two classes to teach today. The rehearsal is with an ad-hoc improvisation ensemble of performers and composers involved with tomorrow's concert at the University of Louisville: Krzysztof Wolek and John Ritz (who are processing sounds with Max/MSP and PD, respectively), flautist Margaret Lancaster, singer Sally Freeland and pianist Anthony Weinstein. I am playing saxophone. Experience levels with improvisation vary within the group, but all are excellent performers. This is our first of two short rehearsals before tomorrow's concert. How to establish a working relationship with so many performers? The expectation seems to be that I will strategize for the group, so I propose more playing than strategizing. In the collective improvisation group I used to run in Holland (Did you know? I used to live in Holland?) I pushed for a lot of talking about what we were working on. My attitude has changed a bit since then. With instruments at the ready and rehearsal space available, let's play. We can talk about it later, at the pub.

My first class is -- wait for it -- "Advanced Topics in Computer Music". Krzysztof introduces me to his class as a composer, improviser, visual artist and "political artist". So. What I Talk About When I Talk About Computer Music: my mentors-turned-collaborators Marek Choloniewski, Joel Ryan and Michel Waisvisz. I have been incredibly fortunate to work with these inspiring, groundbreaking, critically thinking composer-inventor-improvisers. Since we are talking about electronic music, we have to talk about energy, so I also reference Peter Brotzmann and Albert Ayler. Since the electronic music I make is centered on both live improvisation and studio music, I reference both Evan Parker and Autechre. I reference the institutions where I have developed my own practice in electronic music making, SME and the Audio Art Festival in Krakow, STEIM in Amsterdam, and the Institute of Sonology and the ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague. (After the class, one of the students dubs my presentation "name-dropping 101". Do the students, who have never heard many of these names, jot them down? They do not.

I discuss a few of my works made with a computer: Stachowski Variation, Dodging Bullets, and my video Things You Cannot See. Then I ask the class a question which should not be an advanced topic: where does electrical power come from? Someone offers: "the wall". This is not a correct answer, but a forgiveable one, at least in a culture that has gotten used to its sense of entitlement and its loss of contact with nature. It is a teachable moment! I take out my analogue electronics set up and play a quiet, abbreviated version of The Love Story. The energy to power an instrument has to be generated somewhere, and we have choices about our allegiances: refineries, coal mines, nuclear power plants, dams, turbines, the sun, the lungs. (As with food, so with music, less processing and less waste is probably better for you.)

I get a quick break and go for a coffee with some students. One asks about decadence, or the apparent lack of value of new music on a planet going to pot. This is an important point to me, and an important thing to address with young people after they hear me decry industrial civilization. I like the formulation of Antonio Gramsci "I am a pessimist because of the mind and an optimist because of the will." We can know the situation is dire without descending into permanent depression. We can do something about it, and if our gifts are in the realm of communication, we can communicate. Another important formulation, from George Orwell: "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." If we are truly committed to music making, we must be so in good times and bad.

The composition seminar is a larger group, maybe 25 people in the room. While I introduce myself and talk about my background, I let my ensemble piece Elegy for the schoolboys at Ghazi Khan, written for Ensemble Modelo 62, play in the background. When I turn my attention to the recording, I talk briefly about the simple way the piece was constructed, and the horrific reason it was made. I say that writing it is an opportunity to talk about those schoolboys. I ask if anyone in the room knows about the schoolboys at Ghazi Khan. They do not. Neither do most folks reading this, I'll wager. But these boys need to be remembered, and their massacre needs to be remembered, and the countless similar actions need to be remembered, and the killers need to be held accountable, always.

Some may think US crimes against humanity, or war crimes (I don't know which) are irrelevant to a class on contemporary art music composition. One of the reasons I am not a professor of music is that I am more interested in young peoples' politics than their aesthetics. I'd rather know that they prefer anarchism to authoritarianism than that they prefer minimalism to maximalism. Or something like that. In this second class I am able to elaborate on some of the things I brought up earlier in the day, without feeling tied to relating specifically to electronic music. I mention the Scratch Orchestra, Cornelius Cardew and his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and Michael Nyman's Experimental Music. Because Louis Andriessen has just won the university's Grawemeyer Award, I relate the anecdote -- I don't recall the details -- of Louis, now an establishment composer, storming the stage in the late 60s during the performance of a Stockhausen work and delivering a leftist political manifesto. Huh.

Krzysztof guides things a bit with challenging questions about the motivations and economics of being an independent musician. I encourage the students to milk the school for all it's worth: rehearsal space, borrowing equipment, having a community of performing colleagues at the ready. These were difficult things to find after leaving academia. I talk about the Conquistadors set and play the track What We Have from the EP. I talk about the "spectacularity" of the set: percussion on stage always accounts for high expectation and drama, vintage gear seems to excite folks before it even gets turned on, and folks are "wowed" by circular breathing, even though there are more challenging techniques on the saxophone (like playing even vaguely in tune). I bring this up because I think it is neither shameful nor overly "savvy" to use multiple means to connect with an audience. Context is important: the use of extended technique is neat-o, but not in a vacuum. Let's talk.

The students ask some questions: "Do you focus on one region or problem of the world?" "Are you ever afraid that you'll offend someone?" I mention my poor mother, who still encourages me to "be less political". I am not sure that if I refrained from saying that Obama is every bit the asshole George Bush is that the bigger commissions would come in. And to be honest if the ratio of gritty basement shows to concert hall performances is tied to the extent to which I openly express how little I think of the authoritarian culture and specific authoritarians, I am super comfortable with the trajectory of my career.

At Krzysztof's encouragement I end the class with a brief demonstration on saxophone. This seems to be what reaches the class the best. Less talk, more rock.

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 15

2011-04-06T23:49:00.001+02:00

It's a driving day, and it's the first hot day of the tour. I leave St Louis in the late morning and drive for four hours on Interstate 64, all big farms and small towns, to Louisville, Kentucky. Today I listen mostly to the radio, and the radio is mostly classic rock and Christian stuff. After I'm all Led Zepped out, I tune in to the Christian radio stations. It's looney tunes out there whenever anyone, of any religion, aims to impose their spirituality on others. It makes for a combination of hilarious and frightening listening. The stations I'm catching, with their Focus on the Family programs, sound like a bad modern setting of pre-Enlightenment Puritanism. Or: that mashed up with the worst infomercials you have ever heard.

In Louisville I am staying with the composers Krzysztof Wolek and Allison Ogden and their brilliant baby daughter. And their cat. There's been a cat at most of the places I have stayed on this tour, and I have overcome my cat allergies, for the most part. But I soon learn that, in addition to its wonderfully relaxed, sunny atmosphere (at least during my visit), Louisville is apparently one of the worst spots for allergy sufferers. So despite visits to two bars with excellent collections of Belgian and Belgian-style beers, I have to take it easy. Those heavy beers mess with my allergies.

Anyway. I get into town and go to dinner with Krzysztof, Allison, the baby, the virtuoso flautist Margaret Lancaster, composer John Ritz and his wife Sally and their baby. Nice conversations about music and babies and food and travelling swirling around the table over passable Italian food and wine. Because Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has just won the University of Louisville's mega-prestigious Grawemeyer Award, and my path crossed with Louis' (when Krzysztof and I met during his lessons at a composers course in Poland in 1999, and later), I begin four days of being asked for or volunteering stories about my time in The Netherlands. It becomes a joke: "have I mentioned I lived in Holland?" I did, I did live in Holland!

I am in Louisville to teach classes at the University of Louisville and perform at a computer music concert. Krzystof and I made a deal, years ago, to never bullshit our responses to each others' work. So I am humbled and honored that he is giving me a platform to present my work to his students, his fellow faculty and the university community. The hallowed halls of academia are a massive contrast to the galleries, clubs, basements and living rooms I have been performing in on this tour. The timbre and rhetoric are different. The goals and processes are different. But Krzysztof is dedicated to teaching his students not only the fundamentals of computer and historical electronic music, but encouraging them to broaden their approach to music making in general. And I am committed to maintaining the purpose of the tour: to communicate (read: discuss) the messages on the Conquistadors EP. It will be an interesting week.

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 14

2011-04-05T17:36:00.000+02:00

I drink tea in the morning in Champaign with my friend Alyssa. We have been talking about how annoying it is when people begin advice directed at artists with "You know what you should do?" WORLD, I speak for creative people everywhere when I offer this to folks working outside of our non-commodity-driven, intangible economy: You know what you should do? Offer less advice and more support. We know what we should do. We're doing it.

After Alyssa gets the Amtrak back to Chicago I switch to coffee and start writing. The coffeeshop I am in, Aroma, has a playlist going of some of my favorite jazz of a certain era, classic Thelonious Monk quartet with Charlie Rouse on tenor, Eddie Harris, Cannonball Adderley etc.

The drive to St Louis is pretty easy, I listen to "[Condescending] Talk of the Nation" on NPR most of the way. Host and guests speak approvingly of the American war on Libya (for it is a war, not a humanitarian intervention). There's also talk of the French/UN involvment in the Ivory Coast. I listen as NPR struggles to maintain a script about who is a "good guy" and who is a "bad guy" in the spiraling violence that has killed "hundreds" over last year's presidential elections. It is curious for there to be a discussion over whether France acted fast enough here but Western intervention in Syria, or Bahrain, or Israel, where authoritarian regimes brutally put down peaceful self-determination actions, is never brought up.

I get to Cherokee Street in St Louis with a few hours to spare. This is a neighborhood that is self-consciously in revitalization mode. Gentrification story from a hundred other places. What I see are art galleries, print shops, a record store or two, several tacquerias, and a few coffeeshops. It is Monday, 6PM, and most everything is closed, including Cranky Yellow, the curiosity shop, art gallery, performance space and publishing house where I am to play, along with four other acts, this night.

I end up at the far end of Cherokee at a used bookstore. It's open. The other day, in Ypsilanti, Thom Elliot, who hosted the Pleasuredome show, strongly recommended Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which I have never read. (It was during a great conversation at The Bomber Diner, where the perfect diner breakfast makes up for the war paraphernalia that decorates the place.) I think maybe I'll find Kant here. The shop is empty and a sign on the door says "18 and under with a parent only". I browse, fail to find the book I'm looking for. There's more esoteric stuff than, say, fiction, but it's neat that ecology, environmentalism, gardening and nature books are grouped under "Back to the Land". On my way out I mention this to the woman behind the counter, who is typing away at a computer, and we have a very odd conversation. When I mention I am a musician playing up the street, she says she's a wind whisperer herself, which (she says) is a demon slayer. I say (honestly) that I have never met someone who self-identifies that way. She asks what kind of music I play, and says that noise music sounds like hell, and she knows because she's been several layers deep. This is not a metaphor. A change is coming, she says, and volunteers information about her Polish-Ukranian lineage of musicians and occultists. Then her narrative wends its way to the work she does for the FBI, or CIA (I forget), and I politely excuse myself.

I get a laugh out of the fact that on the event calendar at Cranky Yellow my work is described as "brooding folk from NY". Fun show to play. Ground floor, Cranky Yellow is a store filled with new, used, and found art, fashion, toys, writing, and kitsch. Downstairs, a long cement basement performance space with some couches and lights and, at other times, art exhibitions. There is also a publishing and web design arm. I am first on the bill and although the crowd is decent, I get the feeling a bunch of people hang out upstairs. I'm not sure though; I've been closing my eyes more and more when I play, not to disregard the audience, but because it really helps me to focus on six different things I am doing at once when I perform this set. It goes well. I'm exhausted afterwards, which I regard as a good thing, but it is difficult for me to focus on the other bands, which all seem to engage the crowd: a punk band from Calgary called The Shrapnelles, a trio (with overlapping members on tour together) called Topless Mongos, and two local groups, Dem Scientists and The Vanilla Beans.

SET LIST 4/4
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
A Bloodletting
What We Have
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 13

2011-04-04T21:47:00.004+02:00

I take a night off in Chicago and stay with family. My cousin and his wife have two teenagers, wonderful people all, and they ply me with questions about my music, my tour, my travels. I teach the whole family circular breathing. The next morning, one of the kids asks, point blank, my thoughts on the afterlife. The other looks at my facebook profile, notes what I have indicated as my "political view" and asks "what's an anarchist?" I ask him if he has any idea at all. "Don't they want to destroy everything?" He is genuinely interested in knowing, and a critical response would be out of place here. I say that while some people who smash the windows of big corporations identify as anarchists, not all anarchists smash windows. I say that we are interested in the absence of hierarchy in the way we organize our society, that we want direct input into how decisions that affect us are made, that we favor equality. "Isn't that socialism?" he asks. Potentially, but not always and not exactly, I explain. This is challenging. Reminds me of this. Even on a day off, an opportunity to relate to the Conquistadors tour theme. Later, I tell a story and mention staying in a hostel in South Africa. One asks "what's a hostel?" The other responds: "it's a place without room service where you have to share a bathroom." Love these kids.

I catch up over coffee with my friend Alyssa, an actress, musician and dancer in town rehearsing a show. The tour goes from awesome to awesomer: Champaign, where I play tonight, is only two and a half hours away, there's a cheap Amtrak back to Chicago in the morning, so I get a co-conspirator for a little part of the tour! Alyssa and I worked together with our choreographer friend Lindsay Gilmour and five other dancers on Desire and Decay this winter. It is great to have a familiar pair of ears to play to, to listen through. I play a 30 minute set between a new, local three-piece (Bedtime) and a Chicago band called Harps of Tartarus. They would go over really well back in Ithaca on an Ithaca Underground show. Despite this thought, after the show we all talk, and I go off on an anti-Ithaca rant. I love the local agriculture in and around Ithaca, I love so many of the people, the mellow pace, the natural beauty. But I despise the cultural insularity. People talk up the "shop local, support local bands" thing a lot, which is great, but the lack of integration between the two institutions of higher learning and the downtown, and the failure of the apparent social and political progressiveness to somehow overlap with progressive attitudes towards the arts is a constant downer. Some of the most boundary-pushing stuff in town comes through in the punk and hardcore and math-rock all ages programming by Ithaca Underground.

The show in Champaign is put together by Greg Clow, a college radio dj and member of the band The Diamond Stretch. Greg hosts two all ages, alcohol-free shows each month in the basement of "Dan Aykroyd's House", a suburban home that feels a bit like a giant college dorm room. Wonderful, committed audience and really friendly people. Magnificent sounds from the Farfisa this night, and a hilarious question from someone in the audience after the set: "was that Harry Potter on the cassette?" It was Helen Caldicott, of course, who is equally concerned with good triumphing over evil.

SET LIST 4/3
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Strange Lands
A Bloodletting
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 11

2011-04-02T19:38:00.000+02:00

The Toledo Museum of Art is a ten minute walk from the Robinwood Concert House, and with a short drive ahead of me, I spend a good part of the day there. It's a totally manageable museum, mostly on one floor, with the collections not so expansive that you can't see everything. I skip the paid exhibits (Egyptian mummies on one side, Botero on the other) and dig in to most everything else. I am the kind of museum visitor who likes to read every name, title, date and description, which gets tedious, especially since I know I will forget 99 percent of it.

One painting I remember the details of is a Mark Rothko piece from 1960, Untitled. I am not on hallucinogenics as I stand observing it, but it appears as though the dark (purple?) areas on the dark red background are constantly expanding, moving outward toward the margins of the canvas. This is not happening, and I am observing it. I get lost for a while with that. Free improv.

Other favorites are the monumental Athanor canvas by Anselm Kiefer and the small portfolio of photographs of iconic moments in the African-American civil rights struggle (by Ernest Withers, who I later learn was an FBI informant!).

A lot of the famous guys from the 19th and 20th centuries are represented here by at least a painting or sculpture or two: Matisse, Rodin, Picasso, van Gogh, Monet, Calder, Guston, Mondriaan, Degas, Miro, Hopper, Renoir, Cezanne, LeWitt. Are there women? There's a benign Georgia O'Keefe painting. My friends, the composers Pete Harden and Kate Moore, have a great little poster in their house in The Hague, made by the Guerrilla Girls: a classic female nude with a gorilla mask and a text to the effect that the overwhelming majority of nudes in art museums are women, but the overwhelming majority of artists are men. Here in Toledo, the contemporary collection is bereft of the genitalia of either sex.

There are also small collections of African, Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian art. These pieces must be considered differently than the art displayed from (western) Europe and the US, which fills up the majority of the museum. To me, the western art doesn't seem to objectify the makers of the works like the "exotic" art does. A large piece cut off from a Cambodian temple frieze constitutes South Asian art, but there is not a gargoyle from an English cathedral in here.

You know what? Great salad in the museum cafe! And not overpriced! Field greens with pecans, grapes, and feta. Happy healthy surprise.

I pack the car and make my way an hour north, to Ypsilanti, a small college town between Detroit and Ann Arbor with a history connected to the building of bomber aircraft. I play a house show in a suburban home called "The Pleasuredome". Sid Redlin, from Kalamazoo, starts off with a mesmerizing set: two ominous looped synth statements over which he "solos" with a collection of small gadgets, open circuits, and no-input mixer. Loopgoat is next, a captivating, understated solo act with Casio SK-1, guitar, effects pedals and voice. The Pleasuredome, hosted by musician, recordist and philosopher Thom Elliot, is generally a noise scene. I play a pair of songs before giving the floor to Helen Caldicott, speaking at high speed (because there is no time to waste on abolishing nukes) through my tape player over the Casiotone and a shit-ton of feedback.

Although I have other tapes with me, whenever I use the cassette player on this tour I've been playing the Helen Caldicott tape I bought at a library sale last fall. I know that most of what she says in my set is barely intelligible: high speed, dubbed out, distorted. So maybe I'm a mystic here. But goddammit I need to be close to the idea that ALL nukes have to go. There is no such thing as peaceful nuclear technology, because mining the shit, storing the waste, dealing with the accidents -- it's all part of industrial warfare against the species that inhabit this planet. There are no choices with this, and it has to go.

Recently, Helen Caldicott DESTROYED the otherwise excellent environmentalist writer George Monbiot on Democracy Now. It's really upsetting to me: Monbiot, who has written powerfully about a range of environmental and political causes that resonate with me, has decided to use the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan to argue, essentially, that "nuclear is better than coal". He sounds like an industry spokesman, or a politician. He certainly sounds like a bean counter. The committed environmentalist's job is not to make concessions, but to identify and speak and act out against the dangers of any threats to species survival and clean air, water, and soil. Monbiot, who presents himself as rational and under attack for an unpopular but necessary and "scientific" stance on nuclear energy, is off the deep end. Advocates of nuclear technology, and they are everywhere, are beneath contempt and deserve the harshest scorn. And should certainly be the ones dispatched to the scene to "clean up" when meltdowns occur.

SET LIST 4/1
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 10

2011-04-01T18:51:00.000+02:00

In Detroit I stay with Joel Peterson in the Corktown neighborhood. One of the great things about coming out to Detroit this time is getting to meet his friends Thollem McDonas and Angela Villa. They are almost permanently on the road behind Thollem's busy performance schedule, and though I don't share the stage with Thollem, we get to talk. And he and Joel Peterson make some seriously good pancakes for breakfast. Besides being a wonderful musician, Thollem strikes me as the kind of person it would be good to be near if your life was in jeopardy. He exudes resourcefulness and selflessness with sincerity and good humor. I got this impression within a few minutes of meeting him.

I go for a coffee at Le Petit Zinc, a little cafe where The Michigan Citizen is published, with Vince, a friend who saw me perform last year in Toledo and now lives in an intentional community here in Detroit. He is active in labor and social justice struggles, and we have a lot to talk about. He brings me the current issue of Against the Current and we discuss the merits of non-violence and violence in rhetoric and action, noting the activities of liberation theologists, the Ploughshares folks, Tahrir, and then the current western war on Libya. We talk about the corporate-political assault on "cottage" farming and other forms of self-sufficiency in Detroit, where despite (or perhaps because of) the horrendous political-economic circumstances, folks are doing inspiring, resourceful things to not only survive, but thrive. In Detroit, the schools are under attack too, while the whole of Michigan is subject to the same kind of anti-union, reactionary madness that plagues much of the US at the moment.

Contrast to the Finger Lakes region of New York, where I currently live, where the local farms are an essential part of the economy and culture, and the threats to agriculture come not from the municipal governments (as far as I can tell) but from the outside pressures of the hydrofracking industry (which adversely affects health in Michigan too). Everything I want to say about hydrofracking, if you haven't read it or heard me say it already, is probably contained in the Josh Fox documentary Gasland.

It is interesting to me -- sorry, interesting is the wrong word; I mean disgusting -- that while there is pressure for governments in the Middle East and North Africa to end their states of emergency, such anti-democratic powers are being expanded in the US, from the national level on down to the municipal. In Detroit things are considered to be in tailspin perhaps because non-corporate, non-authoritarian structures and relationships are either ignored or targeted. Always beware of politicians talking about actions that smell like martial law.

Before leaving Detroit for Toledo, I go with Thollem, Angela and Joel to a public sculpture in a little lot on the corner of Rosa Parks Boulevard and Temple Street. I don't know the artist, but Thollem discovered that this thing produces beautiful sounds, it is a big (20 feet tall?) metal totem structure. So we play it like a percussion instrument, with Angela filming, and then Joel plays clarinet and I play saxophone. Perhaps a piece of this video will surface sometime.

In Toledo, I play in Gabriel Beam's home-turned-performance space, the Robinwood Concert House in the city's Old West End. Gabe, who plays music in the group KBD, is immensely knowledgeable about the various streams of improvised and experimental music, and is tireless in bringing as much of it as possible through his beautiful living room performance space. It is an incredibly giving thing he does, sharing his home with musicians, and their work with hungry ears in town. I share the night with Joe Panzner, from Columbus, Ohio, who produces a rich tapestry of sound with Max/MSP and a laptop. It is music that relates in my mind to the best work of my friends who passed through The Hague's Institute of Sonology, and I only regret the laptop as a visual focal point of Joe's set. As soon as I close my eyes I am transported. Powerful stuff.

Before the performance begins I get to chat with Michael Kimaid, also from KBD, who I have performed with in the Reactionary Ensemble. When he is not making music, Michael writes about and teaches history at the university level. He is full of insights about the same issues that Conquistadors addresses.

SET LIST 3/31
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Strange Lands
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 9

2011-03-31T01:14:00.000+02:00

You don't get to drive around, from show to show, playing for a few appreciative folks in various towns, hauling out your gear, sleeping on couches, eating on the fly, without a little harrassment from the cops. The drive from Guelph, Ontario, to the Michigan border is fine, but at the border Captain America here is protecting the land of the free from the scourge of...me. "Experimental music" confuses him, so he peeks in the trunk. He has a problem with the way I'm handling business. He would like to see documentation for all of the items in my car. He would like to know why I did not fill out form whatever when I entered Canada to list all of my gear. He would like to know what that big metal thing is ("a milkcan"), what is in it ("nothing"), why I have it ("it's a percussion instrument") and--wait, why ("I'm an experimental musician, officer"). He would like to know the value of all the gear in the car and whether any of it is stolen. It is not. If I was passing through wearing a suit? In a new car? With a suitcase full of clothes? Would he bother me? Because some dudes wear suits worth more than my gear and car combined. And they're thieves, of a sort.

I offer to empty the car and tell the officer the rich and exciting history of how I acquired all of this wonderful gear, going back to the floor tom (used, 1989), the bass drum (new, 1990), the saxophone (used, 1994), the wah wah pedal (orphaned, 1995), the Farfisa (used, 1995) etc etc. He waves me on. Hello America. Welcome to Detroit.

I played in this space, 2739 Edwin in the Hamtramck area of Detroit, last summer. I was on tour with my friend Tristan Trump, who played his Poverty Hymns set, while I did The Love Story. Both that show and this one were set up by Joel Peterson, who plays bass and a host of other string and wind instruments, writes music and brings a ton of good music through Detroit.

The space is an art gallery and the current artist, Marcelyn Bennett-Carpenter, graciously allows us to share the space with her work Turn for this performance. Turn has hundreds of thin, translucent elastic strips running floor-to-ceiling. It is stunning within the Edwin's white walls and wooden floors. It evokes the quality of frozen sound, calling to my mind audio waves that morph as I move through the space.

The night begins with a duo by Joel with Marko Novachcoff, a multi-instrumentalist with a collection of 600 rare, unusual and exotic wind instruments. This night Joel plays doublebass and a Balkan tambor, Marko plays bass flute, heckelphone (one of 100 in the world), khene, a Bulgarian shepherd's flute, and a few others. Beautiful, delicate sounds from these instruments, and Joel and Marko played like old friends.

I am comfortable in gallery spaces, and the acoustic at the Edwin gallery is perfect for acoustic instruments. But I am excited to see how the same set that I have been playing interacts in different spaces, so I play a similar set (leaning more heavily, perhaps, on the acoustic saxophone at the end). It is a decent crowd here, and I think they like the performance, but I am feeling something missing. The set works really well as an arc running through seemingly disparate activities: farfisa songs, electronic drones, and saxophone improvisations, but I find myself wishing I could do a stretched out set focusing on any of these. I guess the average set length so far on this tour has been around 45 minutes, with the rest of my time devoted to getting to places, conversations, hauling gear and sleeping. I am loving this tour, but need more than 45 minutes of music making in my life each day.

Can't have it all, I guess.

SET LIST 3/30
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 8

2011-03-30T19:44:00.004+02:00

I visit relatives in Toronto and we talk about local and national politics. Rhetoric very similar to the crazytalk in the US is creeping into the way various issues are framed in Canada. In Toronto, the mayor -- described for me by one Canadian friend as a "fucking lunatic", and by another as a "redfaced madman" -- heads up a municipal government that seeks to "trim the fat" off of public transportation and environmental initiatives. What is it with municipal politicians and their fear of recycling and bicycling?

Reaching out to Toronto's large immigrant communities in mean and populist ways ("vote your [conservative] values") these maple-syrup-flavored Tea Party types seek to defund initiatives to support immigrant communities and prevent their grandparents from joining their families. They adopt the anti-gay, union-bashing, pro-Israeli apartheid rhetoric of their southern cousins. On the radio a few days ago I was thrilled to hear that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been ousted in a no-confidence vote. I love no-confidence votes on politicians! I agree!

Radio listening has been good in Toronto. I keep catching excellent programming on CIUT 89.5FM, including Democracy Now. Elsewhere on the dial, I have heard a few hours of Polish programming, and I keep tuning in to a Chinese language station. I think it's Chinese: the only thing I understand is "ni hao", and the street names when the hosts report on traffic, so I mostly listen to it as music.

This is my first day off performing, but I get to stay busy. I meet Joe Sorbara at the University of Guelph, to teach his Contemporary Music Ensemble class how to perform my video score Dodging Bullets. His group, at least at this class meeting, has three percussionists, three guitarists, an electric bassist, an upright bassist, a flautist, a pianist, a vocalist, and a synth player. We run through a quick listening excercise and then the piece. Joe is doing a great job: the ensemble's run through is spot on. The piece will be on the CME's concert on campus here April 9th. It is rarely performed without me, and while I love to join various groups in the 23 minute work out, I'm delighted whenever people want to tackle it on their own.

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 7

2011-03-30T19:33:00.006+02:00

I go to London Ontario's "Covent Garden", which is not very similar to the one in the other London. Part mock-Whole Foods, part mall food court, I have an excellent cup of coffee and a spinach and feta börek. I love börek! Takes me back to good times eating excellent Turkish food in The Hague days, and even better: a week in Istanbul in 2006. I went there to exhibit a video, stayed for the wonderful people, the sights, and The Best Food There Is.

I have been calling this the Conquistadors Tour but I could also call it the Everybody is Awesome Tour. I play a trio set at Somewhere There in Toronto. The plan had been to play with Joe Sorbara, a wonderful drummer and composer, and Aaron Lumley, a creative improvising bassist, both based in Toronto. Joe and I played together the first time I came to Canada to play, in 2009, and Aaron and I met onstage in Amsterdam last year at an improv night. Joe and Aaron are awesome.

Alas, continuing a Montreal-can't-make-it theme of this tour, there is a train derailment, travel is screwed up, and Aaron is stuck in Montreal, so Joe calls his friend Heather Segger, a trombonist. She is awesome. It's been a while since I've performed an impromptu set with someone I've never worked with, and I am usually skeptical of these public meetings. I LOVE to play with new people, but I don't think it is always a good idea to confront an audience with a first meeting. I generally favor the kind of group improvisation that is an expression of a rigorous working method among the actors.

Happily, my skepticism is not pertinent this night. It is an absolute joy to play with Heather and Joe, to listen and react and antagonize along with them both. The music is really beautiful and their musical company, in front of the small audience at Somewhere There, is both challenging and comfortable. And inspiring. We'll get Aaron in on it next time.

Paul Dutton, who is awesome, comes out to the show. I got to share a bill with his group CCMC (with multi-disciplinary artist Michael Snow and plunderphonics godfather John Oswald) back in December. We traded CDs and his voice quintet Five Men Singing -- with David Moss, Jaap Blonk, Phil Minton and Koichi Makigami -- is a must have for fans of the genre of Awesome.

Brandon Valdivia (awesome) shows up after I'm done playing and we talk a bit, mostly about my piece Conquistadors. He reiterates something I used to feel, and something Pete Lebel (awesome) expressed the night before: the concern that making experimental music in a world going to shit is somehow decadent. In the wake of the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001 I wanted to run away from the concert hall for what I thought was a more righteous place: a refugee camp, a field hospital, an orphanage. I wanted to do something "meaningful" because I thought doing something I was privileged to learn to do, for other privileged people, was somehow wrong. Yes, I would have trouble trusting an artist who hasn't had something similar cross their mind at some point, but suffice to say I don't feel this way about "decadence" anymore. There are people with names and addresses who order the bombing of other human beings, the evictions of people made homeless by natural disasters, the clear-cutting of forests, the building of another nuclear plant. They are not the names and addresses of my friends and colleagues who struggle to get by making music and art.

Certainly it is righteous to work with the at-risk and the marginalized, to empower people under the boot, to feed the hungry, tend to the sick, organize alongside the disenfranchised. There are so many ways to do meaningful, compassionate things. I think refusal to join the corporate economy, in favor of the gift economy -- how do you quantify a performance, or a piece of music, or a poem? -- is also a radical act. I think dealing in subtlety and genuine communication, in a culture that devalues both, is a radical act. I think that the concerts and exhibitions my peers put on, for a handful of people, for a handful of dollars, for little recognition, is to deal in a kind of optimism that is sincere and untainted by the rhetoric of political campaigns.

Communities of musicians and artists who struggle against the tide of commercialism and branding are the the opposite of decadent. It is thrilling and validating to get into these conversations among the people I am playing with and for on this tour. We have to know that we are doing the right thing despite every cynical indication to the contrary. Some of us come from privilege, some of us do not, but as experimental artists we are always working at the margins, voluntarily, involuntarily. Just as the marginalized can take on the consciousness of the oppressor, artists can endeavor to understand the consciousness of the oppressed. And we do not piss into the wind.

SET LIST 3/28
3 improvisations w/ Heather Segger (trombone), Joe Sorbara (drums), kn (altosax)

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 6

2011-03-30T00:06:00.005+02:00

I spend most of the day in Toronto. At a secondhand shop I pick up two CDs to listen to: A Portrait of Sonny Criss and the People record Misbegotten Man. Sonny Criss, an alto player who I'd never heard, sounds like a less powerful Cannonball Adderley, a less fluid Sonny Stitt, a less funky Lou Donaldson, a less soulful Fathead Newman. Which is not to say the record isn't good; it's just not great.

The People record is fun though. I've seen Mary Halvorson play out a bit in NYC (with Crackleknob, with her quintet, and in other settings) and I've heard recordings, but never People. She's always great, but it was fresh hearing her like this. Her instrumental playing has been getting a lot of attention lately, all deserved. But I would love to see a People show sometime too, so I hope she keeps that going.

On the drive to London I put on another Czeslaw Niemen record: Enigmatic, with the epic 16-minute track "Bema Pamięci Żałobny Rapsod". Love it.

In London I play at Marigold Studios, a rehearsal and recording space in the city's downtrodden east side that sometimes hosts shows. I share the bill with Brandon Valdivia, an excellent drummer/multi-instrumentalist from Toronto who plays with Not the Wind, Not the Flag, and Audio Lodge, a local audio art collective.

My set is fine, but here's something for all you saxophonists to think about before starting to play: take the damn swab out the bell of the horn. I had arrived late, set up in a hurry, no time to soundcheck or even blow a note through the instrument. So at the end of my set, when I pick up the horn and start playing this circular breathing drone, I notice unusual resistance. True, I was playing on a dying reed, but man it took everything I had to keep the sound going. Turns out I was playing through a balled up silk swab at the bottom of the bell. Oops.

After the show I go to a country & western dive bar nearby with Pete Lebel, who organized the show, and his friend Morgan. It is karaoke night and though we don't participate we watch as a diverse crowd of seriously drunk older folks run through some hits. One dude did a better Bob Dylan impression than Bob Dylan could. We drink pitchers of Labatt 50.

When he's not making experimental music, Pete works at a homeless shelter and has made a big effort to organize the arts in this part of town without deferring to the developers seeking to gentrify it. It's a monumental task for anyone, anywhere. The conversation leads to priorities. I talk about recognizing the basics -- clean air, clean water, clean soil -- which need to be dealt with before other socio-political agitation can be meaningful. Pete responds that a lot of the damaged, marginalized people he works with at the shelter have more immediate challenges than the all-encompassing protection of the biosphere. It's a fair point. Morgan says that the celebrity and entertainment culture cut people off from knowing what is going on and what to do about it. We agree that it takes all kinds of activity, on various fronts, to make any serious challenge to the bad things we are all identifying.

My night ends, appropriately perhaps, watching The Towering Inferno with Funkadelic's Maggot Brain as the soundtrack.

SET LIST 3/27
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Strange Lands
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 5

2011-03-28T19:02:00.005+02:00

Wake up at the Schoolhouse in Guelph and watch Wurld, a 23 minute stop-motion film by Elfin Saddle. It's good. Two Montreal musicians made this film in the their backyard over the course of a year, illustrating the arc of human civilization with little found objects and stuff from their garden.

I spend the afternoon in downtown Guelph. There are some cool secondhand shops and used furniture and bookstores. I am tempted by a cheesy $100 beat-generating organ of Swedish provenance. It is a good thing there is zero room in the back of my car.

I listen to the Pi soundtrack on the way to Toronto later in the day. I have listened to this disc as much as any other in the 12 years since I got it. Still like it, because I get to rewatch the film in my head as I listen, and it's one of my favorite films. For the first time, the disc skips!

In Toronto I play at Jeff Garcia's live-in art studio, Earthship. Let me tell you something, people: Jeff Garcia is awesome. His art fills the place and is the place. It's impossible to describe. The space is a dynamic work-in-constant-progress with paintings and sculptures and found objects everywhere. And the records we listen to before and in between sets! Isaac Hayes and Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler and Arthur Conley and dozens of things I don't recognize.

A band from Montreal has cancelled, is this a tour theme? A local trombone and guitar duo, Ghost Eye, start the evening off playing a collage soundscape with live visuals. Good sounds, but long. How long is too long? Ya never know. Jonathan Adjemian is up second. He performs a great set with voice and an old korg synthesizer. It's disarming the way he starts, telling an engaging, rambling story while the pop and squeal of the synth moves subtly to the foreground. Everyone is super nice at this place.

My set is my best so far on this tour and someone captured it. I was totally inspired by the space. The gear is sounding great and I get Helen Caldicott speaking through my tape player over a dubbed out casiotone beat as a prelude to The Love Story. The arc of the set feels really right at this point and the audience is totally committed, so I stretch out on the saxophone ending. After the set I teach everyone in the room how to circular breathe in 30 seconds.

SET LIST 3/26
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Strange Lands
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 4

2011-03-26T20:11:00.004+01:00

I spend a little time in Toronto before driving to Guelph. I go to Mercury Espresso Bar with Tad, who organized my shows in Canada. We talk about weird & experimental & creative music, the kind of stuff he is committed to presenting in Toronto. He knows every band, performer, label, film you've never heard of. It's an honor to be in his orbit & the conversation is a reminder to check out more of the artists & works that I know by name only. There's great shit out there.

On the drive I catch Democracy Now on 89.5FM, which I think is a university radio station out of Toronto. Today's show is a special focusing on the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed hundreds of women in New York City. They were working under sweatshop conditions before labor laws came into place & the eyewitness accounts of that day are horrific: with exit doors locked (to prevent theft, the factory owners said) young women leapt to their death to avoid the flames. Others were burned at their sewing machines; because of filthy conditions, the fire swept through fast, leaving some women no time to attempt escape.

Within a few years laws were put into place protecting workers in the United States. Crafty corporate thugs figured out a way around these barriers to sacrificing people at the alter of capital: outsource the labor to places where such laws don't exist. On Democracy Now the discussion turns to a deadly fire that swept through a textile factory in Bangladesh in December 2010. The conditions were almost exactly the same: factory owners locked the exit doors and workers either burned or leapt to their deaths. The big difference between the fire in Bangladesh in 2010 & the one in NYC in 1911 is that the Bangladeshi workers assembling clothes for GAP Kids earn considerably less than factory workers one hundred years ago. Even adjusted for invlation. Following the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, workers organized and agitated for laws to protect them. Following the fire in Bangladesh, workers have done the same, and have been met with violence & repression. I really hate it when people say that corporate globalisation is important because it brings jobs to the Third World. Go work under those conditions then, for that kind of pay.

Anyway in Guelph I split the bill with Eamon McGrath, who makes stripped-down punk-folk. We play in Peter Bradley's living room, in a converted old schoolhouse, in the farmland on the outskirts of Guelph. It's a beautiful setting and a warm, intimate space. The distance from town keeps the crowd so small it's really a private concert for a handful. But that allows us all to have a nice conversation before the show. Eamon, who is from Edmonton, has toured the Netherlands a bit, so there's lots to discuss. After I learn that Jim Carrey is Canadian, the conversation somehow turns to European immigration laws & xenophobia: the crazy Swiss law against minarets (if they don't like foreign culture they should stop drinking coffee & eating chocolate, you know?), the Dutch fear that their country will be overrun by Muslims. Back when I lived in Holland even people who were otherwise "tolerant" & "liberal" would make some silly case against the "Islamification" of The Netherlands. It is out of control that there can be a "debate" in polite company over growing Muslim populations; imagine someone saying this to you, in a hushed, worried voice at a dinner party in any North American or European country: "in a few years, this country could be 30% Jewish!" Xenophobia sucks.

I have all my gear set up. Eamon plays a strong, committed set & then it's my turn. I play a 50 minute set & it feels good. There are so many levels to manage as I play: acoustic drums, lefthand organ bass through one amp, righthand organ, synth, drum machine, & feedback through another, delay settings, wah-wah position, vocals. The more I do this set, the less the minor hiccups seem to matter. I am enjoying this.

SET LIST 3/26
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Final Warning
Questionnaire
Strange Lands
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 3

2011-03-26T19:49:00.005+01:00

It's snowing in Montreal & someone has boxed my car in with a giant SUV. After loading up I have to beep the horn for awhile but finally a dude comes outside and moves his Chevy. My car has New York license plates. He says he's from Poughkeepsie, which makes us friends.

Diego Espinosa, friend from The Hague days & virtuoso percussionist, invites me over for breakfast. Good times. We need to play together again! Here's a recording from the last time we played together: June 2008, with Rafal Mazur, in Amsterdam at a concert co-organized by STEIM, Mediamatic, and TAG: Energy (for Michel).

On the drive to Toronto I catch a little bit of a certain American rightwing radio host (whose name rhymes with "spawn insanity") talking about Barack Obama's birth certificate. After playing a clip from professional asshole Donald Trump shouting about something, he has two guests on: a "birther" who claims to have definitive evidence that will prove I don't know what, and a "liberal" introduced as "the lawyer for Hamas" who says that if one wanted to nail Obama there are far worse crimes. (I am inclined to agree.)

I put on a CD: it is a compilation of the earliest Czeslaw Niemen recordings, a lot of hilarity as he finds his feet in the early 60s, including a few tunes in Spanish and English ("teeech me hhhow tu tweeest"). My favorite song on the disc is "Sen o Warszawie", which is an awesome song. Niemen is the best.

The show in Toronto is at a new multipurpose event space & the organizer, Eric, brought me in last minute, which is a very nice thing to do! The space feels a bit like a conference room and alcohol is not served, but the fact that all three acts are set up when people come in, and we're all really different, creates a nice atmosphere & good expectation among the audience.

I play first. Since I am a late addition to the bill I play a condensed set, rushing through it a bit but with nice reactions & feedback from the crowd. Some folks dance in place a little to Conquistadors.

The second act is dd/mm/yyyy who play the old video game Street Fighter 2 using the audio signals from their drums and keyboards to control the action. I'm usually not into this sort of thing but they play good music, so the novelty isn't at the expense of quality. Besides, they have some nice, witty merch at the table & they're nice guys, so respect. The headliner is a duo from San Francisco on Thrill Jockey called Mi Ami. They play synth pop with heavy dance grooves. These Canadians here are not the best dancers but they are trying. One of the guys plays a Casio CZ-101 and it is really nice to hear again: my father bought me that keyboard back around 1984. My brother & sisters & I would use it to make live soundtracks to improvised home movies when we were kids. Talk about good times!

SET LIST 3/25
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
Mouths Running Might (instrumental)
The Love Story

CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 2

2011-03-24T18:30:00.002+01:00

TOUR DAY 2

On the drive from Ithaca to Montreal I listen to various NPR stations. The US House of Representatives just voted to defund National Public Radio. I listen to the way NPR reports American foreign policy, I am inclined to agree but for different reasons. Of course, the US Congress should also be defunded, so there's that.

The talk is of the constitutional politics behind the US attack on Libya (and the death of Elizabeth Taylor). No one addresses how utterly wrong it is to be bombing Libya, just whether the decision to do it was taken the right way. I have witnessed this rhetorical conspiracy so many times already, with other wars that are variously called humanitarian interventions or peacekeeping operations or whatever. I hate that another generation of young people has to learn to decipher this conspiracy. In a way, all of the songs I am performing on this tour deal with this very problem: decoding & deciphering the deceits of the conquistadors.

After two hours of this I find a great program on North Country Public Radio. The deejay, Bob, plays awesome cuts from Rhythm & Blues acts like Little Richard and the Cufflinks ("Guided Missiles", I am definitely going to cover that one!) mixed with some of the better British Invasion and summer of love stuff. Nothing post-1968, it's great. When I get out of range on the Canadian side I put on an old cassette: Mouse on Mars "nin niggung" on side A and Plaid "Rustproof Clockwork" on side B. Tomek or Jan Choloniewski lent me those CDs in Krakow, in 1999. Now that I'm putting my music out for sale I think sometimes about copyright and royalties. I guess it was illegal for me to copy those discs. But I spent hundreds of dollars on electronic music in the following two years after they turned me on to this stuff.

The day is bright and clear for most of the drive, and I see thousands of migratory birds dotting the sky and in the fields, more than I have seen in ages. It reminds me of something Derrick Jensen often writes and speaks about, how not so long ago migratory birds would darken the sky for days at a time. He refers to a species I cannot remember the name of at this moment, but I do remember that civilization intervened and that species doesn't exist anymore.

Animal House, the place I play in Montreal, is in a sort of punk/anarchist squat zone in St-Henri. It reminds me a little bit of the Metalkova area in Ljubljana, or some of the bigger squats in The Hague. I am playing in someone's living room, the front door to which is literally a few feet from operational train tracks. Joe is running the show, cooks me and his friends a couscous, vegetables and tofu. We listen to 13th Floor Elevators and Captain Beefheart. All the other acts--all locals--bail on the show for some reason.

Small crowd, all under 25. Half of them are committed listeners, the other half are talky and distracted. There is a heckler but he is a strange heckler: he loves the music! He's just a little bit not sober? Funny interactions ensue. He dances to Conquistadors, trys to play along on one of my drums to What We Have (I ask him nicely to stop, and he does), and then invite him to play along on A Bloodletting. I think he bought a CD. And he lets me use his (Canadian) cellphone, which is very cool thing to offer to a foreign musician on tour.

SET LIST MONTREAL 3/23
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
Strange Lands
What We Have
Final Warning
Mouths Running Might
The Love Story
A Bloodletting
Questionnaire

CONQUISTADORS TOUR

2011-03-24T18:28:00.004+01:00

I just produced an EP, on cassette tape, called "Conquistadors" under the banner of my AFGHANISTAN project. I am on a solo tour to promote the ideas behind the songs on the tape and others that I perform. Here's the tour schedule:

MAR 22: Ithaca NY @ Culture Shock
MAR 23: Montreal QC @ Animal House
MAR 24: Toronto ON @ Sun Room Gallery
MAR 25: Guelph ON @ The Schoolhouse
MAR 26: Toronto ON @ Earthship
MAR 27: London ON @ Marigold Studios
MAR 28: Toronto ON @ Somewhere There w/ Aaron Lumley, bass & Joe Sorbara, drums)
MAR 29: Guelph ON @ University of Guelph (teaching Dodging Bullets to Joe Sorbara's improvisation students)
MAR 30: Detroit MI @ 2739 Edwin
MAR 31: Toledo OH @ Robinwood Concert House
APR 1: Ypsilanti MI @ Pleasuredome
APR 2: day off in Chicago
APR 3: Champaign IL @ Dan Aykroyd's House
APR 4: St Louis MO @ Cranky Yellow
APR 5: day off in Louisville KY
APR 6: Louisville @ University of Louisville: lectures on Composition & Advanced Topics in Computer Music
APR 7: University of Louisville: performance at Bird Hall
APR 8: Louisville KY @ Museum of Modern Art
APR 9: ?
APR 10: Dayton OH @ Blind Bob's
APR 11: Pittsburgh PA @ TBA
APR 14: Brooklyn NY @ Douglass Street Music Collective w/ Reuben Radding, bass & Andrew Drury, drums)

The hometown tour kickoff was a great time. I asked my friend Chris Seeds to share the bill with me. He writes songs & music for contemporary dance and played a fantastic, risky, new performance this night that came off almost as an experimental film, reading excerpts from his old diaries over cassette tape artefacts intermingled with two delicate songs. Attentive, mostly young crowd for both sets. With only a few exceptions, older, more established musicians in Ithaca have been, as a group, shamefully unsupportive of new and experimental music and venues in the past year. It's tiring and makes the city feel extremely insular. It also makes their great music seem a little less great, because a lack of curiosity is tedious wherever it appears. Anyway, some young (college-age) people were out and it was a fun night. I have been practicing hyper-obsessively, hours a day, hoping that the myriad technical problems that inevitably arise from using vintage and cheap gear won't fuck up my performances. It felt good on Culture Shock's little stage.

SET LIST 3/22
Conquistadors
Rocket Ships
Strike the Sun (w/ Ryan Zawel on trombone)
Strange Lands
Mouths Running Might (instrumental)
A Bloodletting

Message from America

2011-03-12T15:43:00.004+01:00

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM AMERICA, TO ITS POLITICIANS:

If you deny our state workers' unions the right to collective bargaining,
we will occupy state capitols.

And if you savage the economies of Latin America for a century,
we will re-elect you.

If you cut funding for education,
we will organize school walk-outs.

And if you grind children into dust in Afghanistan for nine years running,
we will re-elect you.

If a gallon of gas costs more than $4,
we will scream bloody murder.

And if you sell out our pristine wilderness to oil & gas companies,
we will re-elect you.

If you threaten to defund Planned Parenthood,
we will organize & we will protest.

And if our soldiers abroad make a habit of raping people under occupation,
we will re-elect you.

If your sexual indiscretions are made public,
we will shame you in our corporate media.

And if your torture regime is made public,
we will re-elect you.

If people on the other side of the world risk their lives for self-determination under authoritarian rule,
we will demand you support their struggle.

And if you tighten your authoritarian grip here at home,
we will re-elect you.

A Piece On/Of Propaganda

2011-03-12T15:32:00.004+01:00

All of this is true, that you are being lied to. Fooled, tricked, misled. You are being deluded, hoodwinked, cheated, defrauded, disenfranchised. You are being conned, duped, influenced, brainwashed. Your arms are twisted. Your hands are tied. Your back is against the wall. You are cornered, trapped, caged, coerced. Patted down, beat up, worked over. Deceived, manipulated. Your thoughts are controlled, your ideas are not your ideas. What you know about the world and how it works is false, dangerously so, fatally so.

As sure as privacy is a thing of the past, you will learn to unremember independent thought. Groupthink is a reality and your thoughts are it. You are a party to mass delusion. There are entities that will not abide ideas that they themselves did not source. You have never had a dangerous thought in your life. Your speech betrays your long conditioning by a despicable cadre of public relations experts.

When you have information you can trust, you can navigate it to form your own opinions and map out a way of being in the world. When you plot a course based on lies and deceptions, your steps are unsure, your movements irrational, your trajectory a farce.

You are bombarded with loaded information at every turn. Your life is utterly mediated. In print. On screen. Across radio waves. In classrooms. On billboards. At the office water cooler. People are even hired to walk around and nonchalantly extol products, films, brands. They are paid to subvert personal taste and desire merely by being overheard. You know the names of 100 poisonous products that you voluntarily put in and on your body each day, but cannot name the songbird singing outside your window, or the tree he is sitting in. And this according to plan.

Is it okay? Are you comfortable with it?

*

Into the struggle to scale down America's rampant militarism strides the propaganda of the Pentagon. Into the struggle to heal the hurts of industrial civilization stride million dollar corporate greenwash campaigns. Into the struggle to know our selves, our desires, our needs, step unscrupulous public relations firms.

We are meant to feel like inadequate, unattractive outsiders unless we buy the right future junk. We are meant to feel contempt for science, for facts, for recognizing the consequences of our actions: all is right in the world the white font on a bright green background happily declares. We are meant to believe that security and peace come through the prosecution of endless war and the long, righteous arms of American imperialism.

This is really happening. Is it a conspiracy? How do we negotiate our daily lives when such juggernauts of influence bear down on us so consistently, so forcefully, without reproach of conscience?

*

Propaganda, from the Latin word that means "to propagate", didn't always carry a negative connotation. Propaganda is the targeting of receivers' emotions for the purpose of disseminating ideas and promoting specified actions. It differs from rational discourse in that it appeals to feelings and not reason. It is selective information, yes, but it doesn't have to be bad, or dishonest. Just like not all violence is evil--think of a lioness killing an antelope to feed her pride--not all influence is wrong. Bertolt Brecht, a playwright of conscience who lived in times of aggression and deceit not unlike our own, was a type of propagandist in his extraordinary work. So was George Orwell. So was Emma Goldman. Heroes, all, and we can name our contemporary analogues.

Now, however, power structures of incalculable evil stretch over the entire planet and out into space. We live at a time when interconnected sociopathic oligarchies actively and explicitly threaten the existence of our species, and that of many others. And yet these contemptible few constitute such a small part of the population that their authority can be toppled by an informed movement of dedicated individuals. (Witness the fact that a mere ten percent of the population of Egypt ousted the dictator Hosni Mubarak last month.) In order to maintain the global authoritarian order of industrial civilization, it is necessary for the majority to believe that all is well. Join the imperial army to bring about peace. Pay the companies that make you feel inadequate, that poison you, to make you feel better. The only kind of environmentalism that will be tolerated must be ineffectual. (The kind of environmental activism that actually works is deemed "eco-terrorism", and you're not a terrorist, are you? Are you?)

We are beaten down, prodded, invaded, demeaned, pushed around, infected with and waterboarded by propaganda aimed at breaking our will to challenge it. Is it a conspiracy? Is it okay? Is this really happening?

To echo Noam Chomsky, whose Manufacturing Consent (written with Edward S. Herman) is an essential text in the comprehension of contemporary media propaganda, consciousness raising is the first step in lifting oneself out of oppression. The biggest challenge to overcoming propaganda may be the failure of its targets to recognize themselves as such. The propaganda of the Pentagon, of profit-driven greenwashers, of the PR firms, is the brittle, easily overcome ammunition of a cowardly, paranoid, hate-driven authoritarian minority. Recognize it for what it is and the tide begins to turn.

I am a propagandist. Proudly. I am not fair. I am not balanced. I am not neutral. Because all this is really happening. Enlist.

*

[Written for The Ithaca Post to publicize an event sponsored by the Park School of Independent Media at Ithaca College that featured investigative writer John Stauber and civil rights advocate Lisa Graves speaking on PR and the Pentagon. Stauber and Graves are the founder and current director of the Center for Media and Democracy based in Madison, Wisconsin.]

The Imperial Theater of Barack Obama

2011-01-13T19:12:00.005+01:00

I did not intend to write on the incident in Tucson, Arizona last week, where a deranged and impressionable young man named Jared Loughner stands accused of killing six people and wounding thirteen others with the bullets of his semi-automatic Glock 19. But the dissembling words of US President Barack Obama yesterday were cutting in a deeply personal way.

A common refrain in my work is the violence our culture perpetrates on children. This is not only because I experienced it so close and so devastatingly. In 1988 one of my younger sisters, Sybil, was killed when a car smashed into her as she was crossing a street after school. She was nine years old and every bit the bright light that Christina Taylor Green, a victim of the Tucson attack, seems to have been, every bit the bright light that all kids, everywhere in the world, tend to be: energetic, creative, talented, funny, sensitive, full of love, curious, charitable.

Years ago, as I went through a process of abstracting my personal tragedies and grief--attempting to dismantle the formulation that one death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic--I found resonance in the words of Howard Zinn: All wars are wars against children. The work of Derrick Jensen was also influential to me in this context, particularly his notion that most aspects of industrial civilization--how it abuses its environment, miseducates the young, objectifies women, loathes the "other", twists language--are "strangely like war". I see strange wars perpetrated against children throughout the culture and it makes my stomach turn.

Last night, by chance, I happened upon the transcript of Obama's eulogy for the six people killed in Tucson. (The environmental organization 350.org, which I follow on facebook, linked to it, adding that the speech "beautifully shows the humanity we're all working so hard to save.") I avoid watching or listening to political speeches, especially if I haven't read them first; I am as susceptible as anyone to the manipulations of a good performance. So I read the speech and was nauseated. Here is a piece of utterly unscrupulous imperial theater, even without the tenor and cadences that have made Obama so frustratingly beloved by so many.

For the arch-defender of war that Obama is to say the things he said--to applause and adoration--about how the incident should be reflected on and how the victims should be honored, seems beyond perverse to me. Audacity indeed. Even as the Nobel Peace Prize-winner spoke, armed drone aircraft under his command continued their mission of circling and dropping bombs indiscriminately over far-away Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And what did he say? "None of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future."

But one would be a fool to expect Obama, who spoke these words on the occasion of a memorial service for six innocent people, to examine all the facts behind the tragedy or to challenge old assumptions. Not even for a day did Obama halt the atrocities at his command in honor of the victims in Tucson. He did order a moment of silence on the Monday following the shooting, but I suspect little girls in southern Afghanistan could hear the continuing roar of American warplanes overhead.

What else did he say? He said God Bless America. Peppering his speech with bits from both the Old and New Testaments, Obama (or his speechwriters) sought to express spirituality (and perhaps a specifically Christian angle) while forgetting that, at least in Dante Alighieri's vision of Hell, there are special places for fraudulent and violent politicians.

God bless America, Obama. And god bless its little girls, and little girls everywhere. Little girls suffering from the continuing American Predator drone attacks. Little girls suffering from the continuing war on Afghanistan. Little girls suffering from the continuing US occupation of Iraq. Little girls suffering from American material and political support of Israeli occupation in Palestine. Little girls suffering from American dismissal of climate change. Little girls suffering from American economic policy. Little girls suffering from corporate healthcare. Little girls suffering from corporate welfare. Little girls suffering from American institutional racism. Little girls suffering from the horrid notion of American exceptionalism: what a mean, uncharitable conviction creeping through its mainstream political culture, imbuing its people with the cognitive dissonance necessary to applaud a war criminal for gentle words offered back in eulogy! But only to little American girls.

And so on and so forth. To say nothing of little boys, and women and men. Pseudo-liberals who idolize Obama like to remind his left critics that he is not a superman. We are mocked for holding him up to his own rhetoric. I understand, as George Monbiot put it, that hypocrisy is the gap between aspirations and actions. But where are the actions that signal aspirations? They have military operational titles. They are apparent in signatures to laws and decrees that bolster empire. And to hell with little girls.

Call back the jets and the tanks and the soldiers, Obama. Call them back, every last one. Close the military bases littered across the planet. Defuse and decommission each and every nuclear bomb, submarine, and power station. Signal aspirations, impossible though they may be to realize in a capitalist democracy, to end wars against children, even if it means ending your career. End your wars.

It must be difficult to organize a funeral or memorial service, especially for tragic deaths. I would not want to have that job. But if I did, and the memorial service was for victims of violence, I would rule out inviting someone with a proven record of violence against men, women, and children. It was not mere hypocrisy on display. I may be a hypocrite, sitting here typing away at this computer and despising the hurts of industrial civilization. But I believe Obama's performance goes beyond hypocrisy, beyond cognitive dissonance and into the realm of deliberate political and emotional manipulation. If it's not pure theater then it's pure insanity, and if it's not that it's puppetry. As with his predecessors and successors and the perpetrator in Tucson, we can "examine all the facts" that lead not only to lone tragedies, but to systemic tragedies. One little girl killed is a tragedy. So are two. And so are a million.

What else did Obama say? "I want to live up to her expectations. (Applause.) I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. (Applause.) All of us--we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations. (Applause.)"

Then stop committing the atrocities.

THE BEST 2010 OF THE YEAR.

2010-12-31T19:01:00.005+01:00

Hey I am one of the lucky few! In 2010 I was privileged not to be bombed, starved, invaded, occupied, raped, harassed, imprisoned, tortured, disenfranchised, disappeared, beaten, slandered, enslaved, endangered or robbed. I was not denied medical treatment. I was not denied entry to the places I wished to travel. I say privileged because so many others in the world experienced one or more of these things. But not me, at least not in the literal sense. As an artist many of the choices I make in favor of my work and the messages therein do not provide maximum comfort or security, but I am, perhaps, privileged and happy to make those choices.

I was fortunate to perform around 100 shows in 2010: more than last year and hopefully fewer than next year. I got to play in The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, The US and Canada. I got to collaborate with old friends and new friends and visit amazing spaces and meet generous concert organizers. I had audiences that cared and listened and asked questions. One of my proudest achievements was the release of Unison Lines in November. I also self-produced two CDs under the moniker The Love Story: U$ DRONE and Let My Music Hear Children. The net label Insubordinations released improwizje. Other good things from this year:

THESE RECORDS:
Gil Scott Heron: I'm New Here (XL).
Gorillaz: Plastic Beach (Parlophone).
Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part Two (Universal Motown).
Matt Bauder: Day in Pictures (Clean Feed).
Kate Moore: The Open Road.
Ensemble Klang: Matt Wright: Music at the edge of collapse.
Ensemble Klang: Peter Adriaansz: Waves.
Ensemble Klang: Oscar Bettison: O Death.
Ensemble Klang: Tom Johnson: Cows, Chords & Combinations.
Johnny Dowd: Wake Up the Snakes (Munich).
Jason Ajemian & the High Life: Let Me Get That Digital (sundmagi).

THESE FILMS:
Gasland, directed by Josh Fox.
Slingshot Hip Hop, directed by Jackie Reem Salloum.

THEIR VIDEOS:
MIA: Born Free.
Erykah Badu: Window Seat.
The Books: I Didn't Know That.
Gil Scott-Heron: Me and the Devil.

MY VIDEOS:
I put very simple "placeholder" videos together for two of my own songs:
A Bloodletting and Questionnaire.

SEEING THEM PERFORM:
Matt Bauder's Day in Pictures. Dan Deacon. Vieux Farka Toure. Jason Ajemian and the High Life. Lechuguillas. Hank Roberts with John Stetch and Jim Black. Poverty Hymns. Burning Spear. Johnny Dowd Band. Zorch. Why the Wires. Summer People. Cuddle Magic. Trevor Dunn's MadLove. Marnie Stearns. DAM.

PERFORMING:
My own favorite performance was my last of the year: December 10 at Tranzac in Toronto, where some of the various threads I have been working on (agitprop songwriting & drone electronics & singing & saxophone improvisation & performance text) felt organic and natural in the context of each other. Other highlights: The Haiti Horns at The Haunt, Ithaca, May 14. The Love Story at Soundlab, Buffalo, May 22. JATAS at Chapterhouse, Ithaca, June 5. Places, or: The Hague Invasion Act at Wildfire, Ithaca, June 17. The Love Story at Robinwood Concert House, Toledo, July 8. Narayana's Cows with Ensemble Klang at Paradiso, Amsterdam, September 12. Walden with Ensemble Klang at the Bern Biennale, September 15. Desire & Decay at the Schwartz Performing Arts Center in Ithaca, December 3.

PERFORMING/COLLABORATING WITH THEM:
Ensemble Modelo 62. Ensemble Klang (Saskia Lankhoorn, Heiko Heerts, Erik-Jan de With, Anton van Houten, Joey Marijs, Pete Harden). Monica Germino. Max Haft. Max Knigge. Sanne van der Horst. Pascal Meyer. Brice Soniano. Mike Stark. Ryan Zawel. Steve Reichlen. Stephanie Pan. Simon Jermyn. Joachim Badenhorst. Wilson Shook. Jacob Wick. Reuben Radding. Bonnie Jones. Andrew Drury. Matt Bauder. Jay Spaker. Lee Hamilton. Angelo Peters. Alicia Aubin. Alexas Dominique Esposito. Patrick Murphy. TJ Borden. Johnny Dowd. Brian Wilson. Kim Sherwood-Caso. Matt Saccuccimorano. Park Doing. Ami Ben-Yaacov. Alan Pauling. Pat Burke. Jim Catalano. Jarek Miller. Trevor Pinch. Jim Spitznagel. Nick Bullock. JP Petronzio. Devon Rehl. Matt Wright. Zaun Marshburn. Chris Seeds. Max Buckholtz. Lindsay Gilmour. Durga Bor. T. Andrew Trump. Jax DeLuca. KG Price. Jim Abramson. Gabriel Beam. Michael Kimaid. Kevin O'Brien Caine. Steve Baczkowski. Marc Levitt. Jesse Blockton. Greg Altman. Jens Carstensen. David Gordon. Walt Lorenzut. Maurice Perry. Hank Roberts. Brian Dozoretz. Samantha Abrams. Alyssa Duerksen. Shaina Ung. Audrey Pincus. Liz Hake. Danny Lindgren.

Oh, Do Tell.

2010-12-19T03:24:00.003+01:00

The United States Senate has just voted to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", the 17-year old controversial law that prevented openly gay people from serving the causes of empire and injustice in the United States Armed Forces.

I imagine indigenous people around the world at this moment, gathering at the gates to a thousand American military bases and torture chambers, cheering in relief that now, along with other Americans long denied their civil rights, homosexuals will legally be among the invading, occupying, destabilizing, violating, murdering forces of empire.

The military strength of the civilized has always relied on the disenfranchised to do its killing and become its cannon fodder. It doesn't surprise me that racist America is happy to have Blacks and Hispanics and Asians and Native Americans in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that patriarchal America is happy to have women in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that pseudo-Christian America is happy to have Muslims and Jews and Hindus and atheists in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that plutocratic America is happy to have the economically depressed in its armed forces.

But I have found it strange that a government willing to deny civil rights to gay people--that must therefore hate gay people as much as it does non-whites, non-males, non-Christians and the non-wealthy--did not want all the objects of its hatred to serve as its cannon fodder. One would think the government would want to out those to whom it accords lesser value and send them directly to the front lines.

But they didn't. Until now.

To be more accurate, it wasn't that homosexuals could not kill and be killed for the American empire. Rather, they were to do so without revealing their sexual orientation. That was the great compromise that noted friend-to-the-disenfranchised Bill Clinton made in 1993. With the law repealed, gay people in the US Armed Forces can take pride in who they are: trained killers.

Another clarification: it's not that now gays and lesbians will merely be pushed to the front lines. Sure they'll be allowed to murder and die for empire. But also, along with non-whites, non-males, non-Christians and the non-wealthy, non-heterosexuals will be welcome to perform support roles as nurses, doctors, clerks, engineers, and communications [sic] and language experts. They will be able to write press releases and fabricate stories. They will be able to operate drone aircraft from comfortable control rooms thousands of miles away from their targets. They will be able to spy on people. They will be able to negotiate the transportation and use of land mines and chemical and nuclear weapons. There are so many ways for devalued and marginalized Americans to join the racist, plutocratic, patriarchal, pseudo-Christian empire in devaluing and marginalizing people all over our beloved planet.

So congratulations to gays and lesbians in the United States, who are now poised to legally and proudly join the racially, economically, and religiously marginalized in openly participating in the American worldwide imperial bloodbath. You've come a long way, babies!

On Impatience and Compromise and Moderation

2010-11-04T16:15:00.004+01:00

There is a website out there (no, scratch that: in here) called whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com. I think it is the epitome of stupidity. But so are many websites. This one is getting the nod of approval from many of my friends, and I think they are not being sarcastic, and this concerns me greatly. Bear with me for some background.

When the top executive of United States Incorporated chose to invade and occupy Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 it was unjust, poorly planned, quite possibly illegal, and led to massive, inexcusable war crimes and crimes against humanity. When his administration invaded and began the occupation of Iraq in 2003 it was unjust, poorly planned and utterly illegal, and led, again, to war crimes, crimes against humanity, unparalleled destruction to the environment and to articles of great historical and cultural value, and civil war. When his administration continued the material and ideological support of the State of Israel in its violence against Palestinians it was always unjust, criminal, inexcusable. When his administration opened and maintained the torture and detention center at Guantánamo Bay it was illegal, inexcusable, unpardonable. The list of crimes goes on.

Who could argue that the people behind these terrible acts should be pardoned? What mercy is due to the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Powell and their cronies?

The current president of the United States, whose supporters counsel "patience" and of whom his detractors demand "compromise," has continued many of the policies of the war criminals listed above. My friends who like to remind the world through some idiotic website that Obama has signed various financial reform laws or been more friendly to the cause of gay rights, forget or forgive this fact. So I will repeat it: Obama has continued many of the horrific policies of the Bush Administration.

Patience? You don't call for patience when irradiated bombs drop from drone aircraft on your home.

You don't call for patience when your sons are held in illegal captivity for nearly a decade on the other side of the world.

You don't call for patience when your war-torn country is left with thousands upon thousands of trained killers stationed throughout the place, and the world's largest US Embassy is built as a city unto itself amidst the capital.

You don't call for patience when your daughter cannot travel abroad to study for fear she will never be granted reentry, or when the sick are held at checkpoints for hours before finding out whether they are to gain or be denied access to nearby hospitals.

Psychotic rightwing racists like to compare Obama to Hitler. I prefer to compare wilfully ignorant populaces to each other. The rampant state aggression isn't permissible because the trains run on time, or the streets are clean, or there are a lot of women in government. Violence on the other side of the world isn't excusable because the opposition at home is racist and reactionary.

Why are so many people interested in patience when dealing with a war criminal? Where is their compassion for others? The bombs are dropping right now. The bombs are dropping right now! This is no time for patience, no time for compromise, no time to be moderate, reasonable, civil.

A few days ago I attended a screening of the excellent and important documentary Gasland. (If you haven't seen it yet, find it and see it.) Filmmaker Josh Fox was in attendance for a Q&A. It was election day, and he introduced his work by asking the capacity crowd if everyone had voted. Massive applause. With his film and his appearances, Fox is bravely fighting against hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in North America. But his priorities can be screwed up. Hundreds of people in a room, all fired up and ready to go, and all he could think to say is "have you voted" (ostensibly, for this or that Democrat supporting safer gas drilling). He did not ask if everyone in the room had slashed the tyres of a Halliburton truck today, or blocked a racist homophobe from campaigning. It's all about being civil and moderate and playing within the narrowly drawn rules of the game.

I sometimes listen to a few minutes of rightwing talk radio, people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. It is instructional to hear what they say and how they say it. Privileged to live in a beautiful place like Ithaca, New York, I guess it's important to me to be reminded of the depth of evil that flaunts itself proudly and lucratively in the United States. Oh, that evil: I think it is empowered by the patience and pseudo-moderation of the same sort of folks who think Obama is a swell guy.

Compromise does not work when a knife is held to your throat. Moderation doesn't help when your opponents (and they are legion) only speak violence and hate. Patience is useless in a burning building. Can you get to that?

How to Vote in 2010

2010-11-02T06:44:00.006+01:00

Aren't elections a total sham in the US? Even when candidates fail to buy their way into office, they can still buy influence over the winners. But you can't and I can't. Why not? How is the whole occupation in Afghanistan going for you? It's been nine years. At least Iraq is violence-free post-Saddam. Right? I'm not so sure about all this democracy. Has democracy made the air cleaner? Or the water more pristine? Has it prevented poisons from entering the soil? Or any oil from spilling out anywhere? How is democracy working for migratory birds? How is it going for whale populations and rainforests and starving children in a bountiful world?

Every two years some Americans like to vote. I like to do something better. I reflect on Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, the slim essay that influenced Goldman and Ghandi and King. One of many wonderful lines worth meditating on: "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." I think about this often, and when people get election fever I want them to think about it too.

I don't vote in rigged elections. (Here are my salvos on the subject from 2006 and 2008.) But I understand some people believe the democratic process works, so I address the following to them:

If you need to vote, avoid incumbants. And members of political parties. And career politicians. And rich people. And white men. Don't vote for women with the hearts of men. Or candidates from marginalized groups who have adopted the consciousness of their oppressors. Avoid racists. Avoid bigots. Avoid homophobes and misogynists. Never vote for anyone willing to devote any public funds for war or occupation under any circumstances. Never vote for anyone with a flag pinned to their clothing. Avoid anyone who eats meat, smokes a cigar, or plays golf. And anyone who owns or is on the board of a corporation. Don't vote for the relatives or spouses of politicians. Or anyone who has ever invested in the stock market. Avoid anyone who uses the word "homeland" and is not referring to indigenous rights. Don't vote for anyone who has ever acted professionally, or anyone who has ever participated in corporate sports. Current or former military personnel should not get your vote. People ordained to preach any religion should not get your vote. Nor should people who have had elective cosmetic surgery. Never vote for someone whose slogans are more memorable than their policies. Never vote for someone whose clothes cost more than yours. Never vote for anyone who says "god bless America" and isn't clearly joking.

I am totally serious. Thanks.

Conquistadors

2010-10-11T17:00:00.002+02:00

The United States still celebrates "Christopher Columbus Day," which makes a ton of sense to me. Columbus was a savage conquistador, after all, and the legacy of the conquistador is alive and well in the way the US perceives and treats the world.

So if we hate on that murderous bastard Columbus, we might equally hate on all conquistadors, regardless of where they killed and raped and infected and indoctrinated their way to bloody supremacy: Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. It's all the same.

A more recent celebration on the same day, initiated in the US but celebrated in a number of other countries, is National Coming Out Day, centered on awareness of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues and civil rights for LGBT people. Even in places touted as "tolerant" LGBT people still find themselves marginalized, harried, denied equal rights, and subject to violence. Recent events in the US attest to this sad fact.

I imagine that an individual from any marginalized group would feel a particularly intense hatred of conquistadors in all their guises. What are conquistadors anyway but madmen who run roughshod over the lives of others, attempting to subjugate or destroy populations they fear, rob them of their identities, livelihoods, lifeways? Whether the endgame for conquistadors is real estate or religion or bloodsport or politics, the attitude is the same.

I believe that all people, regardless of their sexual orientation (or race, or gender, or age, or nationality, or ethnicity, or creed, or physical abilities) have equal rights in - and similar obligations to - their communities. These may be usurped by force, but that does not obviate them. So I am always confused when marginalized groups fight passionately for their rights at the expense of others: when they succumb to the consciousness of their oppressors.

This is a very real issue for the gay community in the US, where people struggling to be free (from violence and to openly express themselves and to enjoy the same rights and benefits of society as others) also struggle for the right to join the US Armed Forces. The USAF is always a force for subjegation and violence, irredeemably so, always, always, always. To conquer others is wrong. To agitate for the right to do so is also wrong.

I am an ally to LGBT people struggling for liberty, and to all people struggling against the conquistadors.

Less Mellow, More Harsh

2010-08-06T16:42:00.004+02:00

I never do this, but I am posting an addendum to my previous piece "Harshing Your Mellow". I am posting this for anyone who considers my position to be somehow pessimistic (the epithets have started to flow in) or feels that small victories should be celebrated to help urge others on.

Friend:

Though I often agree with the formulation of Antonio Gramsci: "I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will" I don't think the label pessimist is appropriate in this case. You call my opinions pessimistic because I am not cracking open champagne over the New York State Senate's vote in favor of an 11-month moratorium on new hydrofracking drilling permits. For you, this is a victory.

I think writing what I wrote--because someone, somewhere, may be comforted knowing there are others who see through the smoke & mirrors--is actually an act of optimism. Humankind is better than the shit we are in. It is civilization that is fucked. Witness cultures that are tens of thousands of years old interacting & surviving. I have great "faith" in humanity. Pessimist is a lazy epithet that I get over & over from people who hold me & my convictions at arm's-length, who are quicker to identify with our young culture (industrial civilization) than our ancient species. They mistake comfort for love.

Imagine, friend, that instead of soil & water & air we are discussing a person, perhaps you, perhaps your child. And instead of multinational drilling & extraction corporations we are discussing a serial rapist that you, or your child, is in some sort of relationship with.

The abuse has happened, is happening now & will continue to happen. We want it to stop, so we take our case to a judge, who rules that it must stop temporarily to study the ill effects the abuse has on you, or your child. It must stop IF a second & third judge agree. The second judge will consider this matter in a month's time. Meanwhile you, or your child, continue to be abused by this monster rapist. If the second judge rules in favor of temporarily halting the abuse (again: to study its ill effects!) a third judge will consider the matter. If the third judge agrees with the first & second judges (this could be months from now, meanwhile you, or your child, are being violated by this monster) you will have a legal respite until May. It is now August. You might have rape to look forward to in late spring.

But there will be loopholes. "Exploratory" abuse will continue. "Conventional" abuse will continue. You have friends in other states, where the laws are different, who continue to suffer from completely legal abusive relationships. The laws do not protect the victims, you see, they protect the abuser.

Drilling leases are still being signed. The abuse continues. I cannot & will not celebrate a sham victory that allows something that I love--in this case the soil & water & air--to continue to be abused. It is twisted pessimism to think so small as to celebrate, now, to think that this slap in the face is a sign of hope. Such thinking is why we're in this mess in the first place: we too often celebrate sham victories & fail to fight for substance. People around here are still drunk from celebrating Obama's campaign victory (to take one of my least favorite examples). So drunk, they fail to notice the torture chambers are still active (those are not screams of delight, friend), the bombs continue to drop (those are not celebratory fireworks), the prisons are overflowing, the deceit compounds.

If you or I were involved in a genuine struggle to prevent these multinational corporations from turning our planet into toxic swiss cheese, we would not stop to celebrate now. (I am reminded of what Bob Marley said when he chose to perform two days after being shot: "The people who are making this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I?") As I wrote yesterday, this possible moratorium, this sham victory, is written into the script for us. We decide if we want to change the script. All we have to do is wake up to the abuse that continues around us, call it what it is, & stop it.

There is so much to do & we have the power to do it. What could be more optimistic than that?

"Harshing Your Mellow"

2010-08-05T07:07:00.008+02:00

Interesting conversation with a stranger today. Cooling off with a $1 beer on the stoop of one of my favorite locals, I was asked how I felt about the August 4th passage in the New York State Senate of an 11-month moratorium on new hydrofracking permits in the Marcellus Shale. Hydrofracking is something that I have thought deeply about, and intermittently acted and advocated against, since I first learned of the issue late last year.

(To summarize: Hydrofracking (high volume slick water hydraulic fracturing) is a particularly toxic method of natural gas extraction. The Marcellus Shale formation, stretching from northern New York State to Pennsylvania and West Virginia, has been identified as especially ripe for drilling. In Pennsylvania (and many other states) where the laws have been more lax, residential tap water has been shown to be flammable due to the effects of gas drilling. Hydrofracking uses a toxic mix of secret, proprietary chemicals (owned by the vile assholes at Halliburton, of course), sand, and millions of gallons of water to fracture gas pockets in the shale and force precious fossil fuel to the surface. In the process, a portion of the toxic fluid remains in the ground, while most of it returns to the surface. This fluid is industrial, radioactive waste that is known to cause birth defects, brain damage and cancer. And so on and so forth.)

So what did I say to the stranger who wanted my opinion? I said that the drilling continues. So-called "exploratory" drilling, which is presumably not covered by the moratorium, allows ecocidal corporations to drill without environmental oversight. But whatever. The Senate vote will first be reviewed by the State Assembly in September. Who knows how long they will discuss the matter, while current and new drill sites poison the water table. When they are done discussing, the Governor will review the issue. (The current Governor, by most accounts, appears to be a bought-and-paid-for, inept dick.) Meanwhile, if I am deciphering the insane politics correctly, the moratorium does not go into effect. At all.

The stranger who had asked for my opinion of this wonderful news countered with something about how "we did all we can" and "it worked" and the Senate vote "offers some hope." To which I responded that "we" did not do all we can. The main thrust of public effort on this issue has been political, and is moving in typical sludge-like political time. But the Earth cannot wait. I responded with the thought that "we" did all we wanted. Were we to do all we can, "we" might have slashed the throats of ecocidal maniacs willing to drill (to go to one extreme), or "we" might have set their machines on fire, or monkey-wrenched them to uselessness, or blockaded drill sites. I was not overtly advocating such behavior. I was pointing out the gulf that exists between what was done and what could be done. What was done was legal and sanctioned by the same forces ready to destroy the soil, water, and air tomorrow for a buck today. Calling for a moratorium, and maybe getting it passed (later, maybe, and perhaps with a shit ton of loopholes, why not, that's how this garbage always goes down) was already in the script.

There is a bottom line. What is it? It is clean air, clean water, and clean soil. That is the minimum requirement for species survival (our species and the various species with which we interact). The fraudulent, corrupt, make-believe, quote-motherfucking-unquote democratic process is a wholly inadequate channel for protecting the bottom line. How many tragic reminders do folks need? How many oil spills? How many "severe climate events?" How many extinctions per goddamn day? How many asthma sufferers, cancer patients, victims of brain damage? It is not a victory when the ecocidal corporatists that would readily sell your survival down the toxic river set the terms of your victory. (Hope & Change, anyone? I bet the hundreds of thousands of mothers and children killed during the Bush/Obama Imperial holocaust in Iraq are celebrating in their irradiated graves over President Peaceprize's announcement earlier today of the end of U.S. combat operations in their former Earthly home.)

Back to the stoop, and my friendly conversation. I added that there ought to be in place an "underground railroad" for heroic people dubbed "eco-terrorists", animal liberationists, monkey-wrenchers and so on. Not everyone will stand up, bodily, to the engines of war against the Earth. But when such folks do, and when they are on the run, they deserve our protection physically, legally, rhetorically, philosophically, spiritually.

The stranger, who claimed to be a 30-year veteran of anti-nuclear activism, then announced (like a perfect, left-liberal fauxgressive) that I was "harshing his mellow." Which was just fine by me. Fuck his fucking mellow. People sometimes ask me why I am so angry. I want to know why those same people aren't.

Open Letter To Ithaca City School Board

2010-03-22T16:30:00.003+01:00

20 March 2010

To the Ithaca City School Board:

As a participant in Ithaca’s world-class music scene and a graduate of the School of Music at Ithaca College, I would like to respond to the proposal to cut funding for crucial elements of the music program in Ithaca’s public schools. Some personal reflections are followed by questions I hope you will take under consideration.

In early 1993, at age sixteen, I performed my first paid bar gig, as the drummer in a high school rock band, thus beginning my career as a professional musician. This would not have been possible without the strong elementary school music program I benefited from beginning at age 9.

Later in 1993, I conducted the high school orchestra in one of my first compositions, a ‘symphony’ I had written over a span of several months after school. This would not have been possible without the strong elementary school music program I benefited from.

In 1999 I was the first student of the School of Music at Ithaca College to become a Fulbright Scholar. This would not have been possible without the strong elementary school music program I benefited from.

My Fulbright Research Grant enabled me to travel to Krakow, Poland, where I continued my composition studies, participated in establishing a thriving improvised music scene, and still maintain meaningful connections with dear musical friends and colleagues. This would not have been possible without the strong elementary school music program I benefited from.

After two years in Krakow, I moved to The Netherlands, became a part of the music scene there, and soon represented that country at arts festivals as far away as South Africa, Turkey and Lithuania. This would not have been possible without the strong elementary school music program I benefited from.

During my time in Holland, I became a curator of my city’s premiere new music festival, helping to choose exciting musicians from all over the world and exposing them to the students and music loving public where I lived. This would not have been possible without the strong elementary school music program I benefited from.

In the past few years, I have given lectures and masterclasses on my work in Mexico City, Tel Aviv, Krakow, London, The Hague and right here in Ithaca. I have performed my work in Toronto, Manchester, Berlin, Warsaw, Ljubliana, Budapest, Prague, Boston and New York City. None of this would have been possible without the strong elementary school music program I benefited from.

Six months ago, a decade after my graduation from IC, I decided to make this progressive, dynamic and community-minded city, Ithaca, New York, my home. All of the new connections I have made and all of the old connections I have rekindled have been in large part thanks to the strong elementary school music program that I benefited from.

I think back to those first weeks in elementary school band. I remember how enormous my alto saxophone case seemed at the time. I remember learning how to set a reed on the mouthpiece, the mouthpiece on the instrument. I remember learning how to hold the saxophone, where to place my small fingers, how to care for it. I remember the feel and smell of the dog-eared beginning methods we learned scales and simple melodies from. I remember, as a nine year old, tears welling up when our school band performed “The Rainbow Connection”. Already at that age I was learning the vital transformative power of group music making.

From elementary school band, to middle and high school jazz band, to school musicals, I have benefited immeasurably from my participation in the public school music program I grew up with. Not a day goes by that I am not grateful for the opportunities I had to become the musician, and person, that I am. These opportunities should never be denied to any child.

I question how cutting the elementary instrumental program for all children in the school district will help to benefit underserved students. I question how taking away, from all children, the vital lessons that group music making teach will enrich the lives of any student. I question whether the members of the School Board believe that many of the district’s young people will be able to take on, as paid, extracurricular activities, what are now offered free of charge before, during, and after school in a safe and constructive environment.

Even if a very small minority of well-off children were to begin taking private lessons in band and orchestral instruments, these children would be denied the experiences of working in concert, playing in tune, producing harmony. These are not convenient puns: these are essential abstract values that music making teaches young people. Music education helps foster notions of creativity, discipline and teamwork. Insofar as a child practices her instrument in order to perform for the enjoyment of others, it instills a sense of community, a sense of pride, and a sense of selflessness. It teaches self-confidence. It increases communication. Music education may not be the sole setting where these values are learned, but in the discipline’s unique constitution as a time-based, community-oriented, abstract art, these values may well be learned deepest through group music making.

With this in mind, I urge the Ithaca City School District to leave the elementary music program and all extracurricular activities intact. It might summon all of the community’s creativity to find an alternative. And so we must.

Keir Neuringer
composer / performer
Ithaca, New York
keirneuringer.com

Aim Carefully

2009-12-14T15:55:00.006+01:00

Over the past weekend, scores of pianos and percussion instruments were vandalized at Ithaca College, the school where I earned my bachelors degree long ago.

Every day, many horrible things happen in many different places. Occassionally I am sufficiently outraged to write about them. This is one such moment.

I write as governments and scientists gather in Copenhagen to utterly fail to address or remedy the hurts industrial civilization has carved in our global climate.

I write when an acceptance speech for a peace prize can be delivered by a man who hastens to defend war rather than its victims.

I write while architects of neo-liberal agendas strip farmers of their land and wilfully leave countless people to starve.

I write while "Predators", armed drone aircraft, circle high over towns in Pakistan or Afghanistan. I write while dignity is denied those under occupation in Palestine and Iraq.

I write while unknown species go extinct, disappear forever, behind the smokescreen of human progress and its attendant energy needs.

I write while oceans are poisoned, rivers are killed, mountaintops are removed, children are enslaved in sweatshops and brothels, mammals are tortured and slaughtered in factory farms, the innocent are incarcerated, and the guilty are driven around in their limousines.

Outrages, all. So what about these pianos at a small, private, American liberal arts college?

What an unconscionable act of aggression towards the act of music making and the young music students preparing their final exams! But there's more: What a terrible waste of energy!

Ithaca College is located here in Ithaca, New York (from where I now write). The city is at the heart of opposition to an evil plan to subject much of the region to a new form of gas drilling. The plan is simple: ethically vacant companies offer folks with land seemingly attractive financial incentives to drill, despite the abundant evidence that 'hydrofracking', the method of extraction heavily reliant on secret Halliburton technologies, will toxify the water, land and air for hundreds of miles.

The damage hydrofracking will cause is truly incalculable and irreparable. But because cash rules (both for the people in the economically depressed communities where the leases are being made as well as for the politicians failing to safeguard the environment from the nasty corporations they bow and pray to), there is little likelihood that conventional--and 'legal'--means of resistance will suffice.

Unlike many of my friends, I see no advantage to declaring one's ideological opposition to violence when faced with violence. I have written about this before. It is right, I think, to at least consider the use of force as an appropriate and effective counter to violence. And violence can be done against one's immediate person, against one's environment, against one's livelihood. When you guarantee your attacker you will not fight back, you give him leave to always have the upper hand, the last say. I don't advocate violence as the first mode of conflict resolution, but neither do I deny it its proper place when it is the most appropriate response.

Someone punched Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the face yesterday! Some may think it was a pot shot. I think it was a warning and, given the grievances, a generous one at that.

The hydrofracking issue in Central New York State reminds me of this passage from Derrick Jensen's Endgame :

I just got home from talking to a new friend, another longtime activist. She told me of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try to stop the government and transnational timber corporations from spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon. Whenever activists learned a hillside was going to be sprayed, they assembled there, hoping their presence would stop the poisoning. But each time, like clockwork, helicopters appeared, and each time, like clockwork, helicopters dumped loads of Agent Orange onto the hillside and onto protesting activists. The campaign did not succeed.

“But,” she said to me, “I’ll tell you what did. A bunch of Vietnam vets lived in those hills, and they sent messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, ‘We know the names of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses.’”

I waited for her to finish.

“You know what happened next?” she asked.

“I think I do,” I responded.

“Exactly,” she said. “The spraying stopped.”

To the local would-be killers of pianos and marimbas: you have made some folks angry, sure. And you have inconvenienced some. But you have left them all even more determined to fill their world with music. You are despicable. The students are inspiring.

Take your aggression out where it counts. There are people gunning for your clean air, your clean water, the very land you walk on. They are not music students. They have addresses. As do you.

Thanksgiving Questions

2009-11-25T18:26:00.003+01:00

I grew up loving the Thanksgiving holiday without giving it much thought. I celebrated my last Thanksgiving in 2000. The following year, while the United States was bombing weddings in Afghanistan and locking up children in Guantanamo who had the temerity to fight back, I finally realized how utterly obscene it was to participate in a holiday which essentially has its roots in invasion and occupation (not to mention the horrendous cruelty and environmental degradation of factory farming). As another Thanksgiving approaches, a few questions occurred to me.

What if Thanksgiving in the USA was a celebration of locally sourced, locally seasonal, organic food grown on small farms, home gardens, or hunted and gathered, like it was for the Puritan colonizers in 1620?

Or what if it was a day of national mourning and fasting in solemn rememberance of the genocide perpetrated against cultures that revered the land?

What if on Thanksgiving people refused to eat poisoned food sold in toxic containers? What if they invited not just family, but neighbors into their homes, shared the fruits of garden harvests and traded heirloom seeds to sow the following growing season?

What if the national dish did not revolve around the charring of a fellow mammal after it lived a life of fear huddled in a tiny cage?

What if the genetic integrity of the foods Americans eat was respected, left alone, and not invaded and destroyed as though it were just another territory claimed by divine right?

What if the culture was not so apocalyptic? What if everything, all the way up to the planet we inhabit, was not so disposable?

What if the famous Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City didn't celebrate opulence, excess, the victory culture and affront after afront to history, but instead was marked by the determination of its participants to invade and occupy government buildings until the government ceases to invade and occupy other countries?

What if the televisions were turned off? What if we put our boots through them, and left the remains at the entryways to the headquarters of the news networks, just as a warning?

What if instead of Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving we all gave something back, besides our thanks? Better, what if we reclaimed something that has been taken from us?

What if instead of watching corporate sporting events in a food coma after dinner, we organized and played our own sports? Or used our energy to build something that's broken, or dismantle something that should never have been?

What if thanks were only offered by those who know what gratitude means - not the word but the concept, with its implications of respect and interdependence?

What if these questions were asked at American Thanksgiving tables? What if they weren't considered vulgar, or out of place, or (ho hum) unpatriotic?

What if there was no Thanksgiving holiday, no Thanksgiving parade, no Thanksgiving sports or movies or Christmas shopping or slaughterhouses or presidential messages or anything?

What would you do? How would you signal your gratitude for the good fortune, the comforts, the privileges that you have? What if it was for you to decide?

You are the pilgrim, your ship has landed, the world offers its bounty up to you. You decide.

Connections Significant and Petty

2009-08-06T21:01:00.007+02:00

In January I joined this hateful, soul-crushing, privacy-sapping, conformity-encouraging, time-sucking social networking website called 'facebook', you may have heard of it.

Having just moved back to New York after nearly ten years in Europe, I suppose I joined in order to stay connected easily with my friends around the world, to reconnect with people I had fallen out of touch with in the States, and to be able to promote my creative activities to people I imagined might be interested.

I was, and am, skeptical of this website, and I used it with caution (I still keep my profile private). But very soon after I joined I began receiving friend requests from people I hadn't heard from in 15 years or so. One such person, from my high school circle of friends, immediately left me a curious message that went something like this (I recall it from memory):

At first I was glad to see you are on Facebook. But then I looked online and found this on your blog: "I support the insurgency against US and allied forces in Iraq. I wish no harm to those American troops. I think they should just leave. Now. But if they won't, well, I support efforts to force them out. Unfortunately." My husband is in Iraq. I think it is good you chose to leave America. I think you should stay there.

She had dug deep for this out-of-context quote, several pages into my blog and many paragraphs down in my essay Violence and Ghandi's Blunders. But OK. I responded privately at the time:

Perhaps you've heard such arguments before, but if this country was invaded and under occupation, we would probably agree that the invading force should leave or be forced out.

I want to be clear: I wrote "unfortunately" about supporting troops being forced out and I wrote that I wish them no harm. I remember your husband from high school and I truly wish for him to come home safe. The mission is illegal under international law and was flawed in many more ways from the get-go. I believe that his will to do good has been terribly misused by the people at the top of the chain of command.

If living abroad for a decade has helped me to have this perspective, then I'm glad for that privilege. But I live in the US now. I welcome the opportunity to discuss this sort of thing, but I think the "love it or leave it" tone of your message was unnecessary and a bit frightening.

She sent this back: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." And quietly 'unfriended' me.

Which is fair enough. I actually wrote earlier in the paragraph from my essay she quoted, "my allies are really fewer and further between than I would like to admit." Just because people grow up together, or go to the same schools, or come from a similar socio-economic background, or persue the same career...none of this makes anyone an automatic ally. Obviously. But realizing this has been a slow process for me over many years. Whereas I once saw us all 'in this together' and was greatly interested in large-scale movements for social change, I am wary of such groups now. I don't wish to disparage them all, but many seem to be an excuse for inactivity, and they mirror authoritarian and/or otherwise invasive structures in one way or another. (I even turned down an invitation to join the Cloud Appreciation Society recently. I may like to look at and photograph clouds, but joining others in this and carrying a card will not make the clouds more lovely, nor my appreciation for them greater.)

Anyway, I have another, more recent political exchange on facebook to relate. An acquaintance from junior high school 'friended' me some months ago. It seems to be acceptable practice to do this without even saying hello, even if there has been no contact between the two people in a decade or so, and nothing more in common than a high school diploma from the same school. We weren't close then, haven't kept in touch since. Well, the other day I posted a link to a Democracy Now story about poor nutrition in the U.S. The following exchange ensued with this person, we'll call him 'Arek':

Arek: You have to take anything from "Democracy Now" with a grain of salt and in this case a tablespoon of sugar!

me: That's kinda funny. What's your beef with DN?

Arek: Well, DN is very entertaining, and some of their information is good, but they paint a very disorted view of reality.

My issue with them is that what they say about Israel is slanderous. Many of the stories are fictious and are always one sided.

I think they have damaged their crediblity by reporting falsehoods and hear say and as far as I know have never issued a retraction.

Sadly I think they are responsible for alot of confusion amoung intelectual people and create division among Jews.

Have you ever been to Israel?

me: I see. And strongly disagree (that DN is wrong on Israel).

I performed in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 2007, and lectured in Holon on the role of artists in breaking down the walls (real and metaphorical) imposed by nasty governments.

Arek: Sorry, but it sounds like DN has gotten to you too!

Living in Israel I can tell you the government is not "nasty", as they have ben very good to me.

Israel is just a little country surrounded by very dangerous people, every moment of every day someone is trying to kill a Jew.

me: I was talking about all governments dude. A gov't is only as nice as it is to the least privileged of its people. You may have done well over there, many are not so lucky. To say nothing of the millions IL holds captive in the Occupied Territories. You sound like you are living in a settlement, which, if true...nuff said. But still, to be fair, turn around what you wrote: 'every moment of every day an Israeli (and I won't conflate them with jews) is trying to kill someone.' I'm not wrong. And I won't continue this discussion here.

Arek: I am really sorry you feel this way. Nothing I say will change your mind. Arabs in Israel live in the only democracy in the Middle East and have many if not more freedoms than the Jews.

How do you see the constant stream of terrorism against Jews inside and outside of Israel as a problem that we created?

What would happen to us if there was not fence or army to defend us?

For the first time in 2000 years there is Jewish country and you are not here building it, but in the States trying to destroy it.

I guess Cat Steven's must be your role model?

Needless to say, this person is neither ally nor friend. I have many Israeli friends in and out of Israel, but never have I encountered this sort of delusional thinking among them (only among American Jews). On the surface this is a completely insignificant exchange with a brainwahsed, racist settler. But the points he made merit some response, perhaps.

Arabs in Israel live in the only democracy in the Middle East...
False. On both counts.

How do you see the constant stream of terrorism against Jews inside and outside of Israel as a problem that we created?
Note the manipulative language. There is not a constant stream of terrorism against Jews outside of Israel. There are acts of anti-Semitism in the world, to be sure. To wilfully conflate these with the legitimate struggles against the state terror of the State of Israel is deceitful. To conflate all the acts of violence within Israel with terrorism is deceitful. To equate the violence inherent in the defense of Gaza, or the West Bank, or Lebanon, with the violence of Israel's illegal occupations and invasions is deceitful.

What would happen to us if there was not fence or army to defend us?
Ask the Palestinians. They are living the answer to this question.

For the first time in 2000 years there is Jewish country and you are not here building it, but in the States trying to destroy it.
I'm about as interested in a 'Jewish' country in the Middle East as I am in a Kalahari Bushmen country in the Yukon Territory, or a Zoroastrian country in the Easter Islands, or a Catholic country in Vatican City. Seriously. (And remember, many of the people who run Israel are ethnic Europeans.)

I guess Cat Steven's must be your role model?
Well, he's got a great voice.

*

Of course it's all petty. It's facebook after all. The problem with social networking is that it is anti-social and the networks are false. There are these petty, insignificant, virtual connections and then there are the connections one longs for. A friend of mine who just returned from a week in the woods said to me today--said to me, for real, not 'texted' me--"Being alone in the woods is the least lonely thing."

So true. I spent six days hiking alone in the Western Beskid mountains in Poland earlier this summer. The first day I kept wanting to communicate what I was experiencing, but my mind went no further than imagining the views in bite-size morsels acceptable for social networking. Terrible. But as I hiked (and it was a deliciously grueling, utterly exhausting hike), I awoke once again to my senses, to connections that mattered: hot, cold, thirst, hunger, distance, mud, sun, stone, rain, wind, birds, flies, deer tracks, bear tracks, trail conditions, animal sounds in the forest, my ability to hold out through the day's walking against pains from the weight of my pack.

Over the next days I forgot about petty connections and discovered connections more significant than I can communicate without physically showing them to you. I imagine we all know, deep in our animal selves, that we should forge and nurture these significant connections. And when we do, we won't even remember wanting to say to hell with all of this petty networking.

Billie Holiday, David Simon and the War on Drugs

2009-05-29T18:34:00.004+02:00

I am reading Billie Holiday's 1956 engaging autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (ghostwritten by William Dufty), and found a passage on the failed war on drugs that sounds like it was written in opposition to the failed war on drugs of the Reagan years, or indeed today. She says:

People on drugs are sick people. So now we end up with the government chasing sick people like they were criminals, telling doctors they can't help them, prosecuting them because they had some stuff without paying the tax, and sending them to jail.

Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn't treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day.

And here's David Simon, creator of The Wire, speaking on the subject on Bill Moyers Journal:

I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we're basically treating our underclass. The drug war's war on the underclass now. That's all it is. It has no other meaning.

The Same Wars

2009-05-24T07:23:00.004+02:00

I am coming out of blog retirement to call out the phoney torture and imprisonment debates between raging sado-fascist Dick Cheney and his posse of bloodthirsty orcs, on the one side, and wet-noodle-in-chief Barack Obama and his starstruck apologists, on the other.

Just to refresh everyone's memory, since Obama's presidency has functionally obliterated the anti-war movement: the occupation of Iraq has always been illegal and unjustified. The war on Afghanistan has always been illegal and unjustified. This was as true in the first moment American jets let loose their industrial-strength petro-massacres in each of those countries as it is now, with the American imperial project under the command of the Obama Administration continuing to grind people to bonemeal and homes to rubble.

Bush's wars and Obama's wars: they're the same goddamn wars!

Everyone really needs to shut up already about bailing out banks and the auto industry and improving healthcare in the US. First, the US has superpower-sized reparations to pay to Iraq and Afghanistan. The amount of carnage that has been wrought on the people and environment in those places, without a shred of justification, is incalculable and unspeakable. (It certainly goes unspoken.) Thousands upon thousands of people have been slaughtered because it proves politically and economically expedient to do so for a relative handful of suited thugs. There has never been justification for these undeclared, illegal wars.

There has never been justification. And this has all been said before. With the way he's playing it, can we all please stop pretending Obama is not in the early days of his eventual war criminality? We can't have it both ways: either he's brilliant and he's galloping proudly into it, or he's just another fool puppet sleepwalking. Gotta be one of the two. And now the debate is over whether we torture and whether it works? What the fuck, people? Of course we torture and of course it works. The point of torture is to torture. It's terrifying because it's part of the state terrorist playbook. And it definitely works (it just doesn't do anything to minimize violent religious extremism, but whatever).

(An aside: allow me to correct myself, this language is so tricky. I do not torture. I almost aligned myself with the wrong people there for a second.)

Dick Cheney, for all his monstrous crimes, is now a mere 'private citizen'. Who gives a shit about the nationalistic fear-mongering drivel of a half-dead celebrity criminal? Answer: here come the news and op-ed and comedy shows to treat his grunting and croaking as somehow relevant, and allow the new president's rhetoric to move ever-so-unsubtly to the right. But even in the first weeks of Obama's presidency, when he seemed to impress so many (already drunk on the phenomenon of his race) with his determination to 'close the prison at Guantanmo Bay', he was foot-soldiering for the Bush/Cheney vision of the world. True: no one, not a soul, should be in the detention and torture facility at Guantanmo Bay. But Obama's intention was never to free the people illegally detained and tortured, but merely to move the prisoners out of the spotlight of international scrutiny. Hide them somewhere else. Break international and U.S. laws somewhere else. Torture them somewhere else.

Every day that the wars and occupations and baseless detentions continue are days that whoever is in charge is culpable for those crimes committed. And really? You don't think there are sinister goons torturing right now as you read this? Here is what Noam Chomsky recently had to say on this subject: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175073

Obama is correct in asserting that the Guantanamo monkey business has actually ramped up recruitment of those willing to take action in their opposition to American military force. But in a gross display of cognitive dissonance few seem to pick up on, he then determines to subject prisoners held for years without charges to further imprisonment elsewhere, and to military tribunals.

Let's just be clear on something: America has tortured. America does torture. America will torture. And what has changed? The president's got a different name, a loftier voice, but he still wilfully deceives. The press still wilfully underreports. People remain wilfully ignorant of their own march in the parade of horrors.

I realize that even informed people are unlikely to quit their desperate job searches and re-amp the anti-war movement. Unemployment is bad here, not quite as bad as in Afghanistan and Iraq, not even close, but there are decent white folks losing their jobs now. Still, I have a modest proposal: those who supported Obama before he took the reins of a mass-murderous, torturing imperial project might consider either taking their Yes We Can signs and bumper stickers down or scribbling in a final word to make that campaign slogan a little more honest: Yes We Can...Torture!

If the music isn't activism, it's the wrong music

2008-11-10T16:20:00.006+01:00

Excellent, brief essay by composer John Luther Adams: Global Warming and Art. From the essay:

Three decades ago I came to Alaska to "get away" from the world. But the world has followed me here in an inescapable way. I came here also to help save the wilderness. For years I worked as an environmental activist. When I left that work I did so feeling that someone else could carry it on, but that no one else could make my music. Implicit in this choice was my belief that, in a different way, music could matter as much as activism.

Of Exasperation and Democracy

2008-10-29T18:48:00.002+01:00

I sometimes send an email update to a few hundred people to inform them of my creative activities. To my latest update I added a paragraph detailing some of my main reasons for not voting in the U.S. (Not much changes, here’s a link to what I had to say about voting two years ago.) This paragraph was not only pertinent to the time I sent out the mailing (a week before the 2008 presidential elections) but also to an audiovisual installation of mine Registering Our Exasperation currently on exhibition at the Melkweg in Amsterdam.

I will not be voting in the upcoming U.S. elections, though I am eligible to do so. I see the electoral situation as not so different from that of Belarus, wherein the democratic process is so obviously flawed that participation only seems to indicate legitimization. I wouldn't bet on a horse that I knew in advance would not make it to the race. Only the extraordinarily well-funded are given access to the public through mainstream media. And they--the well-funded (and forked-tongued)--maintain attitudes that are so obviously divergent from the majority of the people that even with their obscene funding they will not allow other ideas to compete for public attention and support. I am not suggesting that there is no difference between the two main actors this particular year, but that the difference does not speak to the breakdown of democracy. Given the various extinction-level crises that an American president sits at the helm of, I am not willing to be pragmatic in the question of government, at least not with regard to the illusion of choice. As I have written many times before, this is not only an American issue. However one chooses to participate in democracies flawed or perfect, I advocate a particpation in community that obviates mega-powerful, centralized governments. To be clear, I am refering to the kind of participation that Henry David Thoreau had in mind when he wrote "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." Because without a community actively defined by those who live within it, any government is irrelevant and any election is ridiculous. If it is change that one wants, it is change that one must do (and not change that one must vote for).

Anyway, I received a number of thought-provoking responses, some from people who share my attitude. The majority of the substantive responses, however, were from people who thought my decision poor, although all agreed with the notion that American democracy is in a very sorry state. But the suggestion seemed to be vote for the candidate who is black, because he is black, and that is historic, and he talks about change, and change would be good, and the other candidate is really much much worse. Which all may be true, but how that would address the democracy issue I do not know. As it happens, I found this to be exasperating, again appropriate to the work I am presenting at the Melkweg. So I wrote the following to be made available at my exhibition. It has some cursing in it.

How do I register my exasperation? How do I indicate the frustrating understanding I have come to that mega-nations & governments run by madmen are causing all of the problems—problems that, year in & year out, someone, somewhere, is telling me I should solve by voting for different madmen? Could everyone please stop telling me to vote?

Go ahead & vote, vote, get your candidate or political party of choice to win some sham election, vote. Pat yourself on the back for participating in democracy & then go back to sleep for the next few years, while politicians & the corporations that own them ride roughshod over the earth, killing people & rivers, enslaving children & the integrity of genes, slaughtering languages & rainforests, mocking democracy.

Or do they? Do they mock democracy? Hitler, Mugabe, Lukashenko, Hussein all won elections. Even that shit-brained son-of-a-bitch Bush nearly did, twice. What is democracy anyway in our age of perverted information, when all information is commercialized, when shit floats, when access to your intellect is sold to the highest bidder, when soundbites will have to suffice because neither you nor your candidate have time to read the policies drawn up in backrooms by people whose names no one even knows?

How do I register my exasperation? Stop telling me to vote. Stop telling me to participate in a counterfeit electoral process, in a democracy in which political parties can be divided over whether human industry is cooking the planet or not, over whether the violence should be conducted by insufferable idiot jerk-offs or charming intellectuals, over whether this or that group has the right to self-determination, over whether torturing someone constitutes ‘torture’, over whether the integrity of borders is more precious than the integrity of the lives of those who wish to cross them, over the extent to which women’s reproductive rights & the civil rights of homosexuals threaten the nation.

I am not part of a community that stretches across multiple mountain ranges, over rivers, beyond the corpses of once-proud & impenetrable forests, that has asserted its right to pave the planet & pour chemicals into the eyes of bunnies to create new cosmetics or find cures to cancers the culture causes in the first place.

No. How do I register my exasperation? What place does democracy have in the mass extinctions we are witnessing, mass extinctions of a magnitude only seen when a comet smashes into the planet or an ice age covers it for centuries? Vote. Vote for liars who pay lip service to the builders of bombs, to the financiers of fire & brimstone, to the high priests of pedophilia and misogyny, to the conquerors of carbon, the gangsters of genetics, the vanquishers of forests. Vote for them & encourage everyone around you to do the same, get the vote out, they say, get it out. Rock it. Get it out & then go back to sleep, & in a few years’ time another cast of back-alley elite, socialite sociopaths will dance on camera for you in expensive suits, with flecks of corporate shit in their teeth & the fresh blood of a million children on their breath.

You raise your voice & say no, no, these are not my nations & this is not my way, these democracies are killing my planet, my first & last & only beloved planet, & listen to the response you get, they say, with less subtlety than Chavez or bin Laden: but do you want a dictatorship? And that’s when you realize just how shallow all this fuckin’ democracy is, you knew it stank, you knew it was false, a fraud, a fake, but it wasn’t until democracy loving people—& it’s true you are surrounded by intelligent and creative people, & they love democracy, just love it, every time an election comes around they get hard with hatred for the greater of two evils—but when such creative, intelligent, imaginative & democracy loving people as those around you fail to imagine anything but this violent shithouse, this fiction, this sham, this obscenity parading as righteousness, this vile method to slowly annihilate the whole goddamn toy, well that’s when you ask, how do I register my exasperation? How do I register my exasperation? How, midst all this skullduggery, all this shallow & pernicious blather, do I register my exasperation?

For a while, I listened to the radio program Democracy Now! I listened & I listened & all the guests were getting tortured or incarcerated or had brothers & sons about to be executed for the color of their skin or the sexual orientation of their partners, or were lawyers fighting against the latest surveillance laws & bipartisan gladhanding to fund more war & on & on & on. So I took away the words & left the aspiration, meaning both what these beleaguered activists & dissidents wanted and literally the sound of their breathing & pausing while they spoke. And it sounded like exasperation. They were all exasperated, like me, perhaps like you.

This was in 2006 & everything they were saying was something no one wanted to hear, people just wanted the economy to go up, up, up & for news of the wars to go away. Well the wars are still here & at the moment the economy stinks the way it has always stank to me, like shit, but back to the artwork in question all that audio of exasperation was of things no one wanted to hear, so I put it together with the text from my video Things You Cannot See, which I had just made & the two seemed to go together very nicely, things you cannot hear & things you cannot see, I put them together & gave the work the title Registering Our Exasperation, & so to answer the question How do I register my exasperation? I think a pretty decent start is to make some art, something that relates & transports at the same time, in which the content goes together very nicely, as artwork should, form is important after all, yes, to make some art & to talk to people, to vote with my whole influence & to turn my back on the madmen.

Disputing Augmented Unreality

2008-06-04T16:28:00.004+02:00

from TAGMAG 06, a publication of <>TAG in The Hague

I never feel better than when I'm walking in mountains far from urban civilization. I carry a heavy pack filled with my sleeping bag, a small tent, some food, some cooking utensils and other gear, and some spare warm clothing. I keep a map of the area and a liter of water. And some chocolate. My best walks have been in the south of Poland, where I can wake up and spend eight hours following good trails through the most sparsely populated terrain—just a tiny village here and there in the valleys far below—before arriving at a clearing to set up the tent or stay in a rustic hostel or farmer’s place. I fall asleep tired and sore shortly after sundown and awake at dawn energized and ready to cover more ground.

It really is an ideal way to use my energy and spend my time, especially in the company of good friends. Enjoying my time out here is something that I had to learn to do, and I am certainly no expert at it (and I go all too infrequently). I can only identify a very few types of flora and fauna. I have not learned to successfully navigate with the sun or the stars. The only foods along the trail I recognize as safe to eat are blackberries and raspberries. (On some walks it is possible to literally fill buckets with them without pausing, so plentiful are the bushes by the path in late summer.) When I have the opportunity to drink water straight from streams—it is always excellent, utterly refreshing—I have no way of knowing for certain that it is safe. I can recgonize when distant clouds are bringing with them rain, but not so far in advance as to change my course.

I am not a mountain climber; most of the walking I do is not particularly risky, but I have made some foolish decisions. I once wandered off an isolated alpine trail and crossed a very recent avalanche in the Dolomites, in Italy, and as I slowly zig-zagged my way I watched as stones loosened beneath my boots and tumbled hundreds of meters down sheer cliffs. On another walk I climbed across a fresh mudslide in the Beskid Zywiecki region in Poland, balancing precariously on upturned tree roots and mud-encrusted boulders that defied gravity as they jutted out of the mountainside. But perhaps the most foolish thing I have ever done in my life was set out alone on a day-long walk around Hogsback, in South Africa, without a map or water or any local knowledge. I lost the path and spent hours exposed to bright sun, winding my way through dense prickly brush, navigating around unexpected cliffs dropping off to nowhere, and endeavoring not to lose my footing in the many holes dug by unseen animals in the ground. I returned to my hostel hours later than planned and completely dehydrated.

I have never gone walking with a mobile phone.

***

Imagine: I am on a walk somewhere, lost and thirsty and hours away from any shelter. The sun is setting and menacing clouds are rolling in and, not knowing what to do, I begin to panic. But I have a small Augmented Reality (AR) unit with me, connected to a sensor that monitors my heart rate and a lightweight pair of sunglasses with embedded translucent video screens. The unit takes barometric readings, it cross-references GPS data with the latest Internet-based ordinance survey information, and plots a route to safety that takes into account weather conditions, the terrain, access to water, and my own physical condition. As I look through the sunglasses, a map customized to my needs appears superimposed over the wilderness, displaying place names, likely places of shelter, and calculating distances and walking times. Data about local flora and fauna I should avoid is provided in image, text, and sound. All of this reassures me. I calm down and set out confidently and safely for civilization.

Yes, but I would rather leave such a device at home.

***

Augmented Reality refers to the layering of virtual (computerized) data upon one or more of an individual’s senses for practical, entertainment, medical, military, or artistic purposes. It is also a syntactical misnomer. Reality is not—cannot be—augmentable. Unlike breasts and penises, we cannot modify reality on a whim. Reality is not a show. In order for us to have a discussion that doesn’t resemble an LSD trip or a stay in an asylum for the insane (or a televised American political debate) we cannot qualify or quantify ‘reality’. To do so would be to dispute it. And there are only two possible consequences of disputing reality: insanity or art.

I am not a philosopher, I cannot address here the philisophical history of our culture’s conception of reality. I am also not a religious person, I do not believe that reality is ordained by the supernatural. I am often flabbergasted in philisophical conversations by questions such as ‘How do you know everything did not begin five minutes ago?’ or ‘How do you know we are not all just brains in a jar?’ It is difficult to properly articulate my certainty that I was in fact here more than five minutes ago and that my brain is not in a jar. My reality exists between the soil and the sky. And that’s that.

So how is it that I can communicate with others with different understandings about the nature of what is real? Like you, I am a human animal and, like you, I have the capacity to empathize. I was discussing this with my friend, the composer and computer musician Tom Tlalim, who observed that AR, like the Internet (and I would add like mobile phones, like anything that can be abstracted from specific perceptions of time, space, and connectivity), threatened the notion of the local. And I think he is correct. ‘The soil and the sky’ poetically defines the largest entity that I can grasp as local: my planet. And not only my planet, but tangible, physical aspects of it that others experience and are subject to. When I watch you drink water, I cannot taste it but my mind may trigger a memory of the taste of ‘water’. That, I think, is empathy. An AR device might allow me to actually taste water. And that is insane. There is no water!

***

My notions of empathy and ‘the local’ are closely intertwined. Since we are living in a global village, a small world, a litterbox playground for capitalist ideologists, it seems we are unable to value and respect the local. In multiple ways we are torn away from the local, torn away from the positive and negative realities before us. We live in the same local global village as billions suffering from starvation, or preventable disease, or political disenfranchisement, or state terror, or environmental degredation, and we fail to empathize. We relate, rather (or many of us do, anyway), to layer upon layer of digital unreality: gadget fetishism, video games, rampant militarism, the false corporate prophecies of a green future fueled by capitalists, the celebration of shit-brained celebrities.

There is a word for all of this, and the word is insane.

***

Why is it that some sort of AR unit have been helpful to me in Hogsback? Because I was a damn fool for doing what I did. Technological progress should not be used to medicate stupidity. I for one will not submit my animal body and my animal mind to Twenty-First century cyborgification. I never cease to be disturbed by the fact that people willingly wear those idiot bluetooth devices in their ears. I certainly never will. And no one cares if I do or not. But AR is advancing along with another phenomenon, called ‘ubiquitous computing’. Ubiquitous computing, the idea that everything we create can be networked, constantly processing and syncing a variety of data, seems to be widely accepted. In a world of ubiquitous computing there will be no ‘opt out’ possibility. Individuals may well become simple conductors of machines that talk to each other. Go ahead and try to opt out, now, of all the things that have become ubiquitous, the air and water and noise and light pollution, the transmission waves that flow through your body whether you want them to or not, whether you know it or not, the carcinogens and chemicals.

We march fullspeed ahead towards openly disputing reality at every turn. This is what the ubiquitous disputation of reality is called: mass insanity.

***

There’s a tangential comment I need to make on the subject of ‘ubicomp’ (does it get more 1984 than some of the words and phrases we use for technology these days?). I wrote above that within ubiquitous computing, data from the things we make can be networked. It may seem touchy-feely to some reading this, but I’m pretty sure trees and birds and bees and earthworms and people who are awake to their unaugmented senses are networking and syncing too. I know this to be true; the longer I spend away from devices doing the networking for me, the more I feel alive to the world around me. I need no products to facilitate the connectivity between my perceptions or amongst them and my surroundings. It is all wireless when you spend days walking in the mountains.

***

Insofar as we can influence and instigate aspects of our evolution, I propose in the strongest possible terms that we do not evolve away from our empathetic, animal, and locally-conscious selves. What advocates and developers of AR might see as augmenting not only our experiences but also our capabilities, I see as forfeiture of our experiences and capabilities, and this should be considered very carefully. I can and should learn about the flora and fauna in the mountains where I walk (to make an example of my own stupidity), but this ought to happen at the speed of experience, not the speed of a wireless or GPS network. I neither need nor want to submit my autonomous humanity to military and corporate augmentation. We can all make our own choices about how many gadgets we own and how many starving people we refuse to see. But when the augmentation, when the insanity is not only expected but ubiquitous, it is reasonable, it is utterly sane to say no. And to do more: to act on that refusal.

***

There is a layer of experience and perception and action that is maleable, that is augmentable. I first saw the formulation ‘art disputes reality’ in the work of Albert Camus, whose own grasp on the realities of the Twentieth century were manifested clearly in his writing and activities. ‘Art disputes reality,’ he wrote, ‘but it does not hide from it.’ I believe art can dispute reality when artists address it forthrightly and bring creativity to bear on the enigma of being, on the problems and beauty embedded in our perceptions. And by sharing in reality, consciously, conscientiously, and with clarity. Which is to say: sanely.

The Aesthetics of Ecocide

2008-05-15T21:32:00.006+02:00

[From TAGMAG 05 (March 2008), a publication of <>TAG in The Hague. Cross posted here and here.]

For most of the past 200,000 years, since Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in Africa, all humans lived in sustainable relationships with their landbase. They fed and were fed by the organisms with which they shared diverse environments and prospered as a species, eventually inhabiting many regions of the world. They brought with them their capacity for language, tool-making, complex organization, aesthetics.

Around 13,000 years ago some human populations began to develop the earliest attributes of civilization. A very few notable river cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia (and later in North and South America) established year-round human settlements, later to evolve into cities, city-states, and empires. Instead of moving to sources of food, water, and shelter, they brought these things to single locations, sparking the first large-scale, human-instigated deforestations, desertifications, water pollution, and disease, as well as early instances of animal extinctions, genetic engineering, genocide.

These settled cultures were the exception to the overwhelming majority of other human cultures, spread out around the globe, which remained in states of sustainable interdependence with the natural world. Wherever these non-civilized cultures have been met by the civilized, they have either been absorbed or eradicated. I am not romanticizing. This is historical fact. There are very few non-civilized human cultures left. Present-day hunter-gatherers are the only examples of humanity not serving a death sentence to its own ecology.

Fact: civilization is on a mass-murderous rampage that is destroying its home and everything in it. It’s called ecocide, from the Greek oikos, meaning ‘house’, and the Latin cidium, meaning ‘to kill’. Civilized humanity is killing its own house. Your house. My house. Everybody’s house. Or if you prefer: your mother, my mother, everybody’s mother.

Those of us concerned about global environmental collapse wonder if there is any meaningful thing that the civilized can do to prevent the destruction of our species and most other species. Some people have dedicated their lives to issues such as wildlife and rainforest preservation. Others, for a variety of reasons, have come onboard recently with technological innovations. One American politician made a highly popular powerpoint presentation.

But is any of this effective? Is it meaningful? Can civilized humanity do anything more effective to stop environmental meltdown than cease to exist? Not humanity, but civilized humanity. Sorry if you’ve grown attached to civilization, but if we want to stop being ecocidal we are going to have to give up either civilization or our lives. If we hang on to civilization for as long as we can (perhaps a few more decades, perhaps, before it collapses under its own weight), we not only guarantee our own destruction, but the destruction of everyone and everything we love.

The good news is that the only thing you have to do to save your home, save your mother, save everything you love, is give up civilization. And that’s how it goes. While this is not particularly controversial if one looks at the environmental indicators, my guess is that many readers will resist agreeing. The inability many of us have imagining life without civilization is a sad comment on how attached we are to our mass-murderous ways. The violence has become more important than life itself. We identify more with consuming the planet than being an animal in it. Crazy, huh?

Take an hour or two and think deeply about this. Appraise civilization, as one of many distinct human cultures. Can we really be so deluded by our own participation in the killing as to think that what civilization is doing to the planet can continue without leading to utter disaster?

And let’s be clear: civilization is not some benign cultural phenomenon that makes art, trades corn for wool and builds cities, with millenia of ecocide and genocide an inadvertant and regretted side effect of its otherwise good works to prolong life expectancies, invent haute cuisine and turn out mind-numbingly stupid sitcoms. Civilization thrives on the subjegation of everything around it. It is insatiable. History tells us that its appetite is infinite. Common sense tells us that our world is not.

British physicist Stephen Hawking apparently agrees with me. In April 2007 he stated that, due to the threats of “global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers...the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space”, essentially claiming that humanity’s only chance for continued survival is to leave this planet. Hawking then got in a jet and floated around in zero gravity for a few seconds. A leading thinker of our civilization considers our home to be like so many mass-produced, excrement-smeared baby diapers in a landfill: disposable.

Heartbreaking, especially if you love this planet.

Is Hawking right? Consider what our species requires to survive: clean air and clean water, to begin with. An atmosphere that neither chokes nor cooks nor freezes us. We need to interact with other species—those we eat, those that eat us and help dispose of our waste, those that shelter us. We need diversity, the diversity of our genes and that of the things we eat. But do we need better, cleverer products? Do we need monumental architecture?

Our water is utterly poisoned. National Geographic has recently reported that on this planet, 71 percent of which is covered with water, none of it is pristine. None of it is untouched by civilization. There are growing dead zones—massive areas where no marine life can exist—in the oceans. Civilization is killing rivers daily: dumping toxins into them, damming them (yes, and even for ‘clean’ hydro-electric power), eradicating the forests that once lined them and brought precious nutrients to them. Whole lakes have caught fire or disappeared. Rains have been composed of acid. Glaciers are melting because it is the right of the civilized to eat beef and drive an automobile.

Civilization has succeeded in killing water. And even where there is clean drinking water, the civilized increasingly prefer the bottled variety, the production of which does violence against our planet in its water- and oil-guzzling production, bottling, transportation, and disposal. (We can leave aside, for now, the violence that marketing it does to our intellect.)

And our air is filthy. Conduct a little experiment: go into the woods, or the mountains, somewhere far away. Take a deep breath. The degree to which you enjoy taking that breath and it makes you feel good is the clearest possible indication of how unclean the air is that you breath every day. The air that you breathe is the air of the civilized. It is filthy, filled with poison, and it makes you sick and unhappy. This is an objective fact: refer to your experiment in the woods for proof.

Humans are a hardy and adaptable species. Although civilized humans have almost completed the elimination of all non-civilized human cultures (those still living in balance with their ecosystems), the rest of us will outlast many other species. But our survival depends on our interaction with other species. While in our civilized wisdom we turn our back on these interactions, our actions continue to raise the planet’s temperature and cook vital amphibian, bird, insect, and plant species. Our own demise is thereby precipitated.

What will happen if we fail to respect the integrity of genes, when some inevitable disease strikes a staple in our monocrop agriculture? It is happening now with bananas and with bees. Yes, and what will fish-lovers do when, as is widely and uncontroversially predicted, edible fish species disappear altogether within the next few decades?

May I vent? I am bored to tears by the faulty and false solutions parading as the new hope for our civilization. While I respect recent efforts to alleviate the most obvious hurts of ecocide, I sometimes wonder if failing to recognize and name the real problem isn’t making it worse. Civilization will not fix civilization. A brilliant scientist is telling you to fly into outer space if you want your children to survive. One assumes that only the civilized get a ticket on the Great Airlift of the Future, and hunter-gatherers be damned. Hello?

Listen: there is no hope for civilization. Civilization is not redeemable. Civilization will not be reformed. It—we—will continue to consume what we can, and destroy what we cannot, until there is nothing left. Unless, of course, it is stopped, it is ended, it itself is subjected to the same sort of violent and systematic program of eradication that it has subjected everything in its path to for the last several millenia. Or, more likely, it collapses under its own weight. Either way, as it has hurt for millenia, it will hurt when it goes, kicking and screaming. Feel it now?

Yes, yes, there is no hope. And that may well be a good thing. Without relying on hope, that is, without externalizing the problem, our problem, we have nothing to wait for but our own good actions. What would it take for us to demolish all of our reasons for not acting against ecocide? How can we smash our false hopes for the baby steps we occassionally take against the juggernaut of civilization? We will all feel stronger when we stop playing victims to our own crimes.

The excellent and uncompromising radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen, whose flawlessly argued and highly recommended work Endgame inspired much of this article, often asks his readers to consider what they love and what they are capable and willing to do to protect and preserve it. He writes:

“One of the good things about everything being so fucked up—about the culture being so ubiquitously destructive—is that no matter where you look—no matter what your gifts, no matter where your heart lies—there’s good and desperately important work to be done.”

So do it. Figure it out and do it. It is beyond the scope of this article to instruct anyone as to how, just to recommend we all take our minds out of the gutter of civilization and find a way. Not just this year, while it is fashionable. (Jensen has noted that for the last few decades environmental issues have returned to the headlines approximately every seven years. But the rainforests still get eaten up.) Not just until all of our automobiles run on pseudo-solutions like bio-fuel. But as a matter of course and a way of life.

Yes, and I’m typing all of this into my laptop, produced by one of the most environmentally offensive and aggressively marketed corporations in the industry. And yes, I type at 35,000 feet, as I cross the Atlantic Ocean. And yes, it is the eighth time I have crossed it in the last six months. We can discuss carbon footprints, alternative energy sources, the phoney greening of polluting industries. Or we can be honest.

Or we can talk aesthetics. Lost as I am myself in the delusions of civilization, I came up one afternoon with the name of the <>TAG exhibition, ecoAesthetics, as though the aesthetics of ecology ought to be of concern. Aesthetics? I live in The Netherlands, a country where the utterly arrogant concept of eco-aesthetics has been writ large on the landscape, even by the idea of ‘landscape’: there is hardly any ‘eco’ left here, just aesthetics, the entirety of the envirnment controlled—‘stewarded’, the policy writers of George W. Bush’s government would say—for centuries by the civilized, presumably because the civilized think they know better. I find it hard to do better than 200,000 years of survival through ice ages, floods, and volcanoes, but what do I know?

Here I sit in an airplane, cooking the atmosphere around me and strangling the environment below, playing the good soldier in civilization’s war against the planet Earth. And reformulating what has been said about the mass-murderous culture that prosecuted a more commonly agreed ‘war of aggression’ in the last century: at least the planes run on time.

Violence and Gandhi's Blunders

2007-06-02T16:15:00.000+02:00

I do not, as I once did, maintain an ideological commitment to non-violence. I do believe that (non-violent) civil disobedience can be a useful tactic in opposing illegitimate authority, rejecting empire, preserving one's rights and dignity, and so forth. But it is only one tactic. There are others, and success depends on how a multitude of tactics are employed by a multitude of actors.

In his book Endgame and in his talks Derrick Jensen goes to great lengths to point out the fundamental flaws of maintaining an unwavering "commitment" to non-violence in the current climate of State and Corporate Aggression. He describes how "non-violent" protesters at the WTO thing in Seattle in 1999 actually fought, physically, with other protesters who were willing to up the stakes and destroy corporate "property". Jensen even mentions how these "peaceful" types---who presumably had agreed in advance with the authorities on where and how many could march, how many would get arrested and so forth---how they actually assisted the police in hauling in those who sensed that engaging state/corporate violence with love and kindness wasn't going to get anyone anywhere.

At a certain point, refusing violence as a tactic ceases to be about one's own spiritual health; it becomes, instead, an unwillingness to protect others under fire. Someone once said that no ideology is so good that it is worth committing cruel acts for. Fair point. I think a refusal to prevent cruel acts is in itself cruel. And if you need to get physical, to step away from the armchair and the computer, in order to prevent acts of cruelty, then by all means do it.

Sure: one man's cruelty is another man's profit, moral authority is a tricky issue, and perhaps at least some of what I am suggesting here might sound like it validates the worst crimes of, say, the Bush Administration. But don't misunderestimate me.

For years my own rejection of violence was centered on the idea that I did not want to become that which I despise, that which is destructive, that which my values stand in opposition to. So much did I believe in universal justice and "the rule of law" that I even said that, given the chance, I would not assasinate someone like Hitler. Not even a universally accepted archetype of pure evil like Hitler could get me to take on his tactics, I thought.

Well, I don't anymore. The people controlling and destroying the world want nothing more than for their opponents to always and ideologically stop short of preventing the destruction by any means necessary. I want to be clear that I am not advocating violence. But---and I credit Jensen for arguing this point powerfully enough to get me to reconsider extremely deeply held views---I think an honest look at useful versus useless tactics might get us thinking differently about violence.

It's 1936 or so, and there we are, with the IEDs, standing just outside Adolf Hitler's house. But we don't ignite them, because to do so might just encourage more state repression. You know what Jensen says he would say to a guy like Hitler if he had the chance to meet him? "Bang. You're dead." I love it.

I'm not pro-gun. I don't think we all ought to arm ourselves to fight the State by dressing up in black and using walkie-talkies and throwing molotov cocktails at business fatcats when they step out of their limousines. I'm against violence. I don't allow it to manifest in my daily personal interactions. Still, I think we're not being honest if we don't even discuss provoking the same degree of state repression and violence for ourselves that (for example) the US government and military---along with their proxies, hired guns, and political and corporate allies---dispense to others in our name every second of every day throughout the world.

I wonder if a sustained campaign of property destruction and violence (or the threat of it) against planet-raping elites would be more or less effective than the sustained campaign of "consciousness raising" and occassional rally attendance many of us have presumably taken part in.

It's not just some rights and freedoms we risk losing by not fighting back by any means necessary, but the planet itself as a giver of whatever it takes for this generation and the next to survive on a practical level.

From Endgame: "Those in power are responsible for their choices, and I am responsible for mine. But I need to emphasize that I’m not responsible for the way my choices have been framed."

And this: "Defensive rights always trump offensive rights. My right to freedom always trumps your right to exploit me, and if you do try to exploit me, I have the right to stop you, even at some expense to you." ...to which I would add: not only the right, but the responsibility, even at some expense to me.

Jensen says over and over again, and he's right, that the violence will not stop because we ask nicely. It won't stop if we organize 15 million people to march peacefully against war on the same day throughout the world (remember that one? I was there). It won't happen because we write a lot of intelligent stuff and "get it out there".

I'm not giving planet-raping elites any more credit than their willingness to do harm merits. No one needs moral or philosophical (much less political) authority to push back. When you're literally gasping for air you don't seek out authority for access to something breathable. You don't ask permission for water (or human breastmilk) to not be poisonous, or for children to not be slaughtered for profit, or to prevent everything in the non-human world to rapidly---rapidly---disappear (read: get ground up).

We serve no good purpose by openly informing violent state/corporate criminals that their offences will never be met with counterforce. It just doesn't make any sense. The gas-guzzling, hyper-consumerist jerk-offs of America and the rest of the world would do well to take note when open season is declared not just on their political representatives, but on their ecocidal civil works, shit-house media propoganda dispensers, and corporate flagships as well. That might get them to poke their heads up from American Idol for a sec.

What I'm noticing is that my allies are really fewer and further between than I would like to admit. Upping the stakes and making sacrifices definitely means taking an honest look at tactics, physical tactics. There's no reason to be nice and I think people who for whatever reason won't get physical need to be supporting like crazy those who will. In this sense I support the insurgency against US and allied forces in Iraq. I wish no harm to those American troops. I think they should just leave. Now. But if they won't, well, I support efforts to force them out. Unfortunately.

Unwillingness to make sacrifices to do the killing is one thing, but the state violence will continue unless more people make sacrifices to prevent it. Cindy Sheehan's recent conclusion seems to be that such sacrifices are basically unthinkable for a population that doesn't really give a damn.

The following list may be well-known to some. I have just discovered it myself. Shortly before his assasination Gandhi gave this list of "Seven Blunders" that lead to passive violence to his grandson Arun, who added the eighth.

1. Wealth Without Work
2. Pleasure Without Conscience
3. Knowledge Without Character
4. Commerce Without Morality
5. Science Without Humanity
6. Worship Without Sacrifice
7. Politics Without Principles
8. Rights Without Responsibilities

And I have one of my own:

9. Turning the other cheek twice.

Please add your own in the comments section.

Decay, Destruction and Waste

2007-05-16T09:39:00.000+02:00

Note: written for the program book of the fourth edition of new music festival Dag in de Branding. Also appears at the <>TAG website.

Decay, destruction, and waste. I could be writing a history of the decline and fall of an ancient empire. Or a modern empire. Or the much more devastating and long-lived empire of Civilization. But I’m not: I’m describing the twelve hours of new music that make up the fourth edition of the Dag in de Branding Festival.

If you’re inclined to see this red thread of explicit decadence as just so much doom and gloom, I invite you to look more carefully. Albert Camus, a hero of mine who worked in times not unlike our own---times that were and are unfortunately “interesting”---wrote that the greatest art speaks to the time in which it is created. That is exactly what the events in this program do.

This is not doom and gloom. It is an absolutely essential state of the Arts at this interesting moment. Indeed at any moment. I have written elsewhere that artists are the sensory organs of the culture. We are its eyes, its ears, its mouths and its hands. If our works of art fail to recognize the decay, destruction, and waste, then our eyes, ears, and mouths are shut, and our hands are bound. How encouraging then, in these seemingly senseless times, that (some) artists haven’t lost their senses. To rephrase yet another observation of Monsieur Camus, art may dispute reality, but it does not hide from it.

How so? At the start of the program we are brought face to face with the reality of decay in the abstract in Bill Morrison’s film to Michael Gordon’s extraordinary symphony Decasia wherein ancient filmstock is seen suffering the ravages of time. But the work masterfully disputes this reality by preserving the decay itself, turning the visible death of a beloved artifact of industrial civilization into a thing of aesthetic beauty. An underlying question of this work, at least for me, is whether to mourn or celebrate the decay of a culture that has paid for its wonderful creativity with unspeakable environmental devastation.

Or this: the destruction referenced in Bob Ostertag’s music to the Living Cinema project Special Forces is the real destruction that the world silently (and to its great shame) witnessed in Lebanon last summer. Ostertag is never one to hide from the reality of destruction, having earlier brought his Yugoslavia Suite to the Balkans, post-Nato, and Special Forces to Beirut. Yet, I think, he disputes this reality, constantly, by using these works as opportunities for beginning dialogues on the themes he treats. Ostertag disputes the reality of the destruction his work reflects with uncompromising dedication to social justice through and beyond his music.

Or this: Egon Kracht and the Troupe bring us the Faust story as a rock opera (with a nod to Frank Zappa) in The Seduction of Harry Faust. In this updated version, guess how God, Mephisto, and Faust are portrayed? As a media tycoon, his marketing expert son, and a loser they destroy by bringing him into their world, of course. This is right on target for our uber-consumerist, narcissistic, and celebrity-infatuated culture (though I must say, sadly, that satire and reality are more often than not one and the same thing these days).

Or this: Boxing Pushkin, ostensibly about the life of the famous Russian author, consciously throws the audience into the role of spectator. Meanwhile the very definition of freedom, as embodied by Pushkin, seems to be at stake. While this work is perhaps the least overtly connected to our red thread, even a cursory glance at the synopsis (and the battles over Pushkin’s legacy) calls to mind the violence one witnesses done to language to legitimize this or that regime.

Or this: “Waste equals food” write the authors of Cradle to Cradle, a remarkable book that examines natural life cycles and nutrient flows as paradigms for how to reinvent industrial design in environmentally sane and ethically responsible ways. I mention it here in connection with Wasted, the mini-festival of decayed, destroyed, and degraded sounds-turned-breakbeats (and more) hosted by Jason Forrest and Pure. This gathering feeds its audience-participants with energy, exuberance, and catharsis mined from some of the darkest reaches of our culture. What is wasted here and what is eaten, I will not say, nor will I venture to put into words what reality is under dispute.

* * *

“Create dangerously” urged Albert Camus toward the end of his life. The American civil rights and social justice leader Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the world is in dire need of creative extremists.” Both were destroyed early by two of the more nefarious designs of Civilization: the automobile and the gun. What a waste.

We may not have asked for this red thread---I mean the red thread of decay, destruction, and waste running through the lives of humans and non-humans, through our values and wound tightly around our planet---but it is what we have and what we are. To present a program of new music revolving around aspects of the decay, destruction, and waste of our culture, our Industrial Civilization, from material to social decay, from self-destruction to the destruction of our neighbors, from the wasting of our planetary environment to the wasting of our youth---to present works that reflect this historical moment is not necessarily to celebrate it, but to recognize it.

It is to come to our senses as listeners, as artists, as social beings.

It is to know who we are, what we are, and what we must do. It is to be awake, alive, and up to the task.

Doom and gloom? If art should be uplifting, and if the world is in fact in dire need of creative extremists, what could be more uplifting than that?

Callibration

2007-05-11T16:42:00.000+02:00

"It's not disillusionment, it's callibration."

---Mihnea Mircan, a curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, speaking at a curators conference organized this week by Stroom in The Hague. He was answering a question about a shift in the way he deals with the political ramifications of his work. See a brief essay by Mircan here.

I am the recipient of a grant from Stroom and was asked to write a short description of my work for an online portfolio the organization maintains. This is what I wrote:

My work, all of it, from music to video to installations to texts and so on, is an attempt to answer a question posed by environmentalist author Derrick Jensen: "What are sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?" Or this question, from architect/designer William McDonough: "How do we love all of the children of all of the species for all time?" It is a reply to the call to arms of Albert Camus: "Create dangerously" or that of Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The world is in dire need of creative extremists". It is a recognition of the extraordinary danger industrial civilization poses to the natural world, and a reaction to this danger, spoken in a language the people destroying the planet cannot speak.

Which, as it happens, doesn't change a damn thing. Have a nice day.

Breaker

2007-05-05T17:16:00.000+02:00

These are the lyrics to the new song "Breaker" by Low:

Our bodies break
and the blood just spills and spills
but here we sit debating math.

It's just a shame
my hand just kills and kills
there's got to be an end to that.

There's got to be an end to that.

Strong stuff. The video is here.

Satire?

2007-05-02T12:16:00.000+02:00

Is this funny? You decide. I think it's just incredibly accurate journalism, reflecting the true state of today's mass media. Unfortunately.

Disappointing as it is, I guess it is also unsurprising that the collective behind The NewStandard sadly decided to cease publishing last week. After over three years of dedicated work on a shoestring budget they were simply unable to generate enough interest in ad-free, independent, high-quality journalism to continue.

I wonder: if people do not want quality, low cost, independent, accurate, and ad-free journalism (produced, I should add, using a revolutionary workforce model), what the hell do they want?

It seems incredible to me. We all complain our goddamn faces off about "the media", "the news", "the mainstream media", "corporate media" and so on and so on ad nauseum, yet enormous propoganda organizations like The New York Times, CNN, BBC, FOX, MSNBC and the rest continue to attract readers and viewers to their daily untruths and deceptions.

These organizations lie to you. All the time. Twenty-four seven. Hello? Quoth Vonnegut: Nobody home.

Again, no surprise: the popularity of programs like The Daily Show, which host Jon Stewart correctly identified recently in an interview as serving the function of an "editorial cartoon". Which is fine and good. But we need more than cartoons. We need more than satire. Especially when, in the able hands of acts like The Yes Men or comedian Stephen Colbert, the satire is too good.

False

2007-04-20T02:55:00.000+02:00

Real quick:

The incident in which a mentally disturbed man shot and killed thirty-something people at Virginia Technical University earlier this week is certainly not the "worst" shooting massacre in US history.

Any "news" source which reports the incident as such is contributing to a conspiracy of disinformation. You are being lied to. The facts as reported are false.

The dubious pride of place for most innocent victims of a shooting rampage (in North America) should undoubtedly go to any number of planned mass murders of indigenous people or Americans of African descent.

What you consumed as news was not news. It was entertainment. It was not entertainment. It was whatever it takes to shift product between commercial breaks. It was not that. It was propoganda.

Period.

We are not the consumers of the media, we are the product.
---Kevin Danaher, 10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Bank

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
---Derrick Jensen, Endgame

It is not the television that is lying to you. Who is lying to you?

Frog with Implanted Webserver

2007-04-11T00:50:00.000+02:00

I just returned from the opening night of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in Rotterdam. I am not happy.

The first work visitors are confronted with is something called Experiments with Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver. Here is the official description of the work:

Garnet Hertz has implanted a miniature webserver in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container of mineral oil, an inert liquid that does not conduct electricity. The frog is viewable on the Internet, and on the computer monitor across the room, through a webcam placed on the wall of the gallery. Through an Ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani's original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal. Experiments in Galvanism is both a reference to the origins of electricity, one of the earliest new media, and, through Galvani's discovery that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue, a nod to what many theorists and practitioners consider to be the new new media: bio(tech) art.

Let me translate for those readers not accustomed to the morally vacuous language of the wine-soaked art world:

Asshole takes the corpse of a frog---amphibian corposes are easy to come by in these days of human-instigated global warming, toxified water, and poisoned air---sticks some motors in its legs and wires in the gallery, and invites visitors to participate in his shit-brained glorification of an artistically bad, technologically backward, and morally repugnant idea.

(Hey, you don't think it's morally repugnant to use a frog's corpse? How about we use your grandmother's corpse instead? Put her in a clear glass container of mineral oil and click the mouse to make her legs kick. Sorry: if you don't get what's wrong I don't know if I can explain it to you.)

The single redeeming factor in the inclusion of this otherwise utterly useless, horrendously uncreative and straight up tasteless attempt at "art" in the DEAF exhibition is that at the very least it alone demonstrated (brazenly, arrogantly, proudly, shamelessly) something inherent in everything else on display: the absolute affrontery to the natural world necessary to be a good and cooperative "media artist" in this trash heap of a culture.

Your little art goes beep and lights flash and another sixty or so Iraqi children succumb to some strange form of cancer to make it happen. Safely tucked in here at the end of history you make a witty installation with RFID (radio frequency identification) technology---my, what big subsidies you have!---while brown people somewhere else are forced to show their ID cards at (American, British, Israeli, whatever) gunpoint to get to the other side of town.

Besides leaving, there was nothing I wanted to do---as an experiment, of course---so much as shut down the electricity on some of these artists. For good.

Now is as fine a time as any to let you know that I'm just about through reading volume one of Derrick Jensen's heartbreaking call to action Endgame. Jensen---whose earlier work A Language Older Than Words was, until now, perhaps the single most important book I have ever read---is turning my bad attitude even worse.

And yet: You. Must. Read this book. Start here.

Back to cutting off the electricity. I wonder what these "media artists" or "electronic artists" or whatever would do if there were no electricity to juice their little gadgets and installations (and fucking "bio(tech) art"). So much of it---and this is a conclusion Jensen would quickly make if he bothered to dally in the minutiae of this ultimately inconsequential and wine-soaked world---so much of it simply legitimizes and glorifies harmful technologies, often without any meaningful content to at least somewhat call out the culture's persistent violence.

Guess what the theme of DEAF 07 is? Ready for this? Interact Or Die!

Now I suppose this could be understood a number of ways. For example, it could be a call to all of us to start interacting with each other in meaningful ways. After all, it is the absence of our own nurturing of community that allows governments and corporations to set the agenda and limits of human interaction. Or "interact or die" might be a warning that we fail to recognize the fact of interdependence in the natural world we (should) inhabit at the risk of spiritual and ultimately literal death.

But since the natural world was so completely absent in this exhibition (with one or two minor exceptions: a video with leaf cutter ants carrying little national flags instead of leaves, for example) I have to assume that what we were invited to interact with was the unnatural world of these works. The field for interaction is the field defined by these uncreative creations, mobilizing under the banner of the unusually explicit "interact or die" theme to do further violence to lingering memories of the Planet Earth (where once upon a time frogs ate mosquitos, not ethernet impulses, and lived on the banks of rivers, not clear glass containers of mineral oil).

I do realize that I might be alienating myself from the few friends in the art scene here who even bothered to read this far. I know some of this may be unpopular with my computer-programming, electronic musician colleagues. And sure: part of my work exists within the realm of electronic art, insofar as it uses electricity and electronics. (I'm even using electricity and electronics now to fire off this mediated communique.) This is not a fact in which I rejoice, but an issue with which I wrestle constantly.

But this isn't about me. I don't stick ethernet cables in corpses.

Not-So-Innocent Bystanders

2007-04-04T20:18:00.000+02:00

From Society Under Seige by Zygmunt Bauman:

Five per cent of the planet's population may emit 40 per cent of the planet's pollutants, and use/waste half or more of the planet's resources, and they may resort to military and financial blackmail to defend tooth and nail their right to go on doing so. They may, for the foreseeable future, use their superior force to make the victims pay the costs of their victimization (were not the Jews under the Nazis obliged to pay the train fares on the way to Auschwitz?). And yet responsibility is theirs -- not just in any abstractly philosophical, metaphysical or ethical sense, but in the down-to-earth, mundane, straightforward, casual (ontological, if you wish) meaning of the word.

[...]

We are all bystanders now: knowing what needs to be done, but also knowing that we have done less than what was needed and not necessarily what needed doing most; and that we are not especially eager to do more or better, and even less keen to abstain from doing what should not be done at all . . . There are more and more goings-on in the world which we sense are crying for vengeance or remedy, but our capacity to act, and particularly the aptitude to act effectively, seems to go in reverse, dwarfed ever more by the enormity of the task. The number of events and situations that we hear of and that cast us in the awkward and reprehensible position of a bystander grows by the day.

Teraz Polska

2007-03-26T08:17:00.000+02:00

Prelude: please begin by reading this article by Doug Ireland.

* * *

Here's a question: what's the deal with Poland's creeping fascism, and what is integrated Europe---risen from the ashes of its militaristic, intolerant, genocidal, and all-around street-thuggish past---going to do about it?

I ask this because I care deeply about the place. Before moving to The Hague I lived for a while in Poland, and may again someday. I fell in love there. I gained a family and incredible, fascinating friends there. I've climbed its mountains, performed in its theaters and clubs, studied in its cultural capital. I've learned its language. I've taken it for my own and many Poles have welcomed me as their own.

So what? So now when I visit Poland I have to contend with what may very well be the EU's leading fascist state.

It is already quite well known that the Polish government has happily allowed the CIA to transport its captives through Poland, to be later subjected to torture. (More on that here.)

And I don't have to remind anyone that four years ago, in opposition to a slight (and rational) majority, the Polish government sent troops to criminally assist the United States in its illegal mission to invade Iraq, murder its people, and destroy its environment and infrastructure. Last year the current government broke its predecessor's promise to withdraw Polish forces from Iraq by 2006.

At the moment, openly fascist twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, president and prime minister, are taking serious and aggressive steps against homosexuals. This government has some ties to groups that advocate violence against gays, and incidents of violence are on the rise.

The Kaczynski government enjoys friendly ties with the criminal government of Israel (built partially on Poland's ashes but still no friend to universal human rights). But its open encouragement of extreme intolerance harks back to the early days of another pseudo-socialist regime, one that ended up bleeding Poland not only of its Jews, but many Catholics, Roma, and yes, homosexuals as well.

One of the most disastrous things in all this is the way wealthy "Christian" groups in the US lend enormous support to the Polish government's hateful policies. Some civil rights disaster is bound to occur because of all this, and with Poland's horrendous unemployment and the flight of skilled workers to Western Europe, it's more a question of when than if.

I think at a certain point internal opposition becomes powerless against unrepentant fascism. It would have been immensely helpful if elements in the United States (for example) had not done business with Nazi Germany preceding (and during) the Second World War. Similarly, I honestly believe that world governments have a moral obligation to diplomatically and economically isolate the United States until it ends its utter belligerance and rejoins the international community.

International law, basic human decency, and some help from our morally-equipped friends in business are necessary to prevent the proto-fascist regime in Poland from goosestepping over the edge. Yes, I am appealing to the business community: stop doing business with a Polish government that includes the odious Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families).

The European Union is currently celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of its direct predecessor, the European Economic Community.

Now. I know that the EU was and always will be first and foremost an economic arrangement, that it favors capitalists, and that capitalism always conflicts with human rights (if not at home, then at factories, farms, prisons and war zones abroad).

Still. Let's pretend that there is some validity to the press release version of the 50th anniversary festivities, that peace and stability, freedom and democracy are also part of the EU's mandate. Let's allow, for a moment, for argument's sake, that European integration had everything to do with a strong and justified reaction to the horrors of the Second World War. Imagine that. It follows that the EU must do everything it can to prevent the atrocities the Polish government is preparing.

* * *

Postscript: lest anyone think this issue---of depriving gay people of their civil rights---is an isolated issue within a weak Polish government, think again. It looks like Europe's newest member, Romania, is preparing the same or worse.

Interesting reads

2007-03-21T11:30:00.000+01:00

* Anthony Arnove: Four Years Later...and Counting

* Geert Lovink: Blog Theory interview

"The Third World is not a reality but an ideology."
---Hannah Arendt

"I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings."
---Margaret Mead

Unsorted

2007-03-16T10:56:00.000+01:00

When will my country die for me?

---attributed to Grace Slick

If violence is contagious, then, I think, so must be its antithesis -- compassion, decency, tolerance. It's difficult to broadcast those examples, especially when it's easier to sell advertising on CNN when all your news stories are about terror and destruction.

---Megan Neuringer

In fact, there is some evidence that the ubiquitous moral injunction to think positively may place an additional burden on the already sick or otherwise aggrieved. Not only are you failing to get better but you're failing to not feel good about not getting better. Similarly for the long-term unemployed, who . . . are informed by career coaches and self-help books that their principle battle is against their own negative, resentful, loser-like feelings. This is victim-blaiming at its cruelest, and may help account for the passivity of Americans in the face of repeated economic insult.

---Barbara Ehrenreich
(from "Pathologies of Hope", Harper's February 2007)

This one is for the children

2007-02-28T22:14:00.000+01:00

Funny thing happened last week. My thirteen-year-old drum student and her family found my weblog and discovered my not-so-secret life as a foul-mouthed commentator on the wilful destruction of the planet by the high, the mighty and the rest of us.

So this one is for the children, for those innocent people unjustly exposed to radical political views and strong language not suitable for the young. Exposed to ugly ideas. Exposed to sick concepts and vulgar vocabulary. Exposed to dirty words like "Condoleeza", "powersuits", and "AIPAC".

Honestly? I must say I am thrilled that my student and her younger brother were confronted with the unrestrained and justified outrage the writings here generally represent. The drum teacher who shows up once a week is not only the drum teacher, but a concerned human being as well. Young people must be aware of the danger in the world. If I was young it would terrify me to think others were unconcerned, that they failed to be outraged, that they were unmoved to respond to the dangerous world. So I'm perfectly happy they found these words. And of course I am fine with the fact that they know I think both Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton are assholes.

Of course, I hope they will discover a power of language that reaches beyond the cheap and vulgar . . . but kids I can't help it if the US Vice President is a total Dick.

It was funny when suddenly, in the middle of last week's lesson, my student asked if I was a communist. We were working on the drumbeat to a Coldplay song, and she seemed to guess I didn't like the band very much. I mentioned UK environmental writer George Monbiot's strong criticism of the false environmentalism of Coldplay leader Chris Martin. And I said that I thought it was important for musicians to be concerned about the state of the world in real ways, not just as a hook for their songs. She said: "so are you a communist?"

She wasn't kidding.

I thought for a moment about what "communism" meant to me in 1989, when I turned thirteen myself. The "communists", I was brought up to believe, were evil incarnate. They hated freedom and democracy and Jews and color television (sound familiar?). People forced to live under "communist" rule knew deprivation, decay, and despair, and the horrors of an enormous prison-industrial complex (sound familiar?).

I remember thinking that the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Moscow in the mid-80's was a major victory, that Ronald Reagan was fighting to liberate millions of near-starving children from leaders who incessantly threatened the peaceful West with nuclear holocaust. I thought the US was responsible for taking down the Berlin Wall, for Solidarity's triumphs in Poland, and for dismantling the Soviet Union.

Was I a stupid kid? No. Was I specially targeted for indoctrination? You bet. We all were. We all are. Which is why I think it's perfectly fine my student has read her music teacher's angry little articles about officially sanctioned and culturally encouraged political, economic, and environmental violence.

I would be a rotten teacher -- of any subject -- if I didn't encourage my students to think critically, to examine what they're taught, to challenge ideas that they find intuitively repellent.

Just as I want my student to find and develop her own way to play the drums, I hope she will find her own path through the information she is exposed to. At her age I had seen enough Time magazine covers to truly believe that deceitful, murderous Ronald Reagan was fighting against bad guys and for such vaunted concepts as equality, justice, freedom, and democracy. The magazine covers, the network news, pop culture and even the new CNN taught me this while Reagan's administration sent more and more arms and money to (non-communist) blood-thirsty psychopaths around the world.

Don't get me wrong. The bastards running the Soviet Union and its satellites were criminals too. There really was deprivation and despair. The utopian social system really did crumble while some of the same mafioso-types who are running those countries now lined their pockets, spied on people, and threw money at a bloated and unnecessary military (sound familiar?).

It's worth mentioning now that the mistake has always been to see leaders of adversarial countries as real adversaries. Remember: people like Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein belong to the same club, and club members have never been adversaries of each other so much as they have set themselves up as constant adversaries of us. In my moments of greatest optimism I believe we could, if we chose to, cease fighting their wars, cease allowing them to enrich themselves off of the blood of people and the planet. And young people have to know this.

So this is what I said when my student asked if I was a communist: I said it doesn't matter what I am -- I believe that you and I and everyone else have the same rights to food and security and housing, regardless of how we look, where we come from, and where we live. And then I said this is a drum lesson, so let's get back to the beats.

If my young student of the drums continues to search, she may find some of the ideas that I touched upon in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And if she reads it and keeps it in mind when she catches the news or sees Hollywood's latest, I have no doubt she'll become a truly radical drummer.

Love and Ambiguity

2007-02-19T09:41:00.000+01:00

"Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality."
---Theodor Adorno

"The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure."
---Milan Kundera

I'm finding governments to be terribly intolerant of ambiguity these days. Just today I was listening to a news broadcast referring to the insistance, by the extraordinarily insane Condoleeza Rice, that Palestinians (and only Palestinians) renounce violence as a prerequisite to peace (or, ostensibly, even modest attempts at human rights guarantees under international law).

Is the US Secretary of State totally out of her fucking gourd or what? How's that for unambiguous? You have to put down your weapons, but the Israelis don't. And we don't. Just you.

As it happens, Israel and the US insist that Iran unambiguously cease its nuclear power program. US Presidential hopeful and all-around rightwing-asshole-in-a-powersuit Hillary Clinton has unambiguously stressed to her sugardaddies at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that the US will continue to stand with the criminal Israeli government against the people of Palestine. And at her second talk delivered to AIPAC in as many months, Clinton told those assembled: "in dealing with [Iran]...no option can be taken off the table." That's Washington-bullshit for "Yes, I would assert my humanity by dropping atomic bombs on people who live in Iran."

Now Israel, of course, has maintained a policy of ambiguity about its hundreds of nuclear warheads since the 1980's. Israel's is the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, other than Dick Cheney's in Iraq.

(Incidentally, here are some talking points by Phyllis Bennis on the Iranian non-issue.)

So this past weekend I went to a noise-music event organized by some people I know in The Hague. As one of the organizers said to me, it was a "package deal", meaning some of the acts he wanted to present were touring with some acts he was less interested in. Most of the music was loud and unfriendly. Difficult, but not thought-provoking. Thoroughly "more-underground-than-thou" and I felt like I was in a scene from a David Lynch film most of the night.

One of the acts involved two costumed men standing behind a table with some electronic music gear on it. Draped over the table was an American flag. One of the performers was dressed up like a "terrorist" (as any typical Hollywood movie-goer would be expected to recognize). The other was dressed up as a US soldier, but with a "scary clown" mask. The music -- poorly constructed feedback and noise -- was also supposed to be "scary". You can sense the subtlety of the group's political critique, right? The performers jumped around a little bit, got in the faces of the audience, and at one point kicked a few beer bottles at those of us standing in the front.

I said to someone, a reader of this very weblog: "these fascist Americans aren't making any friends". I was kidding. At the same moment someone else said "I hate this socialist bullshit." That was funny. At one point an audience member tried half-heartedly to light the flag on fire.

The performers eventually exited the space in a feigned fury, the "terrorist" strangling himself with the American flag. They left all their gear on and loud noise fuming out of strained speakers. Everyone just watched and waited. I hesitated for about ten seconds and then walked to the table and shut off the power. I got some applause for that, and shouted "USA! Number ONE!" I wonder if anybody got it. I wonder if anybody didn't. I left things ambiguous.

I go and see a lot of music and art and lately I find myself asking "where is the love?" (On constant rotation in my cd-player at the moment are discs by Philip Jeck, some of the warmest, most hauntingly nostalgic and beautiful stuff I've heard in a long time. The love is definitely there.)

Not to be mistaken myself, at my solo concert at STEIM earlier this month I mentioned something I had heard in this video of a speech by architect-designer William McDonough. In the video McDonough looks at his audience and asks "How do we love all of the children of all of species for all time?" He presents it as a design question, as a problem for his discipline. I did the same before I began playing.

Well. It's a monumental question. Maybe the question. For any of us. Check out the video to get the proper context.

You know, I don't think the powersuit assholes are working on this question. I don't think the Presidents of this or that or any country are working on this question. Are you? As the planet heats up impossibly and the powersuits prepare more warfare, "security", and economic dominance, at least one thing we need to be unambiguous about is love.

Obligation

2007-02-07T11:08:00.000+01:00

Break the law or support the war. Is there any other choice?

I have written on more than one occassion about Rosemarie Jackowski of Vermont. Jackowski is an advocacy journalist and former Liberty Union candidate for state attorney general. She is also a principled and fearless activist working on behalf of the victims of US aggression, and a grandmother.

I am happy to report that the guilty verdict against Jackowski for her non-violent act of civil disobedience in 2003 has been overturned. Jackowski blocked traffic with a sign that read "Stop US War Crimes". She was charged with disorderly conduct and sentenced to prison.

An article in the Rutland Herald notes that Jackowski "believes she had an obligation, morally and under international law, to speak out against the death of Iraqi civilians."

For my part, I believe that we all have such an obligation, grandmothers, politicians, artists, factory workers, black, white, short and tall, all of us. It's wonderful to have examples of courage set by a 69-year-old member of Veterans for Peace. Sure. But what do the rest of us have to lose? What can we risk -- what can we offer the people Jackowski believes she has a moral and legal obligation to protect?

(Answers such as "attending State-sanctioned mass rallies on Saturday afternoons" do not count.)

Jackowski has claimed that, with the case essentially thrown out of court (because the State wants to avoid "wasting taxpayer dollars" on it), she will not have an opportunity to explain what she did and why. Here, then, is a link to Jackowski's Courtroom Speech from October 2004. Please read it carefully.

At the end of the speech Jackowski stated "What happens to me here today is not important. Since the day of my arrest, more than 13,000 Iraqi civilians, many of them children, have been killed. That IS important." Take that number -- thirteen thousand -- and think about it. It represents people just like you and me, condemned to horrific, brutal deaths. They committed no crime, but stood in the way of the crusade of the US government and its allies to thieve the resources and sovereignity of Iraq and test out the sadistic machines and gadgets of the military-industrial complex.

Now take that number and multiply it over and over and over, many times, until you reach the current and growing death toll. Who can fathom that kind of carnage? (Certainly not typically pacified Americans.) Or here's another question: with what other regimes in history do the US and its coalition partners share the stage for having been responsible for that kind of carnage?

On the day after she announced her good news at Mickey Z.'s blog, Jackowski (known to readers there as RMJ) shared an email she had received from a supporter named Richard. It hits the nail on the coffin, as it were, and I reproduce it here.

“I support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I support the killing of innocent women, children and soldiers.

I support the desecration of the Constitution.

I support the destruction of our environment and our eco-systems.

I support Global Warming.

I support the death penalty for poor people and people of color.

I support population control through starvation.

I support the power to imprison us without our due process by eliminating habeas corpus.

I support these things by DOING NOTHING.”

A Man Without a Country

2007-02-02T12:05:00.000+01:00

I just finished Kurt Vonnegut's latest book, A Man Without a Country. Superb. In it, Kurt says

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

And Kurt Vonnegut says

Evolution can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet--the only one in the Milky Way--with a century of transportation whoopee.

And he also says

"Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

What else?

I have some good news for you and some bad news. The bad news is that the Martians have landed in New York City and are staying at the Waldorf Astoria. The good news is that they only eat homeless men, women, and children of all colors, and they pee gasoline.

But this is not a funny book. Vonnegut says as much himself. To him, this is no time to be funny. I was talking about this with my friend Joel Ryan yesterday, who said that a film like M*A*S*H would be impossible today. Too true. Vonnegut again:

The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.

Vonnegut, at 84, shames the rest of us for our lack of outrage. He obsesses over global meltdown so severe--with his country at the helm--that he cannot even do his job.

I don't think I would be able to do my work if I lived in the United States of America either (although at a very meaningful level, the US is a prison we are all living in). Art springs from context, and I do not think I would be able to produce anything good over there--regardless of whether the Asshole-in-Chief is named George or Hillary. Or Barrack.

That's just a feeling, nothing "anti-American" about it. A few years ago, my good friend Greg Altman visited me here in The Hague. We grew up playing funk music in bars together. Greg is a phenomenal drummer. He produces television shows now. I arranged a gig for us at <>TAG, in fact, it was the first event I curated there. We performed a piece I wrote called Dodging Bullets. A audio waveform of a skipping CD is visible on a large screen, and there are markers with text placed in the waveform to pass by the cursor in the middle of the screen. The music on the CD is aggressive and noisy. The "rule" of the piece is that each time a marker connects with the cursor the musicians must choose from three very simple musical gestures to play. By the end of the piece (twenty minutes later) everybody is wiped out, exhausted. Cathartic stuff.

Anyway a lot of the crowd loved the piece and said as much. Greg was shocked the audience didn't walk out. They would, he felt, in New York. He tells that story whenever we see each other, how we performed this crazy music and people listened. And liked it.

Or this: a week ago I performed in Krakow with Rafal Mazur and Morten Nottelmann. Imagine the worst scenario to try to get people to come listen to a free-jazz trio. Almost no promotion. Snowing. Venue in the middle of nowhere. Hard to get to. Cold. 7PM on a Saturday night. No famous last names on the bill. No bar at the venue. But the people came out. And they enjoyed themselves. In my experience people in Manhattan rarely go to Brooklyn to see live music, regardless of the weather. It's like pulling teeth.

When I first arrived in Krakow to study in 1999 and told people that I was a composer (that's how identified myself then), I would receive the same nod of respect one might get in the States if they were to say they were a doctor . . . with a private practice. It was nice. No one, not a single person in Poland, ever suggested I teach music to make a living (for years that's all I got from people in the US).

It's all just a feeling and I could very well be full of shit. Fact is, I'm not a big fan of countries per se, and I don't mind being a man without one (I would like that residence permit I've been waiting six months for, though, please, already, Dutch bureaucrats). I don't like the idea of the US anymore than I like the idea of The Netherlands, or Poland, or Iraq. I do like the idea of people, different, talking to each other, making things together, trying to dig their way out this hole we're in, that's OK.

As Morten was saying on the way to the gig in Krakow, there are two strata of society, and we operate amongst the people, not amongst the politicians. Yes, and sometimes it can be fun up here.

Busy

2007-01-24T04:42:00.000+01:00

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

---George Bernard Shaw

And so it remains the policy of this government to use every lawful and proper tool of intelligence, diplomacy, law enforcement, and military action to do our duty, to find these enemies, and to protect the American people.

---George W. Bush (2007 State of the Union address)

Nice one. And where have I been?

Been busy. In December I finished and exhibited an audiovisual installation (Another World Bank), screened my video Revolution 5 at Resfest, performed a (disastrous) live electronica/live video solo set at the Sugar Factory in Amsterdam, and visited family and friends during New York City's first winter since the 1890's without snow.

In January I played a bit with my old bandmates from the States, produced five short videos for Ensemble Klang, performed and recorded with Matt Wright in Canterbury, and I'll be doing the same this weekend in Krakow with Rafal Mazur and Morten Nottelmann in our trio Stability Group. On the first of February I'll be performing a solo saxophone set at STEIM and joining Kerbaj, Sehnaoui, and Yassin for the second set of their trio gig at <>TAG in The Hague on February 4.

Yes, I'm busy. But I'm not nearly as busy, apparently, as these twisted scumbags in US Army uniforms, armed to the teeth and protecting the known universe from the scourge of terrorism that manifests itself as a lone, defenseless, and crippled dog. As I wrote in a comment on Mickey Z.'s blog where I first saw the video, I wish these assholes all the mercy and compassion they show in their treatment of this poor animal. Then I hope they are torn to shreds by wild dogs.For the sheer amusement of the dogs.

In these busy two months I have necessarily distanced myself from "the news", although I have been observant enough to know that tonight George Bush, undoubtedly one of the worst human beings ever born, announced to the world that he---soulless chickenshit criminal that he is---would send more armed and indoctrinated children to murder and torment people (and other creatures) in Iraq.

I have not been busy enough. The planet's crumbling and we're still putting people like this, like this fascist psychopath Bush, up on pedastals. Adoring him with air time. Showering him with money and power. Letting such people determine how our world works. Surrendering our dignity to their perversions.

Hooray for my busy career. Hooray for yours. But please. We need to get busy. NOW.

Check these

2006-12-13T10:02:00.000+01:00

I have been far too busy to do any writing of substance lately, a situation that may continue for the next few weeks. Readers here may find these interesting (in addition of course to my wonderful links collection on the right) for the time being.

A Woman's Worst Nightmare >
By Cindy Sheehan

Parecon on YouTube >
(If you don't know what parecon is you've not been reading carefully enough.)

Linguistic Somersaults in an Age of Aggression and State Terrorism >
By Edward S. Herman

Land of the Free >
By James Vicini (Reuters)

The Empire and Inequality Report, volume I, no. 4 >
By Paul Street

Meat Contributes to Climate Change >
By Megan Tady (Kudos to The NewStandard. It is a good thing when more "hard news" sources connect diet to environmental issues.)

Let them eat cake (or a Yule log or cookies shaped like Barney) >
By Tim Grieve
(This is an article about what the filthy pig* of a war criminal-in-chief and his guests will be served during White House holiday receptions. Sometimes salon.com forces you to watch a goddamn commercial before viewing content. I just had to view some shitty commercial for an SUV with text like "I hope to leave the world better than I found it". Seems like an appeal not to buy a fucking SUV if you ask me.)

*No offense to pigs

Tone of Voice

2006-11-29T23:09:00.000+01:00

First, a little something from Neil Postman's wonderful 1985 work on the end of public discourse, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

I had that passage on the brain today when I happened upon Paul Street's latest blog entry.

Go have a look at Street's brief message to so-called Congressional Progressives. It's good stuff. Now try this: print it and read it out loud. Read it aloud to yourself, to your friends, to your television screen. Don't hold back. Full voice. Shout. Say it like you mean it ('cause you do).

This is the tone we need to use. This is the tone we use not on easy targets like that menu of criminals known as the Bush Administration and related national and multi-national rat bastards. No. This is the tone we use on the possible allies, the would-be friends who for one reason or another just cannot seem to do their jobs, be responsible, and -- as Street echoing Spike Lee says -- do the right thing.

Enough being sweet. Enough being friendly. Time for the tough love to kick in. And this idea reaches across national borders. It's not just about asking democrats in the US Congress to impeach the lying, cowardly, soul-less, asshole of a puppet ruling the planet. Not just about that. We need national governments throughout the world to do their jobs, to stop working against the interests of their people by continuing to do business with the thugs at the top in Washington. Rumsfeld's retirement was not enough. Yes they all need to be stripped of their cushy jobs as ambassadors, cabinet members, World Bank presidents, civilian advisers and whatever. But they also need to be on no-fly lists. Listen here: none of us on this side of the Atlantic want America's war-mongering, neo-conservative backwash soiling the streets with their presence (unless they're being dragged in belly-cuffs to the International Criminal Court), earning money with their bullshit speeches, or enjoying themselves at all, ever. Ever.

How embarassing will it be if people like that human shitstain Rumsfeld get the Kissinger treatment around the world only to continue to live comfortably in the States. So Street is right: put impeachment back on the table, and now that there is something like a non-reactionary majority in the US Congress, the gloves should come off.

* * *

Don't get me wrong. With the criminals behind the occupation of Iraq behind bars the work will be anything but finished. It is really just an excercise in empowerment. While it will be official government business to bring Bush and Company to trial and put them far, far away (locked up tight, for as long as their miserable bodies breath the air they've been pleased to foul), it is up to individuals to mend the damage we do of our own accord. To what extent are individual members of a destructive culture blameless? What amount of personal responsibility should each of us take? I have in mind here the problematic disconnect between asking corporations and governments to take more (and better) action against environmental degredation while people are pleased as punch to work for them, first of all, and secondly to consume wildly out of proportion with anything approaching sustainability. Ending the reign of scum like Bush (and you British could do your part by taking down your cowardly war criminal lap dogs as well) is a very small part of the larger project of ending our own hyper-consumerist, ultra-materialistic, planet-murdering lifeways.

Or does anyone disagree?

Go Ask Your Democrats

2006-11-25T00:50:00.000+01:00

On the mid-term elections in the US earlier this month:

Congratulations! If you are an American -- and with US military bases scattered across the globe, who isn't? -- you are now the proud owner of a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party, the absolute lousiest bunch of political criminals the United States has had to offer since, well, the Republicans.

But before you get too tipsy celebrating the trade-off of a handful of Republican scumbag liars for a handful of Democrat scumbag liars (and the switcheroo between outgoing War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the incoming CIA agent taking his place), here are some questions you may want to ask your local, state, and federal Democrats:

1. When will the USA Patriot Act be repealed?

2. When will the Military Commissions Act be repealed?

3. When will the last US troops leave Iraq?

4. When will funding for Israel's brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine be cut off?

5. When will the US join the International Criminal Court, and sign and honor the Kyoto Treaty and the International Landmine Ban?

6. When will the legislation authorizing a gigantic concrete fence to be built between the US and Mexico be killed?

7. When will the tax code that unjustly favors the wealthy (in particular those who do nothing to earn their money) be changed?

8. When will the resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who thinks of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint", be demanded?

9. When will John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the United Nations who has said "[t]here is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States" be fired?

10. When will Vice President Dick Cheney, who has carried out secret meetings on energy policy and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, be removed from office?

11. When will US corporations, businesspeople, and investors be made to take responsibility for the havoc their extraordinary unaccountability causes throughout the world?

12. When will the US nuclear weapons arsenal be dismantled and the program to build more destructive weapons shut down?

13. When will those responsible for the policies of torture and extraordinary rendition be brought to trial for their crimes?

14. When will the SOA / WHINSEC be shut down?

15. When will Diego Garcia be returned to its people?

16. When will reparations be paid to the victims of aggression authorized by the United States Congress?

17. When will the US pay its dues to the UN?

18. When will the US stop meddling in Latin American affairs?

19. When will the US Congress adopt an acceptable and sustainable stance toward the rapidly crumbling global environment?

20. When will the US Congress adopt a humanitarian, rather than a corporate or religious fundamentalist, policy on alleviating the scourges of hunger, AIDS, and other diseases in the Global South?

21. When will the US Congress break up the media monopolies that have decimated political discourse?

22. When will the US Congress defend the supposed ideals of its Constitution by opening up political discourse to more than the two ruling corporate parties?

23. When will access to healthcare and affordable housing be made available to everyone living within the US?

24. When will the US start pushing a version of "globalization" that globalizes labor, repeal harmful trade agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA, and withdraw its support for backwards and ineffective IMF and World Bank policies?

25. When will US Congresspeople give the xenophobic rhetoric a rest?

* * *

Now is a good moment to recommend Paul Street's post-election Empire and Inequality Report for his merciful take on what should be done with the Bush Cabal. Of course my list above is just a start, and an easy-going one at that. None of the questions are particularly nasty, or motivated by polticial ideology. There is a great deal of triumphalism going around, and now that Democratic supporters are exhaling their big sighs of relief, the pressure is off. Certainly the establishment would prefer a slightly less reactionary version of itself to a public so fed up that it removes its blinders and no longer sees a difference between the two criminal parties.

But more importantly, it should be obvious to everyone that in Washington, where (let's be honest) nothing but the label has actually changed, none of our very real problems are going to be addressed or solved. Think for a moment about what those problems are, and consider where (if not in Washington) and how (if not politically) they might be dealt with.

How to Vote

2006-10-30T13:06:00.000+01:00

Next week, a veritable handful of people in the United States will be voting in midterm elections. Provided the right people vote for the Right party (and both of the war-criminal business parties in the US are right-wing), some of those votes may even be counted.

Many commentators say the election will be a referendum on the continued taxpayer-funded bloodbath in Iraq, while others say it will reflect the response of Americans -- politically discerning as they are -- to various financial and sexual indiscretions of a small selection of the sleazeballs in the US Congress.

Little people push the little buttons on their little computers and stories about the Republican Party's imminent implosion appear in cyberspace.

I will not be taking part in the electoral fiasco in the United States next week, though I am registered in New York State to do so. The American political system, wrongly known by some of the more deluded among us as a "democracy", is fronted by the soulless, morally absent underlings of the business-class bastards fast-tracking the planet to unlivable, who would strongly detest the will of the people were they to know what it is. It is fronted by supposed employees of the people, who openly and proudly declare their support for torture and proto-fascism, encourage rampant xenophobia, homophobia, and ecocide, push narrow-minded conservative agendas into private lives, and use scare-mongering to claw their way to the top of the American political shit-heap.

I don't feel at home as a participant in this.

At what point should people cease to cooperate with the systemic destruction of their planet, conducted under the false guise of "democracy"? At what point ought people discontinue their active legitimization of rule by criminals happily signing away on murder, torture, bogus science, the weaponization of space and diplomacy as a series of enormous concrete fences throughout the globe?

The idea that Americans could vote this all into extinction if they wanted is a myth. As proof I could submit what occurred in Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004. But I prefer to think of a more important indicator of that myth. If Americans went to the polls next week in record numbers and swept the Democrats into power in local and national elections, what would change? Democrats would enact foreign policy to more effectively control the planet, with a better marketing campaign to go along with it. At home it would be business as usual, with a nod here and there to minimally slowing down the environmental destruction that is the American way of life. A few states might even allow people to control their private lives, regardless of their gender or sexual preferences.

But not one person from the party in power would challenge the mega-corporations actively consolidating their control of for-profit healthcare, prison management, news media, energy distribution, and so forth.

Look around for a moment on this here internet and you can find example after example of elected and appointed government officials brazenly denouncing democracy whenever it fails to line Yankee pockets. I wonder if it is even possible to name a single country to the south of the United States that has never had its democracy tampered with by its most unneighborly northern neighbor.

This is what Hillary Clinton, the incumbent junior Senator from New York, had to say last week regarding elections in Palestine earlier this year: "If we were going to push for an election, we should have made sure we did something to determine who was going to win."

Not only do I refuse to vote for people who hate democracy, I refuse to vote against them. Asking who one votes for in a rigged democracy is simply asking the wrong question.

If you live in the United States and can vote (that is, if you are neither a victim of the horrendously racist American judicial system nor what Americans have shamelessly taken to calling an "illegal"), and you truly feel that you must vote, there is at least one candidate worth supporting: Rosemarie Jackowski.

Rosemarie Jackowski is a dedicated advocacy journalist and activist working for social justice. A victim of continued abuse and miscarriages of justice, she is the Liberty Union candidate for Attorney General of Vermont.

In a response to a Burlington Free Press editorial endorsing the incumbant attorney general (a response that all of Vermont's major newspapers have refused to publish) Rosemarie writes

My global view includes a deep respect for the law. The most important qualification for the office of Attorney General is an absolute, unwavering commitment to Justice for all, young and old, rich and poor...NO politics, NO cronyism, and NO excuses.

She advocates the creation of a citizen watchdog group to monitor the policies of the office of the Attorney General, an end to paying for testimony during trials, and independent investigations into AG wrongdoings. Perhaps best of all, Rosemarie Jackowski knows exactly what kind of analogues can be drawn between an unaccountable Vermont Attorney General working against the interests of the people, and a similarly out of control, though more dangerous, United States Attorney General.

Whether or not you vote, consider passing on what I have pasted in below to friends and relatives who do. Rosemarie first entered it as a comment at Mickey Z.'s a few days ago.

NEVER VOTE FOR AN INCUMBENT -- Rosemarie Jackowski

Voting for an incumbent is like going back to the same dentist who pulled the wrong tooth the last time.

Voting for an incumbent is like going back inside your camping tent even thought you were just bitten by a snake there.

Voting for an incumbent is like re-marrying your spouse even though she cheated on you the last time around.

Voting for an incumbent is like getting in a plane with a pilot who crashed his aircraft last time he went up.

Voting for the incumbent might mean that you need a change in your medications.

Voting for the incumbent is like taking your computer back to the same repair shop, even though last time they told you that your computer needed a lube and an oil change.

Voting for an incumbent is a vote for “staying the course”.

Voting for the incumbent means that you believe that things can never get any better.

Voting for the incumbent signals the end of all hope for change.

Voting against ALL incumbents is the perfect way to achieve term limits.

Mafia T-Shirt

2006-10-28T19:56:00.000+02:00

The other day I saw a boy too young to be choosing or buying his own clothes wearing a black t-shirt with the word "MAFIA" silkscreened in big, bright letters across the front.

What gives?

Why is the suggestion of organized crime and a willingness to protect one's financial dominance with violence the kind of thing a parent would want to emblazon on the chest of their eight-year old?

It's almost as bad (as in irrational and dangerous to the child's psychological development) as wearing a t-shirt displaying a national flag.

I'm no expert on the subject, but I suppose organized crime's star began rising in the pop culture with dramatic films (and to a lesser extent books) that dealt with archetypal human relationships in the context of mafia violence and related misdeeds.

I take no issue with films like The Godfather (or even the substantially lesser quality soap opera The Sopranos) if observers are able to effectively understand and critique them. One doesn't need to admire the anti-heroes played by the likes of Pacino and DeNiro in order to admire their abilities as actors, or to comprehend the world their characters inhabit, or to appreciate the skill with which writers, directors, editors and cinematographers tell those characters' stories.

Hollywood does not seek from viewers understanding and critique. It wants to move product. It works hand-in-pocket with its ugly sister The Fashion Industry and myriad other "product"-producing relatives. It has also (and less dramatically) made the image of reckless soldiers engaged in the act of murder (for personal or national honor) a positive one. Ditto for filthy, gunslinging, genocidal cowboys, playboy secret agents, and go-it-alone cops who blow up as much as possible before personally bringing the bad guys to justice.

I want to know how it comes to be that people are pleased to accept the values of valueless and escapist entertainment as their own.

I know: wearing a mafia t-shirt or buying yourself the same car that James Bond drives doesn't necessarily mean that you favor organized crime or having sex-crazed, alcohol-drenched spies undermining impossibly evil plots around the globe. But the planet is full of real-life, non-celluloid organized crime, violence, and simple thuggery. It takes an enormous amount of what is truly criminal activity to keep a relative handful of people driving BMW's, or the masses clothed in the products of sweatshop labor.

Not everyone is going to watch a Hollywood film and immediately dissect it from a left perspective. But one might think twice before dressing children in clothes more suitable for the political and corporate mafiosi treating the planet like a disputed streetcorner in gangland.

Wouldn't that be refreshing: if the cutthroat psychopaths running the planet traded in their power suits for t-shirts accurately emblazoned with descriptive words like "mafioso", "gang leader", "hitman" and "dick" . . . ?

Unask the Question.

2006-10-19T21:38:00.000+02:00

Today I reluctantly picked up some groceries at the not-so-friendly (and oh-so-corporate) Albert Heijn, a cultural icon far more ubiquitous than any other in The Netherlands. While one of the most shocking things about visiting a grocery store in the US is the initial confrontation with the illusion of choice, here in NL the mess is tidied up and the choices are narrowed down, often to this or that. This or that usually differs by no more than a few cents. The ingredients (of packaged food, of which we buy rather little) are often the same. Much of what you buy at Albert Heijn tastes like either cardboard or organic cardboard.

Heading out of the shop this evening (with the only kind of fresh parsley one can buy there: wrapped in plastic foil) I was approached by a young woman canvassing for some organization.

She: "Do you live in The Netherlands?"
Me: "Yes."
She: "Do you have a Dutch bank account?"
Me: "What's this about?"

. . . at which point she showed me some of the World Wildlife Fund material she was handing out. I thanked her and said that I had been a supporter for years (true) but had stopped some time ago.

"Why?" she asked, and what I should have said is that WWF focuses on damage control rather than the root causes of environmental degredation.

I should have said that it compromises too often on a range of issues (including logging and seal hunting). I should have said that a tactic based on asking people in our ecocidal culture to cough up a few euros per year (while continuing to maintain their materialistic and consumerist attitudes) was bound to fail. I should have said that an organization set up to protect animals that doesn't explicitly promote not eating them is a contradiction I will not support financially. I should have said that WWF's slick and even cheerful style is discordant with how serious the trouble is. I should have said that WWF's hierarchical structure reveals that it embraces exactly the kind of thinking that put the global environment in the state it's in.

But what I said instead is "WWF's not radical enough."

"So you're a Greenpeace person," she responded.

I guess I deserved that.

Should it trouble me that Greenpeace is the most radical environmental organization that a WWF volunteer could think of? Or that she assumed I must donate money to some organization. I am perturbed by this faulty line of questioning. Such thinking is not unique to inquiring into which environmental organization one writes an annual cheque to. More than once, for example, I have been asked if I'm a democrat or republican.

Or if I was for or against the document erroneously called the EU constitution.

Or if I'm a Protestant or a Catholic, a Christian or a Jew, a capitalist or a communist.

I have been asked if I am pro- or anti-abortion, if I'm pro- or anti-Israel, if I'm pro- or anti-war, and whether I support the troops or not. I have had to identify myself as left- or rightwing, over- or underage, married or single, travelling for business or pleasure. I've been told to love it or leave it, to watch CNN or FOX, to wear Nike or Adidas, to use a Mac or a PC, to drink Coke or Pepsi (or coffee or tea). In the US I am welcome to keep my mouth shut or shout my head off in designated "free speech zones".

But of course the ayatollah of all the inane, black or white, up or down, hot or cold, in or out questions that I have been confronted with is the line that seeks to cut our very planet in two.

Are you With Us or Against Us?

It's a question that needs to be unasked. The world I live in is not made up of ones and zeros, and no lines, real or imaginary, divide it. There is no such thing as a legal or illegal immigrant, "them" or "us", "yours" or "mine" unless we accept the questions posed by these false designations. Separation walls and the fascist laws that go along with them are symptoms of a culture that happily plays heads or tails with entire populations.

Nope. Not me. Too narrow. I am one-hundred percent, without question, pro-choice.

Shame (Gregor Samsa-style)

2006-10-14T13:03:00.000+02:00

As any regular reader of the irregular writings here knows, supporting artistic freedom and rejecting censorship is important to me. There are moments, however, when humanitarian concerns trump artistic freedom.

I am not sure how I feel about the current trial of Simon Bikindi, a popular Rwandan singer accused of inciting genocide with his music. I am not sure about it because it would set a precedent that would see a good deal of the musicians in the US up on charges of incitement to war crimes.

Surely every patriotic song, from the most hideous country-rock pro-war pap to Ray Charles' otherwise wonderful rendition of "America the Beautiful" have served useful support roles in US wars of aggression over the years. (Jimi Hendrix' "Star Spangled Banner" is a notable exception.) Whether these artists intentionally supported the horrors or -- like the Nazi misappropriation of works by Beethoven, for example -- were simply exploited, can be questioned. But what if making a work of art is in itself cruel, inhumane, dangerous, or murderous?

Last night I performed music in an art gallery where just such a work was exhibited. The work was so sickening that as the artist -- whose name will not receive any popularization here -- set up her work I literally shouted "that's fucking disgusting" more than once. (The artist, drunk, cordially introduced herself later.)

What was the work in question? The artist chose to express herself by placing a translucent box full of live cockroaches atop an overhead projector. As the evening progressed and the lamp of the projector heated the box, the cockroaches, subjected to intense heat, were tortured. For the first hour or so they were absolutely frantic, becoming progressively more aggressive toward each other, and then one by one they were cooked to death, while survivors crushed each other up against the presumably cooler edges of the projection surface. To the depraved delight of some in attendence, this was all visible, many times enlarged, on a wall of the gallery.

I feel intense shame at the part I played in this. Why? Several days ago some friends and I were invited to perform at the after-party of an exhibition opening. For a small fee. Upon arriving at the gallery and seeing what was going on I didn't refuse to play. I didn't refuse to get paid. Aside from loudly registering my discomfort (which probably had as much to do with my low-level insect phobia as my high-intensity objection to anything being tortured) and complaining (read: bitching) about the work to people in the audience after I was finished playing, I didn't deal with the problem. We started our first set with a text of mine that indirectly addressed the issue, but this had been planned in advance, before I knew what kind of horrible shit I would be witnessing. Shame on me for standing on a stage with a microphone, witnessing torture, and "respecting" an artist's right to conduct it.

And what about the audience? I spoke to some people who appreciated the aesthetic effect of giant cockroaches crawling on the walls (we feel at home amidst a hundred Gregor Samsas, no?), but felt this could have been done with film, and thus without degrading the artist or the observers or torturing living creatures. Of the hundred or so people who spent any time in the gallery last night, only one person needed to pull the plug to make the point that needed to be made. But no one dared. A room full of artists and musicians, all apparently creative, all engaged in an orgy of torture (read: destruction) ostensibly on the grounds that to turn off the torture device would be an infringement on someone's artistic freedom.

But it wasn't art we witnessed. It was Abu Ghraib. It was Guantanamo fucking Bay. Projected on the wall was any number of individuals demeaned, tortured, and murdered, demonstrating some sadistic bastard's definition of everything from "freedom" to "justice" to "democracy" or whatever (I've lost track of the inane justifications). Just as last night in the smoke-filled, alcohol-infused art gallery, today we witness and we stand agape. And we do nothing.

We witness well over half a million murders in somebody's "global war on terror", one of every four US veterans of it returning home with a disability (if at all), the legalization of torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge, a million unexploded US-made cluster bombs sprinkled on a tiny patch of Lebanese soil (are they called bomblets because so many of them destroy children?) and it gets me to wondering: who are the cockroaches around here?

Perhaps the work last night would have been a decent sociological experiment if several dozen living beings (yes, oh yes: with feelings) hadn't been sadistically tortured for "art's sake". But they were. And the mark of shame is with all of us who stood on and did nothing.

Pull the plug. Pull the plug. Pull the plug.

Coda.

There is a somewhat similar work by Chilean-Danish artist Marco Evarissti: ten living goldfish swimming in ten food blenders. It is the work that made the artist famous (the director of a museum exhibiting the work was taken to court and fined for animal cruelty). Although I personally dislike the work, and I dislike the implication (that it is okay to make a point about human morality by imprisoning a living thing and subjecting it to potential violence), I do not think this work approaches the cruelty of the work I witnessed last night. Why? While Evarissti's work places the mortality of the work's subject directly in the hands of the observer, making the violence implicit, the overhead projector was placed out of reach and the violence was explicit: fundamental to the work. To follow on my metaphor above, the torture and detention centers of the US empire are similarly "out of reach", but the off switch is right there in your hands.

Shakespeare and McChesney and Nichols

2006-10-06T10:47:00.000+02:00

I spent three weeks in Mexico in the summer of 2003. After a week in Mexico City, and nearly another in Oaxaca, I landed in the mountaintop city of San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chiapas. I spent one afternoon lying in a hammock reading Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and another reading Our Media, Not Theirs. I just found the notebook that I kept on that trip. From Shakespeare:

"Our doubts are traitors,
And makes us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt."
Lucio, I.iv

"Who is it that hath died for this offense?
There's many have committed it."
Isabella, II.ii

"O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant."
Isabella, II.ii

"I had rather give my body than my soul"
Isabella, II.iv

And from Nichols and McChesney's Our Media, Not Theirs:

"Because the fight we propose is first and foremost a struggle for democratic processes, the potential base of support includes everyone in the population who favors democracy over plutocracy. In short, the traditional distinctions of left and right are not decisive categories. The more accurate split is between up and down, those who benefit materially from the corrupt status quo, and those who do not."

"Perhaps the strongest indictment of corporate journalism is that the preponderance of it would be compatible with an authoritarian political regime. So it is that China has few qualms about letting most commercial news from the United States inside its borders; it can see that this low caliber of journalism is hardly a threat to its rule."

"At its worst, in a case like the current war on terrorism, where the elites and official sources are unified on the core issues, the nature of our press coverage is uncomfortably close to that found in authoritarian societies with limited formal press freedom."

"[T]he cheerleading from American newspapers and television commentators [serve] as a reminder that the sympathies of those who enjoy the freedom of the press in the U.S. do not lie with those who seek to preserve basic freedoms and democracy in other lands."

"This is a generation that is under pressure from the media it consumes to be brazenly materialistic, selfish, and depoliticized: devoid of social conscience. To the extent one finds these values problematic for a democracy, we should all be concerned."

"The fundamental challenge at this point is not convincing people that something should be done. . .[t]he challenge is to convince people that something can be done."

"When faced with organized money, the only recourse is organized people."

"[W]e need to weave the project of radically changing the media into the braidwork of the larger movement for peace, democracy, and social justice."

"All the organizing in the world won't amount to a hill of beans unless there is something tangible to fight for, and to win."

A Record High

2006-09-21T10:38:00.000+02:00

Here's a little piece of news from the US that seems odd from here: Democracy Now! reported yesterday that in 2005, more than three quarters of a million people in the United States were arrested for violations of marijuana laws.

This is, ahem, a record high.

According to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, enforcement costs US taxpayers up to $12 billion per year, a sum that (according to figures from the National Priorities Project) could provide more than:

2.5 million people with health care or
100,000 affordable housing units or
1,300 new elementary schools or
2.1 million univesity scholarships or
190,000 music and arts teachers or
19.5 million homes with renewable electricity or
173,000 port container inspectors.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it!

[recommended soundtrack: "Smokey" off Funkadelic's Hardcore Jollies, 1976]

The NewStandard

2006-09-15T14:23:00.000+02:00

If you aren't familiar with it already, check out The NewStandard and consider rescuing this vital non-corporate, advertisement-free, independent news source. The work is always superbly researched, there is a section for other news of interest, their working process is open (and worth taking a look at in and of itself) and they've got great comics daily. The NewStandard needs your help and we all need more ad-free independent journalism.

Performance Alert

2006-09-11T20:46:00.000+02:00

I will be a guest for the full hour of this week's United Colors of Noise program on The Hague's underground Radio Tonka. The show is hosted by my good friend and frequent musical accomplice Tom Tlalim and the audio is streamed live and available for your enjoyment online (or in The Hague on 92.0 FM). The show will be today, Tuesday 12 September at the following times: mainland Europe midnight / UK and Ireland 11pm / New York 6pm / Chicago 5pm / LA 3pm etc.

(American servicemen and women stationed on the stolen island of Diego Garcia can check out the show at 4 in the morning on the 13th, while those continuing the occupation of Iraq can listen one hour earlier.)

The program focuses on experimental electronic music and contemporary sound art, and is produced from a dark little (formerly) underground radio station in the center of The Hague.

* * *

Need reading material while you listen? Check out James Petras on the Liquid Bomb Hoax (with thanks to comrade JS Lach for tipping me off), Norman Finklestein on Political Apostasy, and Noam Chomsky and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers discussing Deceit.

Cicero says...

2006-09-05T22:20:00.000+02:00

"I criticize by creation, not by finding fault."

Explanation of absence...

2006-09-05T01:43:00.000+02:00

We were walking and camping on the Pembrokeshire coast in Wales lately, happily bereft of news, email, and life in the city.

We saw big machine guns at the airports in Amsterdam and Cardiff. We had to take our shoes and our belts off, apparently for our safety, because once, four years ago, this one guy tried to light his shoe on fire on a plane. (On the way back, we witnessed a man plead with security for his elderly mother to be allowed to pass through security without being forced to take her prosthetic limb off.)

From the tops of the Pembrokeshire cliffs we saw wild newborn seals greeting the world on secluded beaches. We saw wild horses near St. Davids. We saw many many sheep and cows. We saw two young domesticated male pigs apparently having sex.

We saw bluest water, bluest sky, and spent whole days without hearing the sound of airplanes. We'd walk hours before confronting any paved roads. The trail was lined with ripe blackberries.

We met a couple from Colchester whose names we never got but whose kindess we'll never forget.

Kasia's boots fell apart, but she kept walking in sandals. My backpack slowly disintegrated, and then my ankle gave out (thirtieth birthday last month, and too much time behind this damned machine the last few years...), and then the weather turned nasty. We spent a night in an overpriced bed and breakfast, and another at an overpriced hostel in Cardiff that smelled of socks before visiting family in England. I spent two days on the couch, nursing my leg and watching British television. I saw an automobile advert that used the music from the film Powaqatsi. Wrong wrong wrong.

At the airport on the way back we were not allowed to bring a bottle of water through security, but could buy an overpriced one afterwards. This because a terror plot that may or may not have existed may or may not have involved liquid explosives. We saw a man hassled for neglecting to discard his eyedrops before passing through security.

Without meaning any offence, I did not miss the mechanized, urbanized world we have returned to. I did not miss the obligatory avoidance of eye contact in the city, the unspoken rule that one does not say hello to strangers, the difference between being dirty from an eight hour walk through the countryside versus an eight minute walk around town. I didn't miss knowing who was bombing who, where, and for what. I didn't miss the inane antics that characterize politics nor the concept of celebrity and the culture's inexplicable lust for it.

That all said, after a much needed and much appreciated break I will be back to the usual here shortly.

This week they said...

2006-08-25T10:40:00.000+02:00

"The lesson of every movement in US history is that being right is only half the battle; being loud helps, too."
---Bill McKibben

"The terrorists hate our freedom, so by eliminating the freedom, we can stop the terrorists from hating us."
---Boing Boing

"It's going to take so much more than talking to an opinion pollster or walking into a voting booth to punch the cards for a now opportunistically anti-war Democrat. The Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld cabal should be removed before the next appointed quadrennial extravaganza and before the launching of at least an air war on Iran."
---Paul Street

"[According to the Center for Global Development] much of the US's aid . . . was contingent on the purchase of US goods, and so was in fact a 'backdoor subsidy for American interests.'"
---BBC

"Are there words in the English language suitable for the impeachable serial war crimes you are intimately involved in committing not only in Iraq but also now through your encouragement and supplying of the once again invading Israeli government?"
---Ralph Nader [in an open letter to George W. Bush]

"More than anything else, the two most popular television shows [Big Brother and The Weakest Link] are public rehearsals of the disposability of humans. They carry an indulgence and a warning rolled into one story. No one is indispensable, no one has the right to his or her share in the fruits of the joint effort just because she or he has added at some point to their growth, let alone because of being, simply, a member of the team. Life is a hard game for hard people. Each game starts from scratch, past merits do not count, you are worth only as much as the results of your most recent duel. Each player at every moment is for herself or himself, and to progress, not to mention to reach the top, one must first cooperate in excluding the many who block the way, only to outwit in the end those with whom one cooperated. If you are not tougher and less scrupulous than all the others, you will be done by them -- swiftly and without remorse. It is the fittest (read: the least scrupulous) who survive."
---Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Siege (2002)

"As force is always on side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular."
---David Hume (1758), quoted today by Mickey Z.

Enlightened Despotism in the 21st Century

2006-08-22T08:37:00.000+02:00

"Everything for the people, nothing by the people."
---attributed to Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor

I have had enough of people defending the big heart of billionaire Bill Gates. There is nothing special about criticizing the Bush Administration's woefully insufficient and damaging stance toward the AIDS crisis, and there should be nothing special about a person worth fifty billion dollars giving half of it away.

While people are quick to commend him for his philanthropy, nowhere that I have seen -- and readers, correct me if I'm wrong -- has Mr. Gates lashed out at the root causes of much of what is wrong in the world: the incredible and shameful accumulation of wealth in a world of deprivation (that Gates himself, as the richest individual on the planet, typifies).

The Bush Administration's juvenille and patronizing "ABC" policy (abstinence, be faithful, use a condom) is not difficult to criticize. From his position as a well-known business leader, Gates is correct to insist that women be empowered with the tools to protect themselves, and that research be shared and non-proprietary.

But Gates knows, like no other, that business is business. Since the beginning of his career, Gates has been a powerful advocate of proprietary software. That's how he made his billions. Another business leader -- beholden, as they all are, to the rising stock portfolios of their shareholders -- might be making billions in proprietary pharmaceuticals or agriculture. Business interests are also defended -- at the expense of human lives and the destruction of the environment, always at such expense -- by the essentially violent policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the impossible demands they make on war-torn, disease stricken countries ravaged by resource extraction (read: theft) by the so-called developed world.

To put the lives of the people suffering the most in the hands of those suffering the least is to remake the model of the enlightened despot of an earlier age. Allowing anyone the power and influence that comes with the accumulation of wealth, and then hoping they will use it in generous and humane ways, is simply backwards and wrong. The emiseration of the Global South is not due to benign causes, whatever closet racists and apologists for predatory capitalism may suggest.

I would like to see Mr. Gates turn on himself, to point his finger not at intermediate causes of problems -- such as the horrendous but unsurprising stance of the anti-humanitarian Bush Administration on, well, anything -- but on root causes, such as the massive divide between rich and poor and the rich world's giving with one hand (when it so chooses) while always taking with two.

* * *

Related: must-see documentary The Corporation.

Weekend Quotes III

2006-08-19T13:27:00.000+02:00

"They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people . . . Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder . . . And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."
---Eugene V. Debs, as quoted in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States

"In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed."
---Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When first introduced into English vernacular, the concept of 'political' was a war cry and a call to arms. It has lost that meaning since . . . it was originally coined as critique of reality but later transformed into 'objective description' of reality as its heralds and missionaries turned into that reality's administrators."
---Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Seige

"If you are not frightened yet, you have not been paying attention to recent world history . . . You better check out what happened to the people of Diego Garcia, when the U.S. military decided that it wanted their island as a military base."
---Rosemarie Jackowski, advocacy journalist and Vermont Attorney General candidate

"If this is the best god can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being."
---George Carlin