How we all get played

A brief primer on why we have racism:

Atlas Wept by The Granite Countertops: Official Video

The Granite Countertops perform "Atlas Wept" from their album CRASHING INTO THE FUTURE on Ear Candle Productions.



"You thought you would have your way forever
Turned out not to be true
You thought you were the hero of the movie
Now the world points its finger back at you
What can you do? What can you do?
Throw a tantrum, play the victim

You thought you were the winner in the dogpile
That pile of bodies, now it's rolling over you
You thought you were the author of the future
The book slammed shut before the end of chapter 2
What do you say? What do you say?
Blow the same stupid horn
Serve the same tasteless corn

You can't be satisfied to sit and count your money
Without your words written in the air
It's not enough just to get away with murder
It eats you up that they don't love you everywhere
So you keep croaking at every microphone you see
Our forsaken angry god
One sad obsolescent clod"

J Neo Marvin: Lyrics, vocals, keyboard, beat programming, electric guitars, dwarf djembe and melodica
Davis Jones: Vocals, Cuvaison wineglasses, Chinese massage balls, Tibetan cymbals
Matthew Grasso: Seven-string acoustic guitar, sympathetic strings and lamenting vocals
Lizzie Borden: Soothing vocals

Find this and more Granite Countertops music here!

Linkies and miscellany

The Fall 2012 semester will bring a Renaissance of radio activity from these quarters. I have registered for KSFS radio. I have not DJ'd at a college radio station since 1981, and never before as an actual student.

Mahablog on bogus freedom.

Substance on Crazy Man Michael and his spirited defense of the real victims. (Plus, a bonus Youtube by the Art Bears sounding like a really sloppy Deerhoof.)

Roy discovers a really bad source for mail order iced tea.

And you thought the Paul-is-dead conspiracy theory was goofy...

You really do need to be clicking Astronomy Picture Of The Day every day. Just look at this:

Purge!

Made something new yesterday. This may ultimately end up being a backing track for something else. Or maybe it will stand by itself. Or maybe it will be a theme for a TV show! However it goes, I like the way it turned out.

Didn't we try this "preppy asshole in the White House" idea already?

Up until now, as much as I have grown to detest Mitt Romney for his wide-eyed, histrionic, deceitful babbling, his obnoxious sense of privileged entitlement, and the very real damage he has done to small businesses and the economy as a corporate predator with Bain Capital, I have not considered his face to be nearly as irresistibly punchable as those of his fallen opponents Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, et al. This story changes all of that.

This is being spun as a tale of homophobia. Yeah sure, it's that, but that's not all. You don't have to actually be gay to see yourself in that kid who got pinned to the ground by some smug "popular" fucker taking a scissors to his hair. ANYONE who doesn't fit into the norm when they're young gets this kind of treatment from their peers, usually with no consequence whatsoever for the perpetrators. It's only now that people are actually bothering to have a conversation about what is now being called the "Bully Culture," but this is nothing new.

And if you were on the receiving end of it, you can have all the therapy you like, but it doesn't matter. Shit like this stays with you forever.

The only choice you have is to either turn it into an excuse to wallow in self-pity and take out your resentment on others, or recognize it as just one example of the pervasive injustice that shows up everywhere, in any form, and spend your life doing what you can to fight it wherever it shows it's ugly head. Not just for your own identity group, but for everyone.

As I said, I already hated Mitt Romney before this. But yesterday I just thought he was merely a ludicrous puffed-up target for laughter who deserves to be kept as far away from the levers of power as possible. Now I know better: Mitt Romney is That Guy. Here's to him receiving the metaphorical punch in the face he so richly deserves this November.

UPDATE: Doghouse sums it up beautifully as usual: "Isn't 'organize gang of snotty, well-off bullies to torment the less fortunate' pretty much a description of the man's business career?"

UPDATE II: Winning the Lord Of The Flies vote.

Song Of The Six Pack

Angel Corpus Christi's X-tal covers project is back. This time she and Rich Stim take on a song by Maati Stojanovich and Jeremy O'Doughaill (I did contribute the second verse) about drinking and dysfunction. In other words, it's a country song. Suitable for weeping in one's beer at 3 AM.

5 Songs: The Covering!

Our new Soundcloud Spotlight mix, selected by Davis Jones, opens with three cover songs (Ray Davies, Syd Barrett and Stephin Merritt) by the Content Providers, Davis's own composition for The Blame, "Wagons And Boys", and the Granite Countertops' recording of J Neo Marvin's "Animal Panic". Enjoy.

Schoolyard power plays

What Digby said, part infinity:

As we were watching some functionary or the other extolling the order to kill Osama bin laden as a unique act of leadership and courage this morning, Mr Digby muttered to me, "they're beating them at their own game." And that's what's wrong with it. It's not that Republicans are uniquely evil people in this regard, obviously. This stuff is very human. It's that the game itself is evil.

I get why the Democrats are doing it. I'm sure it's extremely satisfying to land those punches on the right wing blowhards after all the years of taunting and jeering about liberal cowardice. To be able to say they killed the evil mastermind where the swaggering codpiece failed is probably too much of a temptation for them to pass up. I get it.

But I hate it. I hated it when the Republicans did it and I hate it now. I don't believe the most powerful nation on earth should be running its democracy via schoolyard power plays. This is how we ended up stuck in Vietnam and how we have found ourselves floundering about in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It's why we can't stop spending trillions on useless weapons systems, why we "have" to continue to fund ridiculous programs like Star Wars and why everyone in the political establishment assumes that the only answer to budget problems is to cut the so-called "entitlements."

Thanks for trying to fix what wasn't broken

Blogger seems to have decided it's time to force its users to use new templates. In the process, they just wiped out our entire blogroll, our album covers and all our links. What was that all about?

We will try to fix the damage. Beware bloggers, you may be next.

UPDATE: Now everything is back, but the new design is going to take some getting used to. It seems that you can keep your assets if you pick out a new template, while your decks are cleared if you choose to keep your old design.

One good thing about the new look is that there is room to post wide screen videos without having to resize them. So yay for that.

An audience with Robert Wyatt

One of our heroes, in another interview. Thanks to Svenn for spreading this around.





You can hear the whole thing here.

Less fun

Our second X-tal release, the rarities compilation More Fun, will be going out of circulation for a while as of next week. Mosey on over here if you don't want to miss your last chance to grab yourself such hard to find goodies as "I Was A Teenage Christian" and "Dub Rat"!

Mr. Foley

Relevant to my current education.

5 songs: the debut

Starting right now, we will post a fresh five-song set on the Ear Candle Productions Soundcloud Spotlight page. Every week we will change it up, posting a different set of tracks from our releases and works in progress:

This week's selection, picked by J Neo Marvin:

You should never have let me begin!

This one goes out to Krustel Kram and The Mod-est Lads. An entire concert by Tom Lehrer, whose "Irish Ballad" scarred me for life at 10. Witty, educational, horrible and hilarious.

For more on Mr. Lehrer, read this great interview. Here's a taste:

O: Do you feel that you had any impact?

TL: That's hard for me to say. I don't think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It's not even preaching to the converted; it's titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, "We need satire of them, not of us." I'm fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the '30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War. You think, "Oh, wow! This is great! We need a song like this, and that will really convert people. Then they'll say, 'Oh, I thought war was good, but now I realize war is bad.'" No, it's not going to change much.

O: Is comedy important?

TL: Comedy is very important, yes. For one thing, it keeps you sane. But it's not really a conversion. I mean, it's marginally a conversion, because if people tune in or go to a nightclub or even watch television, and hear that a lot of other people are laughing at something you thought was not funny, at least it'll force you to reconsider. I know people who've heard "The Vatican Rag" and then converted, so to speak. They'd think, "Hey, wait. There are actually people who take that as funny. I'm not the only one." I've always done some good along those lines. Many people over the years have said, "Oh, 'The Vatican Rag' changed my life." It's not that they were convinced of something they weren't convinced of before; it's just that now they realize it's okay to laugh. They're not the only ones.

"The party of large corporate government", and other tropes.

Some suggestions for taking back control of the language, courtesy of Crooks & Liars.

Do you remember the 1990s??!!

A good article here on the unjustly forgotten UK band Prolapse (here is their posthumous blog, for more information) and the crowning jewel of their four-album catalog, The Italian Flag.

Here's the opening track. Wish there was a proper video, but...


And a fan's interpretation of what might be their greatest four minutes:


Oh, just one more. An official video from their second album. (There is precious little to be found by this band on YouTube, but happy hunting!) Prolapse were both dangerous and strangely cute, like a head-on collision between the Fall and the Shop Assistants. If there are any bands like this around today, I don't know about them.

The Myth Of The Simpleton

(I got an A on this paper. I suspect this ground has been trodden by someone before, but I was pleased.)

Two acclaimed American movies, one from 1979, the other from 1994, offer two very divergent takes on a similar story. A man of low intelligence is forced to make his own way in American society, and through a series of comic errors, becomes loved, respected and successful, all the while remaining oblivious to the way he is perceived by others. Each character lives a charmed life, following his own eccentric impulses, and is portrayed as a simple, gentle, “natural” being whose disability somehow appears to tap into a form of wisdom that is more real and profound than mere brainpower can provide. In both Hal Ashby’s Being There and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump, the wise fool’s blank, guileless acceptance of everything he encounters becomes a canvas upon which everyone around him paints their own pictures of what they wish to see.

The protagonists in these two films could themselves be seen as mythical signifiers; what is interesting is how each reflects the assumptions of its time. Where the two texts differ tells us a lot about how American mythology had changed during the fifteen years between them.

Being There begins as Chance, a feeble-minded middle aged man, is informed that his unnamed caretaker has just passed away. Chance, who has no memory of anything but his isolated existence, has spent his life tending the garden and watching TV, learning language and imitating gestures from characters on the screen. When he is forced to leave home, he wanders into the city (which happens to be Washington DC) with nothing but a few old suits and his remote. Unfamiliar with city traffic, he is struck by a car containing the wife of a terminally ill banker with political connections. She brings him home where he can recuperate at a private medical facility that is providing her husband hospice care. Now Chance is surrounded by powerful men who interpret his nonsensical talk of gardening and television as elegant, beautiful parables on politics and the economy. The banker adopts him as his closest confidante, and by the film’s end, he is being groomed as a candidate for Vice President. Only the staff doctor knows the true state of Chance’s mind, and he decides not to tell anyone in order to spare the feelings of the banker’s wife, who has fallen in love with him. In this text, the real fools are the people of normal intelligence who believe in Chance’s “eloquent” insights, and the audience is in on the joke. The script writer, Jerzy Kosinski, who adapted his own novel for the film, believed that the danger of television lay in the way it could replace direct encounters with others and deter self-reflection. (Lazar, 2004 ) And no one could be more detached and un-self-reflective than the protagonist of Being There.

The end of the 1970s could be seen as a time of skepticism in the US. The social changes of the 1960s and early 1970s had neither created a progressive Utopia nor destroyed all that was “sacred”. Life had instead become more complex, and what had long been accepted was now open to question. Satire, once defined by George Kaufman as “what closes on Saturday night”, had now become a staple of that same night’s TV roster. After the Vietnam War and Watergate, questioning authority, or at least the trappings thereof, had become a mainstream trope, yet a new conservatism was growing in response to the perceived “weakness” of President Jimmy Carter. In this jaded time, the idea that a fool would be perceived as a hero by powerful opportunists may have struck a chord with many for whom the theme of a nation of voyeurs also resonated. (Willson, 1981) (And the double meaning of Chance’s catchphrase “I like to watch” was not lost on risqué minds.) But the American Zeitgeist was already beginning to change, and Being There did not do well at the box office.

Fifteen years later, we are given the title character of Forrest Gump, a mentally disabled Southern man raised by a mother who teaches him the value of kindness (yet names him after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan). Forrest ambles through an impressive array of stock footage (borrowing a gimmick from Woody Allen’s 1983 film Zelig), inadvertently influencing historical figures from Elvis Presley to John F. Kennedy to John Lennon. Unlike Chance’s gnomic blankness, Gump’s mental disability is not hidden from view, it simply is. This time, it’s not greedy capitalists or power-seeking politicians who are the fools whose intelligence blinds them to the truth; instead it is caricatures of 60s counterculture. These are often represented by Gump’s love interest, Jenny, who comes and goes in his life as she experiences one degrading adventure after another through free love and naïve political activism before bearing the hero’s son and conveniently dying of AIDS. Gump’s benign virtue is contrasted with the flamboyant, often angry characters who populate the movie’s revisionist history lesson. (Wang, 2000) Why are all these ridiculous people acting so wild? If they could only be as simple and good as Forrest Gump, everything would work out fine.

The feel-good message of Forrest Gump, which implies that social change and political struggle amounted to wrong-headed vanity and what the world really needs more of is good manners, resonated strongly with the conservative movement in 1994. During that year’s Congressional elections, which resulted in a Republican takeover of both the Senate and the House Of Representatives, future House Speaker Newt Gingrich used the film as anecdotal evidence of the immorality of the Left, and argued that President Bill Clinton was just like those rude people in that movie. (ibid) For the resurgent Right, Gump illustrated that racial differences could be easily overcome by the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that another doomed supporting character, Bubba, exhibits, and that traditional values were the key to a harmonious society. (ibid) Conspicuously absent from the film’s parade of historical events is the Civil Rights movement, which, while mostly non-violent at its inception, was not merely about being “nice”. We do get to see some nasty Black Panthers, though.

But why exactly is it the fool who is the hero here? I would argue that the appeal of both Chance (who we are meant to view ironically) and Forrest (not a bit) is rooted in a long-standing tendency among Americans toward anti-intellectualism. Claussen (2011) traces some of the history of this phenomenon, outlining the theories of Daniel Rigney, which broke the belief system down into three categories: religious anti-rationalism (emotion is warm/good, reason is cold/bad); populist anti-elitism (hostility to both old money patricianism and supposedly “elitist” progressivism); and unreflective instrumentalism (knowledge is worthless unless it leads to material gain, or “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”). We see elements of all three in Forrest’s story. Forrest doesn’t think since he lacks the capacity, but he feels deeply and subscribes to a strong moral code. (Chance, by contrast, is apathetic to the end, so even if we like the character, we are less inclined to sentimentalize him.) Forrest, despite his handicap, is the normal guy among the pointy-headed intellectuals, some of whom may mean well, but ultimately just cause trouble. And, like a good idealized American, he may not be too smart, but he knows how to jump on a business opportunity when he invests in Bubba’s shrimp company. Surrounded by turmoil and tragedy, the pure-hearted simpleton triumphs, and we root for him through our tears.

Storey (2009), quoting Roland Barthes on mythology, writes, “Semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal...myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Storey himself gives us the example of a photo of a fictional rock star with two contrasting captions which cause us to project a different set of emotions on each identical picture. Image, he writes, “does not illustrate text, it is the text which amplifies the connotative power of the image.” Something similar is occurring in the use of non-fictional footage in the fiction of Forrest Gump, where real people are inserted into a story and made to appear as “authentic” support for its conceits, to the point that politicians employ this imaginary historical context in their own arguments for their agendas.

In Being There, a product of the last days of the countercultural “New Hollywood” of the 1970s, it is the anti-intellectualism of the power brokers in the story that compels them to embrace Chance as a leader. In Forrest Gump, a heart-tugging early 90s blockbuster, it is the audience themselves who are expected to identify with the wise fool for whom life is like a box of chocolates. The denotation of the “fool’s journey” is given two strikingly different connotations that reflect the shared codes of the filmmakers, the viewers, and their assumptions about American society. We “like to watch”, but how much do we think about what we see?

Claussen, D. (2011). A brief history of anti-intellectualism in American media. Academie, 97(3), 8-13.

Lazar, M. (2004). Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There," novel and film: Changes not by chance. College Literature, 31(2), 99-116.

Storey, J. (2009). Cultural theory and popular culture. (5th ed., pp. 118-125). Harlow, England: Pearson Education Ltd.

Wang, J. H. (2000). "A struggle of contending stories": Race, gender and political memory in Forrest Gump. Cinema Journal, 39(3), 92-115.

Willson, R. (1981). Being there at the end. Literature Film Quarterly, 9(1), 59-62.

I can only express this rage in links

Phil Nugent doesn't feel like talking about politics, then proceeds to do so, with white-hot righteous anger. It's beautiful.

Doghouse wishes he had something original to say, then proceeds to give us some original, distilled truth.

Meanwhile, in the Village Voice, Roy parses the sentences of the blather machine and unearths some uglies in the comments section. Bring your hip waders.

Jesse gives us a crash course in empathy, then lays it out more simply for the slower ones in the audience.

Are we ready to clean up the dog poop yet?

Free Pussy Riot

That headline will probably bring us all kinds of unwanted Google traffic, but it is imperative that we support these brave young women.

UPDATE:


UPDATE PLUS:
International solidarity! (Hat tip to Jigsaw Underground.)

What they don't say when they scold us about the work ethic

Some insights on how prosperity really happens (or doesn't):

...I visited a group of Haitian mango farmers a few years ago. Each farmer had no more than one or two mango trees, even though their land lay along a river that could irrigate their fields and support hundreds of trees. So why didn’t they install irrigation pipes? Were they ignorant, indifferent? In fact, they were quite savvy and lived in a region teeming with well-intended foreign-aid programs. But these farmers also knew that nobody in their village had clear title to the land they farmed. If they suddenly grew a few hundred mango trees, it was likely that a well-connected member of the elite would show up and claim their land and its spoils. What was the point?

No More Mister Nice Blog points out the obvious: we could be heading in the same direction here, especially if we keep asking the wrong questions.

I got chills from this

Feel huge. Then feel small.

Animal Panic

The Granite Countertops in stripped down rehearsal mode a while back. Time to plug in and play some more!

Back to the shadows again

The world just got a little less funny today. R.I.P. Peter Bergman.

"Where's the bombshell?" - 2012's next big internet meme

Law student hugs law professor! It's a conspiracy! And the mainstream media is hiding it from us!

Wow, these buffoons really got nothin'.

What you gonna do for an encore?

Got some more videos from the 2006 X-tal house party:

"Stating The Obvious Again" was a direct response to the GOP convention/hatefest of 1992 and the then-recent loss of a few close friends to the AIDS virus. A pushback song for all of us on the receiving end of the "family values" jackboot. Shouldn't be, but it's still timely. Betting, and hoping, that 20 years on we will again be able to say:

"The inquisition has just been cancelled for lack of interest.
Too many people would rather fix the holes in their own roofs
Than fight a Holy War."

(UPDATE) Complete lyrics, by request:

My friends are scattered all across the continents
They're searching for the satisfaction they deserve
Some of my friends have died in pain you can't imagine
Now they're gone for good
I've heard you tell the nation, it's all their own fault.

Don't tread on my loved ones
Don't you even try
Don't toy with our anger
We've got the right to live
Don't threaten good people
Don't trivialize their lives
Don't spit on our values
We've got the right to love.

Pursuing happiness and thrills, we've taken risks
We don't need scum like you to tell us
How to suffer for it.
You sit in offices and churches making speeches
While in the streets, men with clubs and knives
Are out enforcing your philosophy of life.

The Inquisition has just been cancelled for lack of interest
Too many people would rather fix the holes in their own roofs
Than fight a holy war.
Ah, the ghouls will lick their wounds and slink away
You know they'll be back.

Toss out what you've been told
And you have to improvise
You have to rely on your desire, your heart, your conscience
I salute anyone who can make it through the night
If others don't approve of what they see
They can kindly step away from the window.

(I salute anyone who can make it through the night
Someday I will again.)



Plus, "Encore"!

This ball is square

The ongoing collapse of the right wing is more than I ever could have predicted. One thing these people always had going for them is message discipline, not to mention the deep pockets to back it up. Now the masks are falling off along with the wheels. If we had a strong, unified progressive movement in the US, we might be able to do something with this momentum. Maybe when President Warren is inaugurated in 2017 we can truly move away from the cliff.

The amusing part is seeing the "sensible centrists" bemoan this COMPLETELY NEW extremism in the Republican party that we have never, ever seen before. Oh how, oh how could we have come to this unprecedented point? HA! 'Twas always thus. Check your history. They've just lost the ability to wrap it in the economic and militaristic "grownups in charge" window dressing they used to know how to use.

I hope these guys stay on this hobby horse the rest of the year. The worst thing would be if they rediscovered their Machiavellian shrewdness and remembered how to win in November. I remain confident right now that, without their BFF Osama Bin Laden releasing scary videos every few months, the public is no longer enthralled with this bunch and their transparent authoritarianism in "freedom" drag.

Keep on crowing boys. Your overconfidence is going to bring you down.


UPDATE: Oh, but he's SORRY! Isn't that enough?

(Also, ain't nobody who can deconstruct the fools as deftly as the mighty Cerberus.)

You and I have seen what time does, haven't we?

Also, in the world of life and death, a decent, if sometimes cloying, pop performer sadly popped his clogs this week. Davy Jones was, of course, more a TV star than a musician, but somehow at the end of the Monkees' original run, he managed to write this excellent song (that also features Neil Young sitting in on lead guitar). Remember him like this.