Privatizing Profit, Socializing Risk

"We should not try to return to ‘business as usual’. It is business as usual which has got us into the mess. What we need is a paradigm shift. We cannot simply return to the old mixed economy, balancing the rampant follies of the so-called free market with appropriate government ownership and intervention. We must address the underlying issues. Behind the sudden new squeals for help from the very rich we must listen to the long-term cries from the very poor."
-NT Wright (You can read the full text of the speech on the Empire Remixed blog).

Amazing how quickly those cries get answered isn't it? Corporations, banks, and financiers start floundering because of their own greed and stupidity... and it's the one crisis that governments all over the world actually respond to -- and quickly. Debt relief? Global warming? AIDS in Africa? Nah.

Existential Angst and Cute Dim-Witted Dogs

I swear I laughed at loud at every panel of this comic.
(Click on it to enlarge it).

Artistic Voices (Assembly as Authorship)

We make out of our quarrels with each other rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
-Yeats

I write plays because dialogue is a more respectable way of contradicting yourself.
-Tom Stoppard

If you are too serious you are in danger of having everything taken at face value, instead of being allowed to have layers.
-Joanna Newsom

I don't know why people can't see entertainment and enlightenment as part of the same concept.
-Evan Rachel Wood

Most of our funniest songs are about the saddest moments in my life.
-Derek Malakian


A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity, or rather, the better his poetry the more sincere his life. His life is an experiment in living... while we honour those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
-Yeats

My best writing cannot exist without my worst self. Or so I say.
-Johann Kwan

I'm not anything to get terribly excited about, but I want people to listen to my problems.
-Chris Ludecke

Merry Christmas!

Courtesy of me, Joy Electric, and some painstaking Lego animator.

Girl vs. Woman

This is something my gir-- err, lover -- wrote up for me, after giving a good rant to me about it on the phone. It definitely made me pause and think; I trust it will the same for you!

I decided the other day that I would rather be called a woman than a girl. I think that calling adult women 'girls' infantilizes and disempowers us. A girl is a child, weak, impressionable, requiring parental supervision and guidance, unable to look after herself. A woman, on the other hand, is an adult, strong, competent, independent. A girl is somebody that a man can control; a woman is someone who can stand up to him, doesn't need him, and won't take his crap. When was the last time you saw a sign at a strip club that said "Women!?" You didn't, because they all say "Girls!"

I am not going to apologize or pretend that I am not what I am. I am a woman. I'm intelligent, educated, competent, I'm completely capable of taking care of both myself and, if need be, others, and I even have body hair. I'm not going to be horribly offended when somebody calls me a girl, but I think a culture that hesitates to call women what they are is one that is still afraid of what they are. I think that kicking the 'girl' habit is a small way of erasing the persistent paternalism that, at this point, really shouldn't be informing us any more (not like it ever should have to begin with, but we can't change that).

Over-the-Counterculture

I think this just might be my favourite sentence I've written so far. (Though I'm not sure that's saying much. For one thing it's only dubiously grammatical and definitely a little run-on, but I'm going to say that's for rhetorical effect).

"Today we live in a marketplace of identity, with people adopting a consumeristic attitude toward the construction of their greatest purchase — themselves — picking and choosing from the available styles, ideas, cultures, and spiritualities; customizing the details of each element to suit themselves; yet always remaining non-committal and un-affiliated, instantly discarding whatever element isn't appealing; individualism on crack, on steroids — 'it's all about me and what I want.' "

Railed the guy busy constructing an on-line identity via a blog.

(It originally occured near the end of Part 3 of my previously mentioned Deconstructing Religion post, in the section called 'Dipping a Toe in Postmodernity').

It's Done!

I finally killed it. (It almost killed me).

All the parts to my ' Deconstructing Religion ' post are finally done.

"For a while I wanted to be uploaded into an immortal machine intelligence when I died, but then immortal machine intelligences got all popular..."
(The character 'Hannelore' from Jeph Jacques's Questionable Content).

Melody and Avant-Garde Notational music

Okay. So I admit, one of the big reasons I want on that two-post rant about how 'classical music' is a really inappropriate term is so I could could post this, and not be annoyed by being forced to use dumb terms.

I came across this while reading an issue of Gramophone (an ironic name since they're a magazine devoted to what I call 'notational' music). It's two composers talking about the perils of using melody in modern notational music, and I found it interesting. In talking about why there's so little melody, so little tunes one can sing or hum, in modern/avant-garde notational music, they're getting right to the heart of why it's so 'hard' and inaccessible to most people, in a very practical way.

"I do admit to a sadness that we have almost lost the permission to include a tune that the world will remember in a contemporary concert composition... I don't think creative artists and certainly not many of the critical fraternity have really accepted the artistic consequences of social and political democracy. Most of our ideas of high art are still formed in a pre-democratic age -- when not many people had access to arts and culture. I wonder if we haven't got to make some sort of re-adjustment for the fact that many people now have access to music. Of course that audience -- those who perhaps haven't studied music deeply, but none the less love it -- is being catered to (I suppose you'd say that's what pop music's for, or musical theatre, or Raymond Gubbay concerts of favourite classics) but I just wonder whether there might be room for new composers to find something that will transcend these boundaries of taste and education.
"Having said that, I absolutely respect the right of every composer to write music they have to write. Composers stand somewhere in the spectrum of being explorers or magpies. Those who are called to explore and discover new sound worlds and new structures must do that. Those of us that are really magpies just gather sounds in the air from wherever they come and use them to just fill in their nest and make something of it. And I would like there to be a bit more permission for magpies."
- Choral composer John Rutter.

The other composer, Julian Anderson, had this theory that maybe in the wake of the two world wars, "idealism become discredited to a degree that immediate access to emotion of melody" was viewed with suspicion and could no longer be allowed. He said today, composers need to
get beyond this taboo, but without ignoring "the marvellous side of what came up between 1950 and 1970 [in avant-garde music] in terms of colour, harmony, texture, and so on."

(It was the March 2008 edition of Gramophone if you really must know, and the interview was called "Where are today's tunes?").

Notational Music and the Story of Harmony

In my last post I said that the fact the music is notated has had a defining impact on the music that we traditionally call 'classical.' (For some of the reasons why this is an inadequate and inappropriate name, see the last post). If we think about it as 'notational music' we are close to putting our finger on something essential about it; the fact it is written down has both formed and informed the music itself.

For example...
One of the unique things about music in general is how fleeting and intangible it is. It isn't like the visual arts, which produces art you can take in at a glance; there's nothing material about the sound itself that you can perceive or interact with. Music unfolds within time, structuring time even as it flows through it, all by means of distinct sound events linked by time, if nothing else.

Notation is a very powerful tool that allows you to visualize-conceptualize these 'sound events' (I'll oversimplify and call them 'notes' from now on) by mapping them onto a grid, reducing their placement in time to something you can see right in front of you. This makes it easy to see how each individual note interacts and relates to every other note that is occurring both simultaneously and sequentially (i.e. all the other notes happening at the same time, as well as before and after).

This visual representation allowed European musicians to conceive of the notion of harmony in the first place: first as several simultaneous melodies (polyphony - think of a fugue by Bach), then as chords progressing to some tonal goal, supporting a main melody (homophony - think of a Mozart sonata, where, for example a violin plays over piano chords). Without the device of notation, it would be near-impossible for one person to hold all the information in their head that makes up the harmony of even a relatively simple 'classical' piece. People that do memorize the full harmony of a simple piece (for example, a solo piano piece) can generally only do so because they have become so fluent with the notation that they have internalized it. They have basically memorized and internalized a series of rules and conventions of harmony that could not have developed independent of a means to write them down.

(A rough analogy: it's not that hard to imagine memorizing a play -- say a monologue -- but it's hard to imagine someone writing a whole play in their head. Or better yet, someone could, but it would probably be in verse, with a lot of repetition, rhyming, parallelism, and other mnemonic devices, like in the epic poems that bards from various cultures recite. It's impossible to imagine a whole genre of long prose plays developing without the medium of writing.)

So there we have it: notation made possible what is often called the distinctive development of Western music -- harmony. On the other hand, it also helps explain the traditional rhythmic deficiency of this notational music -- rhythms are easier to feel than they are to write. So while Europeans developed the art of combining simultaneous tones to high level through notation, cultures like those of India and Africa developed rhythm to great heights of complexity and dynamism through aural and oral means.

Notational Music

So what do you call music that's currently being produced by composers that are heirs the modern-day European classical music tradition (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and friends)?

'Classical music' is just silly because there's nothing classical about it -- it's modern, contemporary music being made now, or in the past few years. It's also just plain confusing, because 'Classical' refers to a period in European music and art (painting, architecture, etc.) coming between the Baroque and the Romantic period. Properly speaking, Bach isn't a Classical musician; he's Baroque. Neither is late Beethoven; he's Romantic. (Mozart and Haydn are Classical).

'Art music ' is elitist. As if the only music that qualifies is 'art' is created by this very specific group, the educated elites of Euro-Western society.

'New music' betrays how narrow the listening interests of anyone using it are. It only makes sense if all you listen to is music from this genre.

Same thing with 'avant-garde.' Obviously, there's avant-garde music outside of this genre -- free jazz, 'pop' musicians like Captain Beefheart, Aphex Twin, and Yoko Ono (yes, gawdammit, some of us do like her music), maybe things like grindcore and even punk itself.

'Elite music' doesn't take into account the shift in our society from an aristocratic to a democratic model. Sure, fans and performers of this music are still disproportinately drawn from the ranks of the rich and best-educated, but it's -- at least in theory -- accessible to anyone.

Therefore, I propose the following term, after much thought and frustration with existing terms and ways of referring to this tradition:
Notational music. This term does not have any judgemental implications, and in simply describing how the music functions it is quite accurate and says something insightful about the music itself -- and the culture that surrounds its creation and performance. In other words, the fact that it is written down and transmitted through writing has a defining affect on it. (More about this in the next post). This distinguishes it from popular, folk, and jazz music, which may be written down, but for whom notation is never necessary, and which has never been central to how it is typically composed, learned, performed, criticized, or talked about.

It also distinguishes it from other elitest 'art' musics in other cultures, who sometimes use a form of notation, (China and Japan, for example), but for whom this writing is more a reminder than a recipe. No one will get a proper idea of what a piece of music sounds like without hearing it performed. But within the Western notational music genre, a piece is considered complete and self-sufficient when it has been written down for the first time by the composer. It does not necessarily need a performance to exist -- or be discussed and criticized -- though one would be nice. (Thus the habit of many of composers of quietly salting away pieces that don't receive performances for many years, if even in their lifetime).

Yep, notational music.
I'm sure it won't catch on.

If they did, then why can't we?

Chapter 11, Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. "Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation, or the threat or use of force as a means of settling disputes with other nations.
For the above purpose, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the State will not be recognized."

Why do you have to lose a war and get an atomic bomb dropped on you to institute such measures?

I'm old-fashioned

I still like to read the newspaper. Here's a few tidbits from today's edition of my daily rag of choice, the Ottawa Citizen.

"If you live in an electronic world... everything on screen in front of you has an egalitarian meaninglessness"
-Naomi Lakritz, commenting on those who watched Abraham Biggs commit suicide on a webcam.

"Vegans sneer at vegetarians the way nuns sneer at premarital virgins. Amateurs."
-columnist Jack Knox

"Teaching music doesn't work. Teaching the child to love music does work."
-Valery Lloyd-Watts, (retired concert pianist, Suzuki method proponent, and apparently one of Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women, according to a list that was just compiled)

My hero

Click on the comic to see a bigger version. (Blogger refuses to display a larger image thumbnail).

Dear Anti-Abortion Activists and Christian Conservatives

Hi. Um, it's been a while since we talked. Look, I respect your convictions, share your distaste for destroying life, and generally feel like fetuses are kind of getting the raw end of the stick. (D'you ever get the creeping feeling that its not just a women's right to control her body that's at stake but people's right to consequence-free sex?). And hey excuse the digression, but speaking of destroying life, have you noticed what we're doing to a lot of the animal and plant life of this planet? What do you suppose God thinks of that? Anyways, like I said I respect your convictions... I definitely have a real problem with the methods you're using, though. You're really freaking people out and generating a lot of hatred and enmity. I don't feel like Jesus would really be into that. And speaking of that Jesus guy, have you ever noticed how disinterested he (and any of his apostles) was in using politics, laws, or any form of coercion to change the world? (And they lived in a society that did some pretty atrocious things quite regularly and legally).

I have some suggestions for you. Please hear me out, if you would.

If you really think abortion is wrong, a national tragedy, a silent holocaust, or even just kind of too bad, why don't you try to work on creating a society where young women will face no stigma and negligible disadvantage (social, economic etc.) for getting pregnant and choosing to have their child? Wouldn't that be life-affirming? And why don't you do your bit to create a society where every conceived child was effectively guaranteed a good, loving family -- not because some bureaucratic government made grand statements and created ineffective programs, but because people so loved and valued children that they were willing to look after them and raise them regardless of whose genes they shared? In other words, to be really practical, why don't you adopt a child? I mean, at least one. Let me say it one more time... If you actually care about abortion, why don't you adopt a kid?

Because you know, last I heard, even with a hundred of thousands of abortions every year, there are still a lot of kids that never get adopted, and never have a good, loving family. How many 'good Christian families' do you think there are in Canada? (Not enough to actually take care of those kids, apparently -- sorry did I say that out loud?). And hey, don't you just love that part of the Christian story that's all about how God has adopted us into his family, and gave us a home and all the privelege of being his kids? 'Go and do likewise' eh?

You know, I've noticed that it's easy to rant about the sin and failures of others... it's hard to take a look at yourself and find something constructive to do though. I wish you success on your journey towards doing just that, and hope you wish me the same. (As a matter of fact, this letter has actually been part of my attempt to not get caught in the vicious circle of 'criticize but don't do nothin' . I've tried to reign myself in and not be too off-putting, even as I keep in mind that Jesus tended to be pretty blunt and critical of other religious people -- not the 'sinners' and 'heathen' that he so regularly hung out with). Anyways, I'd love to hear from you and talk to you about some of this stuff, if you're up for it.

With love and cautious respect -- and very sincerely,
Tim Kitz.

Rhetorical Questions from a Language Purist

Does virgin wool come from celibate sheep?

Yep, vigin wool -- as opposed to what?

Promiscuous cotton?

How can food be anything other than organic?

(If it wasn't, how could we eat it?)

Why don't we use 'gruntled' as a synonym for satisfied?

Why not 'rebuttle' arguments? Or call the socially apt 'outroverts'?

And isn't it about time 'tricknology' was in the dictionary?

On the other hand,

'de-plane' is not a verb

or even a word.

Do you think incidents of air rage would decrease

if airplane employees stopped constantly using it?

And the only people that refer to Toronto as 'TO'

are wannabe gangsters,

like the hardcore suburbanites

that do their graffiti in eraseable chalk

(and oh, was it a coincidence you scribbled your promises of eternal devotion in pencil?)

And speaking of which (gangsters not heartbreak),

what does it say about you

that you think gang-banging is a form of rape?

[Written way back in fall 2004]

"It is better to be a crystal and broke
Than to remain perfect like a tile upon the housetop"
-Chinese proverb
(quoted on p. 145 of Morton's Japan: Its History of Culture, McGraw-Hill, 1994)

Deconstructing Religion

I have to admit, one of my main motivations in creating this blog was to provide a host for this, my attempt to deconstruct religion. (And because I refuse to toss around poorly understood and hazily defined words, I feel obliged to tell you that by deconstruction I mostly just mean an attempt to call into question oppositions and rigid distinctions).

Because one of my underlying assumptions is that we use words to separate ourselves from others, and that this 'othering' process helps us construct a secure sense of identity. We define ourselves as different — even the opposite — of a group of people who possess a characteristic that we dislike. Often our characterization is a little suspect, (if not blatantly inaccurate) and it says more about who we would like to be than it does about who they are.

For example, gender identity is almost meaningless without a contrasting, 'opposite sex,' in spite of the fact that every gender sterotype is just that — a stereotype so riddled with 'exceptions' that it's more lie than truth. Similarly, the Canadian colonies confederated largely to prevent themselves from being gobbled up by their neighbour to the south, and 'not-American' has remained the only concrete element of what is a pretty amorphous and elusive identity. (And that's in spite of the fact there's relatively little separating us. To pick on a few things we see as uniquely Canadian, the US prides itself on its multiculturalism these days, generally does a better job of protecting the environment than Canada, and has a government that pays 30% of health care costs -- our 'universal' healthcare system pays 70%).

Meanwhile, religious people often think of nonbelievers as sinful and sex-obsessed. Quite a few atheists seem to think that since religious people believe in things they can't prove, they're all irrational and incapable of thinking independently. But as my favourite dead French Christian anarchist writer (ok, so there's not a lot of them around) once wrote, ""The fact is it is much easier to judge faults according to an established morality [or classificatory scheme] than to view people as living wholes and to understand why they act as they do." (Jacques Ellul, Christianity and Anarchy, p.7)

Everyone wants to think that they're totally unique and different, (un-labell-able, if you will, even as we're constantly labelling others for convenience sake). A lot of it is our unhealthy cult of the individual, but there is something natural and understandable about this impulse. As William James said, "Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say, 'I am myself, myself alone." (Way back in the 1929 Modern Library edition of The Varieties of Religious Experience, p.10).

All religions are not one, and neither are all humans. What I've written isn't an attempt to wish away real difference, just an invitation to realize that we may have more in common than we originally thought. (This has got to be one of the great challenges we presently face — how to acknowledge and make room for difference without letting the poison of 'othering', denigration, factionalism, and conflict seep in. 'Tolerance' might be a good, but 'understanding' and 'respecting' is better. And one of my assumptions — and deeply held beliefs — is that if we truly understand something or someone, respect will automatically flow out from that. I think one of the simplest ways this works is that as we begin to understand others, we actually start realizing they aren't quite as different as we originally thought. It's not just about 'doing unto others,' it's about 'seeing ourselves in others,' and vice versa.)

It's also an attempt to think about a very charged word that we toss around all the time. Surely, 'religion' is a very important word, denoting a very important 'thing,' but after all what is religion? What does it mean to be a religious person in a secular society? A spiritual person in a world that doesn't believe in spirit? Why should a secular world care about this weird little thing called 'religion', about these fantasies of some sort of 'spirit?'

Part 1 - The Sacred (AKA Understanding Religion -- The Divine Play)
Part 2 - The Spiritual (AKA Holy Holism, Batman! The Breath of Spirit)
Part 3 - The Secular (AKA Now Where Did We Go Wrong? A Geneology of the Super-Natural)
A Personal Note (To be read before or after the other parts -- or not at all)
An Attempt at a Summary (ditto)

Revolution Music and Over-the-counterculture

Further to that last post, I feel like the transformative impact of music (and art) is seriously overstated. The 'establishment' isn't living in fear of rock, it's busy studying its success at business school.

Beware of people praising to the skies a particular thing, when they they just so happen to make their living creating that thing. That goes for musicians and artists (and the academics) just as well as it does for vacuum-cleaner salesmen. Music (or art) is wonderful -- my life basically revolves around it. But it isn't the end-all and be-all of life -- just one of many worthwhile interesting aspects of life, no better than any other.

That said, these two things are awesome. They've gone a long way to dissolving my cynicism about art these past few months. It really is possible to make art that challenges 'the powers that be' in electrifying ways...



This is CocoRosie's subversive cover of Akon's misygonistic tune, where they give a voice to the pole dancer he's busy objectifying in the original. (If you're as cut off from mainstream culture as I am -- an edited version of this songs was a #1 hit but I didn't come across it until CocoRosie -- you can watch the original here. You'll get the idea after the first minute or so -- I know I haven't managed to sit through the whole thing, so don't feel obliged to).



CocoRosie - lyrics to You Wanna Fuck Me



Now this is Sinead O'Connor a week after she tore up a photo of the pope on live national tv, as a way of protesting then fresh revelations about sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, and the way the hierarchy systematically protected offenders. (She was abused as a child herself).




Is anybody else amazed at the irony of trying to boo a performer off the stage at a tribute to Bob Dylan? (And what she did was quite a bit more gutsy than just plugging in an electric guitar...)

Ursula LeGuin's translation of Book 1, chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching

The Use Of Not

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn't
is where it's useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot's not
is where it's useful.

Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn't,
there's room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn't.

Art's Overrated (Dismantling the Cult of the Artist)

That's right. I think our idea of 'art' is very artifical, finding its basis in more general principles of specialization that have a really corrosive effect on our lives. Think of a carpenter and a composer (or painter) living in the Baroque or medieval period, for example. There actually wasn't a whole lot of difference between what these two craftsmen (craftspeople) did. In their work, they exercised creativity, autonomy, self-expression and skill. They planned the work out from beginning to end, performed just about all of it themselves, and did their best to make sure it was the highest quality they could produce, learning and gaining skill with everything they made -- all in all, they investing a little bit of themselves in everything they produced. But at some point art separated completely from craft, ordinary work, and ordinary life, and we evacuated all of the creativity and spirit out of the ordinary things we do, leaving art as some sort of sacred, magical thing that only 5% of the population ('artists') get to do, or that the rest of us get to do it with 5% of our time (a 'hobby')... the rest of the time our work and what we do leaves us no space for creativity, autonomy, self-expression, etc. Lame.

What I'm trying to say is that the way you made music and made a chair was basically the same before the Industrial Revolution (which relied on an extreme division of labour) ... the maker would get to exercise quite a bit of bit of creativity, autonomy, and skill. Today, most chairs are made by factory workers who are left bereft of such things. Their work is repetitive, boring, uncreative, fragmentary (a worker contributes only one tiny action to the creation of a chair), and entirely determined by others above them. The ideal worker is a pre-programmed drone.

In a lot of ways, the modern divinization of art is an attempt to retreat and escape from the effects of industrialism, but paradoxically, all it does is support the dehumanization of work by saying that creativity, independence, and self-expression is reserved for 'artistic' activities. The pursuit of 'pure art,' 'art for art's sake,' often involving an indifference bordering on antagonism to any potential audience ('I don't write/paint/create for people, it's just for me, and the more people I offend the better' -- the cult of the maverick, revolutionary artist) seeks to remove these values even farther -- as far as possible -- from ordinary life.

(And for the record, there is no such thing as 'pure' art. All art is functional. Even the most abstract art of art serves the function of reinforcing certain values, and delineating social groupings -- at the very least, between those who 'get it' and those who don't. 'Coincidentally' those who 'get it' tend to be the economically priveledged and well-educated).

Why Punk and Drunk Just Don't Go Together

Went to a punk show last night. Cool to see a Canadian hardcore legend (that'd be DOA), almost as old as the Sex Pistols, contemporaries with Black Flag and Bad Brains, and still going strong. Johnny Shithead (the only remaining original member) managed to be really fun (mock guitar-hero pyrotechnics) and really serious (political) at the same time. Hmmm. Somehow, too much modern punk seems to have lost that wonderful combination.

Probably would have enjoyed it more if me and my friend weren't both a little sick. It also would've helped if there wouldn't have been beer spilled all over the moshpit area.

(God, I'm getting too old).

Hello, kids, please listen to Grandpa Tim's advice here: if you want to mosh, don't bring your beer bottle in with you. I know you like pretending to be all rebellious and stuff, but you're crossing the line from rebellious to just plain stupid here. It will spill, and besides the dangerous hazard this will create for everyone else, you'll be out some beer. (And that's the best case scenario -- you could lose the entire beer, and the floor could just end up littered with glass -- never fun to land on). Believe it or not, punk is also supposed to be about taking care of each other (that'd be why we instantly pick each other up when we fall).

One more reason all punk shows should just be all-age shows.

In Honour of DIS

Three kids are playing on the playground, and one turns to the others and says "Are they making us go to school or are we learning for the sake of beauty?"
-Jack White

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
-Neils Bohr

"Public education: The bureaucratic process of replacing an empty mind with a closed one."
-Brooke McEldowney

"It's only work if somebody makes you do it."
-Calvin (from Calivin and Hobbes, as written by Bill Watterson)

Christian death metal (and other oxymorons)

So this year I'm going to be trying to write an honours essay (like a thesis, but for undergrads) on Christian Death Metal. And yes, such a thing really does exist, and some such bands that play it are even quite good and fairly popular in the world of metal. Zao and As I Lay Dying, for instance. Stop rolling your eyes!

Anyways, the main theoretical issue I think I'm going to be grappling with is whether there's something inherent in the music that lends itself to a certain feel/message, or whether the relation between the music and the message is arbitray, so you can just just graft any discourse onto it willy-nilly.

If you're strange like me, and something in the above paragraphs pique your interest, you may want to look at what I have so far, (god knows I'll take all the feedback and help I can get!):
Rough Outline
[A far from static plan, with links to sectional drafts, thoughts, and annotated bibliographies].

As I go, I'm planning to post as much of my writing as I have, probably linked into the Rough Outline, though I may also add fresh links direct into this post. And of course, the nice thing about google documents is they automatically update, so if you're really crazy you can follow my thought and writing process all the way through to what will hopefully be the final product. Or just jump in at some random point and never look back!

If you want to witness the glory that is Christian death metal, you could do worse than to try:
Mortification - Scrolls of the Megilloth video and lyrics
Zao - Savannah live video, and lyrics


Incidentally, John Coltrane is awesome my friends, and on Blue Train he has a seriously wonderful trombonist (among others) playing alongside him. (Listening to it right now). Definitely worth checking out.

300

"In which a small band of racially-pure Europeans save democracy and freedom from the mixed Asian hordes of an androgynous despot. They are betrayed by a cripple who should have been killed for his deformity, and who was seduced by the sexual lasciousviousness said despot was able to offer. Fortunately, good still triumphs over evil."

[For anyone who doesn't know, the movie is a shot-for-shot remake of Frank Miller's graphic novel].


Frank Miller used to be one my of my favourite comic book authors. As far as I'm concerned The Dark Knight Returns is just about the best superhero comic ever written, and though it took a while to grow on me, the long-awaited sequel The Dark Knight Strikes Again is at least as brilliant. But it's hard to have much respect for him these days. 300 is a good story, and I enjoyed it as such when I finally watched the movie version this summer with a friend. But as soon the movie was over, and we started talking about what the movie seemed to saying... things start getting a little creepy. Then I read Edward Said's Orientalism for a class this fall, and had to do a presentation on it, which really opened my eyes to all that's wrong with this movie.

Those behind the movie/book will (and do) say "relax, it's just a story" and "it has no meaning in (or relation to) the real world." But as Said argues, we in the West have a long history (going back at least as far as Homer's Illiad, and Herodotus' Histories) of portraying 'the East' as both dangerous and decadent. Not only have such attitudes and discourses -- often unconscious -- justified imperialism, they sure become convenient when marshalling support for the latest military adventure out in the Eastern world. Thumbs down, Frank Miller.

He's not exactly language proficient

"What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? ... How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender."
-Terry Jones, Terry Jones's War on the War on Terror

Dancing About Architecture

(An Untimely -- seriously, it might have been three in the morning -- Meditation on Writing About Music -- and other silly things -- prompted by an essay on jazz I was struggling to finish)

Would a jazz essay be one you an essay you wrote -- improvised -- on the spot, without reference to notes? Or an oral presentation, given without notes? Would a free jazz essay then be a stream-of-consciousness spoken-word piece that refused to follow the tyranny of linear logic and grammar? Then a fusion jazz essay would be an improvised oral presentation with Powerpoint. A bebop jazz essay would be an improvised oral presentation given while high, and a swing jazz essay would be given while dancing, and a Marsalis-inspired essay would take itself so seriously that it would rob the improvisational process of any fun or excitement.

How to fall in love with old-time music

-Wean your fledgeling tastes on authentic (whatever that means) grunge, punk, metalcore, anti-folk or any other kind of music that values a raw sound and a delivery that's got some blood and guts to it.
-Fall in love with Johnny Cash through his American Recordings. (Listening to Willie Nelson's Teatro album doesn't hurt either). Repudiate your belief that country is inherently crappy (that's probably just urbanite prejudice anyways).
-Watch O Brother Where Art Thou? Realize how much fun the music is.
(Later it will strike you as just a touch smooth and overproduced).
-Watch Ghost World. Share Enid's entrancement with 'Devil Got My Woman.'
-Listen to New Orleans Jazz, possibly the most joyful music ever made.
-Discover Lightnin' Hopkins, the gateway drug to old acoustic blues.
-Revel in the aching beauty of the Stanley Brothers. They put the blue in bluegrass.
-Listen to Skip James and the Carter Family, the lonesomest, spookiest, most gorgeous music you can imagine.
-Dig deeper and find the dirtiest, rawest music out there... Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, and Roscoe Holcomb. (Mix Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson in to taste).
-Enjoy.
-Share with others

Specific recommendations:
Lightnin' Hopkin's 'Best of' put together by Columbia actually is. Check out Mississippi John Hurt's Folkways recordings, while you're at it for a really genial, wonderful take on country blues.
I like the Stanley Brother's Columbia Sessions, but a lot of bluegrass fans prefer the Mercury recordings.
The Carter Family's Decca Sessions, though the Columbia ones are also good.
The definitive New Orleans Jazz band was King Oliver's Creole Band, especially during the years Louis Armstrong was playing second cornet. These recording are also criminally hard to get a hold of, unfortunately.
"The Legendary Son House, Father of the Folk Blues" has been re-labelled and re-packaged various ways. The original copyright holder should be Columbia, the recording made in the 40s.
Roscoe Holcomb has a couple of recordings on the Smithsonian Folkways Record label. Start with the first.
Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson only recorded enough music to fit on one album, so in whatever form and with whatever title you find it it will probably be complete.
Ditto for Skip James when it came to his original recordings in the '20s and 30s. Avoid his '60s folk revival recordings, at least for the first taste.

Telling it like it is

Sometimes the best political commentary doesn't come from the talking heads.

"...if 'they' are protecting a religion of peace by doing violence, we are protecting democracy by betraying it."
-film reviewer Jay Stone, trying to articulate what the movie Body of Lies may be saying about the War on Terror ("Shades of Grey," Ottawa Citizen, Oct 18, 2008, F1)

"...[they're] rigging a game that privatizes profit but socializes risk..."
-cartoonist GB Trudeau (9 Oct 2008 Doonesbury)

Caveat and Addenda

Further to that thing on Marxism from the last post...

1) The last paragraph is assuming either of those actions -- ending economic exploitation or dismantling just about all systems of power and exploitation -- is possible. I realize that's a huge assumption and nobody's done it yet. (Hunter-gatherer society is essentially free of exploitation, but nobody seems to have managed to return to that ideal yet, either by literally returning to the pre-modern or coming up with some postmodern decentralized exploitation-free community -- tantalizing hints nonwithstanding). But of course, just because something hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

2) Marx didn't just create a powerful idealogy. He created a powerful ideology that was explicitly violent, and that bought into the idea that 'the means justify the end.' This ideology gave evil people a powerful excuse to kill and oppress others -- and believe they were doing good! Like other poisonous ideologies, it clearly defined almost anyone that disagreed with them as 'the enemy' -- the enemy of peace, justice, freedom, etc.

3) This was not just all theoretical. Marx himself put his ideas into practice in authoritarian ways -- witness how he seized control of the pre-existing communist movement, and especially the First International. The First International was created to unite socialists of all kinds and create solidarity between them across national boundaries. Of course, by the time it was done, anarchists, labour unions, and just about any other socialist other than Marxist communists had been forced out. Marx's main opponent in the First International, the anarchist Bakunin, predicted that if Marx's followers ever took power they would be as bad as the rulers they replaced, and commented that "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, but socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality."

What's Wrong With Marxism (The anarchist critique) or "It's power, stupid!" .

Marx is awesome. Seriously. A large part of 20th century intellectual history mostly consisted of working out his original thoughts, especially if you include attempts to oppose and disprove his ideas. His analysis and critique of capitalist society and industrialism is brilliant, insightful, and remarkably prescient (given how the Industrial Revolution was still in a... well, not embryonic but at least 'toddler-ish' state). But like a lot of other thinkers that graced us with brilliant, stirring diagnoses of the problems of modern society (Rousseau and Nietzsche spring to my mind) , he's wasn't so hot when it came to offering a solution. Which proves once again that it's easy to criticize, but much harder to offer a positive, superior alternative. (Please recognize the irony in me writing that last sentence considering what this entry is called).

Most put-downs of Marx are based on gross oversimplifications, if not misrepresentations, of his thought so why not add one more? It's also extremely dangerous to generalize about a movement as diffuse and resolutely unclassifiable as anarchism, but I'm going to presume to speak for anarchism here, and articulate 'the' anarchist critique of Marxism, (an act of almost unparalleled folly and pride). Here goes.

The problem with modern society isn't capital, it's power. People desire and wield power to dominate and exploit others, thinking this will make them better off. They'll use whatever means they can get their hands on: violence, hierarchy, institutions, structures, ideology, tradition, etc. Economics is a particularly powerful one — maybe the means par excellence, and capitalism grants oppressors one of the best economic tools of exploitation yet invented. It's all-embracing, insatiable, innately and constantly expansionary, and in a way quite subtle — much more so then slavery or serfdom, for example. (Though it's potentially less sustainable — will the capitalists manage to rule as long as the Pharoahs?).

But it's not the only way, and exploitation will not just automatically disappear if you eliminate economic exploitation. It certainly won't if you don't systematically dismantle all the other systems of power and domination in society. By creating such a powerful ideology (powerful because there's so much truth in it), Marx handed a excellent tool to those who oppress and exploit. The blood of a hundred million people killed in the name of Marxism bear witness to this fact.

"On the Origins of Art"

"Maybe urban people invented art to make up for the lack of beauty in their lives."
-(Me... after looking at another spectacular view of the St. Lawrence River, 2 weeks into a bike trip through rural Quebec)

Life in a Christian Commune (My year at JPUSA)

The main thing that inspired me to start this blog was a desire to post this. 'This' is a paper I wrote in a first-year anthropology about Jesus People USA, a Christian commune in Chicago that I lived with for almost a year before starting university. (Founded in 1972 and now numbering around 500 people, JPUSA is one of the largest and longest-running communes around). There's nothing particularly scholarly about it, though I passed it off by calling it 'a field notes write-up' — basically, I just told stories about JPUSA and tried to explain how it works and what it's like to live there. In a lot of ways, it was just an excuse to get a lot of my memories and thoughts down on paper, partly so I could look back on it years later.

Ever since I wrote it, I've wanted to get it up on the Internet somehow. There isn't really anything like it out there... most of the stuff on JPUSA on the Internet is either material from their official site, or paranoid 'they're a crazy cult!' kind of stuff. I definitely am pretty sympathetic to them in what I wrote (JPUSA was good to me, on the whole, after all), but I'm also definitely not candy-coating anything. I hope this will be a help to those considering spending at time at JPUSA themselves, as well as anyone else wanting to learn more about them.

It also shouldn't be taken as an exhaustive, or definitive, treatment of JPUSA. I was only there for a year, which in some ways is a long time, and in some ways, no time at all. I'm primarily concerned by how JPUSA was experienced by new young single members, because that was what I and those closest to me experienced.  Broader generalizations (about other areas, about structure, long-term trends and how 'things normally are') are at best how they seemed to a relative newcomer. 

WARNING: It's really long! If you were to print it out, it would total over a hundred pages. Hopefully it's very thorough, too. I'm also a little embarassed by some parts of it, and by the writing stye in general (it was 4 years ago), but here it is, warts and all!

Click on the links below to get started.
Introduction
Part 1 - JPUSA's History ; Part 1 Endnotes
Part 2 - JPUSA Today - Structure
Part 3 - JPUSA Today - Social
Part 4 - Coming and Going
Part 5 - The Future
Afterword