Me three

Although I’d prolly want to spin this line to be a bit more sympathetic toward the street-theatre crowd, this from Tim Burke is pretty close to what I’ve been trying to say about my own disillusion with the peace movement, ever since Gulf War I. I remember being out in front of the White House in ‘91, and hearing people chanting “the whole world is watching” while me and my friends were getting arrested, and all I could think was “no, it isn’t.” That was a cool slogan in Chicago in ‘68, but to repeat it now is to hope for the effectiveness of a particular shallow sort of ritualistic voodoo - or to have completely foresworn any hope for political effectiveness at all, in favor of the peace “demo” ritual itself as an empty exercise. I’m not worried so much about statist repression, although that may be a valid warning as well. But really, at this point the stakes are too high for the opposition to be cavalier about irrelevance. We’vegot the worst. president. ever. to contend with right now, and we need a plan for his political defeat that will actually make sense to people and win support.

So it goes.

I just don’t have anything to say these days, but I don’t care. Whatever. I can’t be bothered with anything lately. Not much on my mind recently, but so it goes. I’ve just been letting everything wash over me lately. Eh. Shrug.

Stuff worth reading about the war

From The Onion, more than two fucking years ago.

Michael Tomasky, in the American Prospect.

Robert Wright’s outstanding piece in Slate about consequences of this thing over the longer term.
And I’m sure there’s more, but that’s about all I can stand right now.

I’d damn near forgotten how horrible and portentous it feels, knowing that your country is dropping heavy munitions on a people half a world away. Knowing that in this case particularly the US is the aggressor, acting with reckless disregard for world opinion, it’s all the more dismaying. Just a really bleak and strangely empty yet very heavy feeling. I don’t really know what else to say, except these are dark days indeed - perhaps the darkest I can remember seeing.

The scene.org (see previous entry) thing is working, and all the Lichen choons ever are up.

Keen new little web discovery this morning: the microsound mailing list and its homepage. The mp3 archives of the list’s various remixing projects have a lot of really cool glitchy post-techno sounds. The mcdonna project, which takes Sonic Foundry’s Madonna remix contest to undreamed-of lengths, is especially cool. I suspect I will be subscribed to this list real soon now.

just wanted to see whether this is the way to post an entry here that has no title. either this will work, or the whole entry will try to be the title - in which case I suppose I’ll delete the whole thing. So if you’re reading this, that means either it worked, or you have some kind of timing. Assuming it works, probably very few of my entries will have titles from now on. (Or, more accurately, they’ll all have null titles, except for those few where I decide it makes sense to have a title.) I guess this’ll make this blog none too handy for RSS readers, but trying to title blog entries makes me feel like a fool.

Make it happening

Dang. I was doing so well there, update-wise, for a while. Lately though, not so much. And I’m afraid I don’t have much content with which to rectify the situation, right at the moment. I did want to say that I have been very much enjoying listening to the Boards of Canada lately, and that their web site is extremely cool, although it does require Shockwave. The design and programming of the site appears to have been done by one Mr. James Tindall, the dude responsible for one of my favorite bits of web art ever, thesquarerootof-1 (another Shockwaved interactive thingo).

Microsonic Folk

If you frequent, as I have been known to do, discussion forums on the topic of electronic music, there are a couple of things it doesn’t take long to notice. The first thing is virtually all of the participants are themselves musicians or (as the lingo goes) producers of electronic music of varying styles and quality. While the subject may turn to fannish praises of “name” acts, the talk is far more often about actually making these kinds of music, usually from a more or less practical (i.e. not so much theoretical) standpoint. It is pretty much impossible to find a site where the discussion of techno (or similar/related) music takes place purely or predominantly from the perspective of the listener or fan.
The second thing to notice is that something about the first thing really seems to bug some of the people after a while. A thread will resurface with periodic inevitablity with everyone wondering where the “real” listeners are - or lamenting that most of the audience for this post-techno music appears to be other post-techno musicians. (This is also subtext in many other threads, e.g. about how to do “promotion” and such - it boils down to the search for an audience.)

Now on the one hand, who wouldn’t want a cushy recording contract and the chance to retire on royalties? It’s the rock n roll version of hitting the lotto. As such dreams usually do, this one seems to me to be entirely missing the point. A large part of what’s been cool and just really neat about techno from even its earliest warehouse rave incantations, has been the dedication to the project of tearing down the myth of the Rock Star. The music is anonymous - the audience is the show. In the newest editions of post-techno, IDM, and microsound, the principle has been taken a step further: everyone stays home, hooked to their machines, and there’s no show at all - just bedrooms and headphones. (The even more recent phenomenon of groping attempts to return this process to traditional venues of rock spectacle via laptop “performance” really does little more than provide a public demonstration of how thoroughly tied to programming as such this music really is - and how poorly it therefore lends itself to the typical expectations of a pop music show.) So anyway, my point here (such as it is) is that as someone who both programs and listens to electronic music, I don’t find it a problem at all that any listeners I might find are apt to be fellow musicians. On the contrary, I find it exciting. What I see happening on these boards is that people are sharing with each other both their own original musical works (via audio file trading), along with tips and techniques to enable one another to create more music. And that all looks to me pretty much exactly like an emerging folk music tradition - one that happens to be taking place online, creating works primarily for computer, but otherwise in its general social dynamics something rather like the process traditionally taking place around various American blues-based musics for stringed instruments.