China

Some truly astounding coverage of the earthquake in China on NPR this week. They had two of their regular news personalities in that province preparing for a week of shows from there starting next week. They were conducting an interview at the exact moment that the earthquake happened. Since then they have been following grieving parents and capturing the emotional toll of the tragedy.

Sadly, the effects of the catastrophe in Burma are not as easily conveyed.

One additionally staggering thing about the China situation, especially relative to the school where 900 children died (among many places that children died) , is the effects of the One Child policy. It's unquestionably devastating and unimaginable to have any of your children killed by any means, but to have that be your government mandated only child? That's a whole other world altogether.

Listening

There was a time, and not necessarily too long ago, when the act of buying a new album (call it a CD if you'd like) would involve me hunkering down next to the stereo, usually smack dab between the speakers, listening to the album in its entirety and reading the lyrics as I went. Even on those occasions when I'd rejoined BMG and was faced with the 12 disk bonanza that marked the beginning of all of those adventures, I'd generally get through them in basically the same way, just over several days. Until my current car (2005) I never had a cd player in any car I'd ever had, not including balancing a portable player on MT's lap or the passenger seat when he was unavailable.

The advent of the iPod has, of course, radically altered my music listening experiences. My principle concentrated listening is now done on dog walks. I do listen at work, sometimes to my own music, sometimes to various streaming stations, but because of my pesky responsibilities - phone calls, people asking me stuff - I don't often consider that good listening.

With the iPod has come the urge to rip the CD as soon as possible so I can get it into my iPod for my next walk around the neighborhood. I'll browse through the liner notes and lyrics as it rips, but the scale of time associated with that is so accelerated as to not make for good liner reviewing. And once it's ripped, the CD goes on the shelf, and it's all iPod from there. I now learn lyrics to songs by listening to them, rather than reading them, which perhaps takes longer, but is still satisfying.

I dabbled in the iTunes thing minimally and fairly long after its arrival, eschewing the instant gratification for something solid in my hand. I also harbor a fear of catastrophic data loss, but I now back up my music files so as to minimize that risk. I bought a few songs here and there, and even an album or two because my urge was so great, or I thought the liner notes were unimportant for that particular album/collection. All in all probably less than 50 tracks.

I do, as Dan likes to mock, have an urge to find new music, though I was never particularly cutting edge or adventurous by any reasonable standard. I was raised on FM radio, and remained a fairly mainstream musical fan for nearly my entire life. My tastes remain basically the same, encompassing a variety of genres but overwhelmingly centered on the nebulous notion of 'alternative'. I think that term stopped being especially useful in about 1990, but I suspect all of the readers of this know more or less what I'm talking about.

Buying physical CD's is not an especially cheap endeavor, since other than the mail-order music clubs, the prices have remained essentially unchanged or have gone up since I bought Outlandos d'Amour about 1988. It seems fairly insane to me, and a bit of a racket, but it is what it is. The costs have kept me from expanding my music collection more than I might have otherwise, being reluctant to plunk down $15 for an album I've heard little of.

The opportunities to learn about and be exposed to new music have exploded even while FM radio has become an insipid and flavorless ghost of its former self. Even in our prime listening years FM had gotten far less experimental than it had been even ten years earlier, but by today's standards it was not bad at all. But other than a few stations scattered hither an yon in more enlightened markets, FM is now a steaming shitpile. Thankfully the internet arrived and offered up opportunities for exploration and exposure never before heard.

Prior to that explosion I did try out an interim method, one that is the diret progenitor of the lacksadaisical CMC, namely CMJ: New Music Monthly. This was (and remains - though without my subscription) a monthly CD and mini-magazine filled with all manner of 'alternative' music, a sort of higher general quality Flywheel Sampler. It was a good way to learn about some artists and bands that I'd never heard of without becoming a record store goon. The economics of CD's kept me from buying many of the artists, but I did follow through on a few, and it satisfied my irrational need for new music.

About the time that I found myself not keeping up with that subscription we moved to MA and my new music listening went into a fairly deep lull, placated by a generally excellent local station out here that kept me (along with my own music collection) satisfied. I still bought the occasional album, often by a band already in my collection, but some new ones as well, though all fairly 'mainstream' - played on the radio station above which tended to be about 6 months ahead of the rest of FM radio.

It was really the birth of the CMC that got my interests revived towards seeking new music, along with a weekly podcast about music (yes it's of NPR origin and mentioned prominently in my CMC entries, but good music is good music) and various other sources of musical information that exist among the billions of such places on the vast internet. It didn't really resolve the economic issues, but at least (as with CMJ) I was hearing new good music, stuff that I was unlikely to ever hear spinning through the dial on the radio. It was clear to me that there was a LOT of good 'alternative' music being made, but the distribution scheme had completely changed.

Enter E-Music...a subscription based source of downloadable music. You won't find lots of well-known, major label artists and bands there (though more all the time) but you will find lots of bands like Yo La Tengo and others of that 'toiling in popular obscurity' ilk. For $10 per month you get 30 downloads (all to own and all of higher bitrate than iTunes). It's a bit weird to run out of monthly downloads and be three songs short of an entire album, but for $0.33/song, it's a price I'm willing to pay. I generally work my way around the problem by being very careful about what I download, or fill in the gaps with singles/novelties.

For the equivalent of <$4 for the average album, I'm free to indulge in more experimentation than I've ever felt capable before. I'm still somewhat conservative in my choices (almost always having heard one song by the band) but I've done a couple without hearing a single song, simply based on recommendations and comparisons to other bands I like. What you give up, circling back to the beginnings of this post, are physical things, and especially liner notes. It seems like technology could easily overcome this, but either because of fear of copyright infringement or a lak of interest in the general public, no one seems to offer up their liner notes as part of the purchase, as a pdf or whatever. That bums me out, though I'm buoyed by an infusion of new and interesting music.

I still opt to buy an actual CD for the bands I have a long history with, but I seem to have come to terms with the digital world we live in.

While I typed this I listened to:

Shearwater - unlikely you would have heard anything by them
She and Him - also unlikely
Peter Bjorn and John - they have a song called Young Folks with a catchy whistling part that has gotten some mainstream play

Other great stuff
M. Ward
Bon Iver
Andrew Bird
Arcade Fire
New Pornographers
Belle and Sebastian
Cat Power
The National
Neko Case
Okkervil River

If anyone finds themselves interested in joining e-Music (no long term contract, just by month), I think I can get a bonus for getting someone else to sign up.

Happy listening...

Cool photos...

Here.....

From the volcanic eruption in Chile.

Something new here...

Recalcitrant spring
Keeping your wonders hidden
But once you get the notion, explosion.

Blast from the past...

Oh....boy...everything old....

Reading through a post about the racist element of our voting patterns I came across this little nugget:

[A]t the time, people believed that jazz was the forerunner of the decline of Western civilization. The anti-jazz crusade was motivated by an apocalyptic fear. The anxiety that jazz was "endangering our civilization," as the populist William Jennings Bryant put it in the New York Times in May 1926, was the subtext to many of the voices. People felt, in other words, that the dawn of the Jazz Age heralded the decline of Western Civilization. An assessment in the New York Times pronounced: "The consensus of opinion of leading medical and other scientific authorities, [is that jazz] is harmful and degrading to the civilized races as it always has been among the savages from whom we borrowed it."

Really mindblowing. I for one believe lots of people harbor irrational racist/misogynist/xenophobic leanings, far more than would admit to it publicly, so it's not especially surprising that 16% of Pennsylvanians counted race as a factor in their vote and 54% of that subset said they would vote for McCain rather than Obama. That tells me that more than zero, but less than about 9 percent of people in PA are against electing a black man. Chances are a similar number are against electing a woman. Either way, they need to get the fuck out or wise the fuck up. Old white men have been both a blessing and a curse of this nation, there's no reason to let them have all the fun.

But back to the quote. It is really hilarious to think of jazz as the end of western civilization, and had it not really been a facade hiding a deep streak of racism, it would be laughable. But that was 1926, and the Brown vs Board of Education was 30 years off and The Voting Rights Act was ten years after that. We were hardly an elightened country. Hell, women only had the right to vote for a few short years at that point. And lynchings were still a relatively common event down in teh Bible Belt. Those were the glory years of old white men, and the beginning of the end.

The end can't come soon enough.

Indiana...

America turns its lonely eye to you.


End this....PLEASE!!!!

Ugh...

ABC's debate tonight was a shameful exhibition, mostly on the part of Stephanopolous and Gibson. It would be charitable to call the questions insipid. Does ABC hate America? That is my question. Yuck.

That said, Obama did best when attacked, and Clinton did best on policy. I'm not sure why the question of registering and licensing all hand guns is one that needs to be danced around - who is arguing otherwise - but they both danced like it was 1999. Boy it will be nice when the primary is over.


And what a weird day in the news...on one hand you have the supreme court delivering its verdict on a case of whether it is cruel and unusual to impose the death penalty on child rapists and on the other you have Texas raiding the compound of a Mormon cult marrying off 12 year old girls to men of all ages. Girls who then are bearing children at 13 and 14 years old. One girl they mentioned on NPR was 16 years old and just had her 4th child. Holy fucking shit.


Now back in the old days it was probably fairly normal for females to be married off and begin their job of reproducing (yes, notice the satire) once they passed the age of puberty. That's what puberty was a signal of, and quite common throughout the animal world. Those societies, such as they were, may have also allowed polygamy (or possibly even polygyny) as a acceptable practice (just as with apes and the dominant male) and no one was the wiser for it.

But that really seems beyond the pale at this point. We've generally made the decision that while our parents and adults in general get to tell children what to do, there are some clearly drawn lines in the sand, at least in western society, beyond which parental control can not pass. Arranged marriages are a thing of the past, and coercing naive teenage girls into acting as baby machines with no sense of other possible paths that their lives could take is really sickening.


So, as the TX solicitor general was arguing for the ability to execute child rapists (though different from LA in that TX actually has restrictions on the practice) will this issue bring those two sordid tales together?


For the record, I oppose the death penalty for nearly every crime (excepting perhaps genocide), for a whole host of reasons starting with the practical - more expensive, no evidence of it acting as a deterrent, wildly discriminatory and impossible to administer fairly across racial and economic lines - to the moral - basically that society is not very trustworthy when handing out that degree of justice and a tiny benefit of the doubt (life in prison) seems quite prudent given the possibility of fuck up.

That is all.

Random song

Listening to a show about the music that grew up around Memphis and was significantly responsible for the birth of rock and roll, they played this song...

My Gal is Red Hot by Ronnie Hawkins

My gal is red hot - your gal aint doodley squat!
Yeah! My gal is red hot - your gal aint doodley squat
Well she aint got money, but man she's really got a lot.

Well I gotta gal, six feet four, sleeps in the kitchen
With her face at the door but,
My gal is red hot - your gal aint doodley squat! (repeat)
Well she aint got money, but man she's really got a lot.

Well she walks all night, talks all day
She's the kinda woman gotta have her way, but
My gal is red hot - your gal aint doodley squat! (repeat)
Well she aint got money, but man she's really got a lot.
Oh rock it...

Well she's the kinda woman who's a lounge-around
Spendin' my business all over town,but
My gal is red hot - your gal aint doodley squat! (repeat)
Well she aint got money, but man she's really got a lot.

Well she's a one mans woman which is what I like
But I wish she was a woman change her mind every night, but
My gal is red hot - your gal aint doodley squat! (repeat)
Well she aint got money, but man she's really got a lot.

A version here.

Gotta love the lyrics. Is this the only song in history to use 'doodley squat'? Fantastic.

Left Turn at Albuquerque

Funny, or not funny?

Discuss.

(note - I can't remember the last time I had to spell Albuquerque - it's a total bitch)

For my money, that Bugs Bunny gag is funny mostly by virtue of its repetition. It would have been far less funny if it only showed up in one episode.

The Nine Circles of Political Hell

Inspired (of course) by Dante.

Circle Number One
Inhabited by those truly unaware of the effect politics has on their lives. They spend eternity circumnavigating a large cylinder, always surprised to find themselves back where they started but never realizing why.

Circle Number Two
Inhabited by those who know what is wrong but believe themselves powerless to change it. They spend eternity a stumbling around in the dark, through an ever changing obstacle course they will never be capable of understanding.

Circle Number Three
Inhabited by those that vote against their own best interests, whether because of a single issue, or because they believe they are something they are not. They are presented with a series of choices, only one of which will truly satisfy them, while the others seem to offer bounties, but provide only pain. Every time they chose poorly, an extra poor choice is added to their next set of selections.

Circle Number Four
Inhabited by the politicians who do little but protect their own little fiefdoms, showing no compunction to do anything but that which is most politically advantageous to themselves, but having little general effect on the world. This circle is so crowded that the residents are unable to find space for themselves. They spend eternity searching fruitlessly for vacant space that is filled instantly upon their seeing it.

Circle Number Five
Inhabited predominantly by journalists who have abdicated all personal responsibility to inform the masses and instead focus on the trivial and tawdry. They spend eternity alone and ignored, unable to even hear themselves speak.

Circle Number Six
Inhabited by those that knowingly screw their constituents for personal gain and power. Many pundits also spend eternity here, separate from the journalists above, for they assumed the role of expert when that title was not warranted. All residents of this circle are tormented by bees who fly into their mouths and sting whenever they open them to speak.

Circle Number Seven
Inhabited by the cynical and ruthless enablers. Not politicians themselves, but the mudslingers and scorched earthers. Lee Atwater is the king and Karl Rove is his prince. The effluent from all the circles above them rains down perpetually and they can find no shelter nor means of cleaning themselves.

Circle Number Eight
Inhabited by politicians who achieved their position through no effort of their own and proceeded to exercise power in ways that indicate otherwise, to the great detriment of the many. George W. Bush resides here with a look of complete surprise. He and the rest are to spend eternity toiling, and at the end of each day, all that they have achieved will disappear and they will have to start again from scratch, every day, forever.

Circle Number Nine
Inhabited by Dick Cheney, Richard Nixon, and their ilk that use political power in the most cynical ways possible as part of an actual elected office. Tom Delay also resides here. They spend eternity holding up the weight of all the circles above, never able to relax lest they and the rest of them be crushed.