Because the Internet

Symptom? Sign? Cause? Not a damned clue.

Great Minds

Noam Chomsky on the death of Osama Bin Laden:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders...

And the immortal Bill Hicks, from Rant in E-Minor.



As for fools who never differ, Richard Metzger hits upon an idea that I myself had almost six years ago - charity porn. What's more surprising: that it took a laggardly half-decade for Metzger to experience the same epiphany, or that apparently he & I are the only people ever to have had such beneficent inspiration?

Invasion and Occupation of the Eyes

Oh, hello, December! What's happening? A lot, it seems. Living away from America, I hope Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Kanyemaggedon will forgive my failed attention. I doubt such foggy disinterest would be excused by the swarming ragazzi of the biggest student revolt since '68 - believe me, lads, I'm with you but allow yourself a fleeting, sunny moment of feeling not oppressed and check what your comrades across the pond are paying for their diplomas. Oh, and the latest WikiLeaks Deep Horizon impersonation a la classe diplomatique? I could outshrug James Dean. Let's not be so naïve or obtuse to pretend that politics is anything other than Heathers with heavier weaponry. Speaking of which, if anything should've roused my rancor and set my keyboard aflame, it was last week's bitchfight on the Korean peninsula. At the time, I plucked out a paltry paragraph 'n' a half (since pruned & posted) before returning to more immediately pressing matters. (Hey, if Kim Jong-Il hucks a scud at Roppongi Hills, ain't shit I can do about it. Then again, I wouldn't particularly mind if Roppongi was wiped off the map...)

Somewhere amidst the carnivaliance of Halloween, the apocalyptic blue-balls of American mid-term elections, and the first flurry of year-end retrospectives, my mood cools quicker than the weather. The hysteric tenor and short-frame nostalgia of late fall usually encourages me to close the blinds and batten the hatches until familial obligation bunker-busts my castle of quiet. To justify my withdrawal, I'll usually find some arcane cultural pocket I've yet to explore, and dive in with all the fervor of the newly converted. Two years ago, it was The Prisoner. This year, it's been '60s and '70s thrillers - particularly Italy's infamous proto-slasher mystical murder mysteries. I was nudged towards the giallo genre merely by how bad-ass so many of the soundtracks are. As a good friend & certified giallo junkie argued, Morricone, Piccioni, and Nicolai would likely have been happy composing spaghetti twang & crushed velvet lounge until they kicked their respective buckets. But musically ventriloquising blood-lusty Freudian train-wrecks thrust the composers into savage, alien territory from which almost all contemporary films scores have meekly retreated.

By the way, when I say "train-wrecks," I'm speaking of the general emotional state of gialli characters - but fuck it, I could just as easily be talking about the acting, writing, or editing in many instances. As much as they contributed to film's stylistic lexicon, Mario Bava and Dario Argento's work is more uneven than a Himalayan driveway. Argento appears especially half-talented: his stories piece together with all the finesse & balance of Ikea furniture minus the instructions, and he often cast actors that make the "Garbage day!" guy look like Al Pacino.

But I confess to being a timid tourist within giallo flicks. My tolerance for torture & gore doesn't extend much beyond the Resevoir Dogs "ear scene," so a great many movies by Bava, Fulci, et al. fall far outside my ken. Besides, I'd be slightly concerned if my wife felt Twitch of the Death Nerve was appropriate nightcap viewing. Capers & whodunnits are more our mutual speed. We recently revisited the spy-thriller trilogy that made Michael Caine's career: The IPCRESS File, Funeral In Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain. I had some misty memory of that last movie from my distant youth, but again, I was shoved towards the movies by a fantastic soundtrack. John Barry's IPCRESS score isn't nearly as iconic as his 007 theme, but the musical contrasts perfectly articulate the discrepancies between James Bond and Harry Palmer: the former is obvious, brassy, crowd-pleasing bombast, while the latter is more clever, subtly variegated, and heavily shaded.

The real fun of old films, of course, is picking apart the archaic behavior & periodic fascinations contained therein. Sub- and paratextual deconstruction is obviously not restricted to artifacts: I'm as curious as anyone if the contemporary "Never Say No to Panda" ads purposefully describe an atmosphere of coercion & violent retribution under Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. But movies are marvelous time capsules for those of us born too late: whereas American slasher flicks of the '80s enacted vengeance upon sex-&-drugs dissolution, the giallo films of the '60s and '70s explored the terrifying conjunction of sex and violence. (Meanwhile, both subgenres frame female sexuality in a questionable, threatening way.) The Harry Palmer trilogy is likewise a fascinating glimpse into England's reluctant, conflicted position within the Cold War, particularly Billion Dollar Brain: the dry, skeptical Brit protagonist is sandwiched between duplicitous, smug Eastern Bloc authoritarians and the (ostensibly worse) Americans, who are either criminal opportunists or messianic madmen driven towards Wagnerian confrontation.

However, what I enjoyed the most was the nagging requisition of the British bureaucracy upon Palmer & his MI5 cohorts. As much as they grumble about the imposition posed by their paperwork, the steadfast observance of protocol appears the only safe route between the militarist East and the wild, wild West.

Truffles & Trivia

Christ, has it really been three weeks since I threw anything up here? Amazing how life gets in the way of mucking about in cyberspace.

So, in the interest of giving cause to occasionally check this site, here's a handful of memetic tchotchkes - great for ice-breakers or the local pub's quiz night - to tide y'all over under the next batch of big-think claptrap. (Which, I promise, is coming swiftly down the pike. I'm just faffing about with word-choice at this point.)

* * *

Two major plane crashes within twelve hours, the latest in an alarming line of aviationary disasters. My set-theory specialist housemate reassured me that the meager probability of getting in a place crash (around 1 in 4.2 million) is the same whenever I set foot on an aircraft. Of course, he had to go on to explain how compound probability would support my jittery suspicion that, yes, I am more likely to die with each flight I take. Thanks, math!

* * *

Via the always-delightful Things Magazine, here's a remarkable collection of photos that suggests China was more livable amid the early-'80s aftermath of the Gang of Four. Shanghai wasn't always a garbage-strewn clusterfuck? And there was once depth and translucence in the skies over Guangzhou? Scenes of natural splendor uncluttered by artificial lights and souvenir vendors? The mind reels.

Meanwhile, the recent Takanashi Yutaka photography exhibition provided an interesting White Lodge/Black Lodge converse to the above Flickr set. A series of bar interiors - also shot in 1983 - from within the warren of Shinjuku's Golden Gai suggests that relatively little has changed in Tokyo over the past twenty-five years. In claustrophobic bars with thematically unified decor, gel-haired rockers and chain-smoking ojisan mingle with heavily made-up gals sporting vinyl Puma shoulder-bags. Throw a couple of cellphones into the frame and the pics could have been taken last night.

* * *

Okay, I get obsessive about stuff I dig - that's why I bothered watching this hokey preview of Twin Peaks' second season. Remember what it was like in the days before user-generated content and constant connectivity? How quaint Alan Thicke's smug tour-guide persona and ABC's proprietary impassivity seem now... But far more shocking than the presumed lack of media literacy circa 1990 is the very existence of something called Cop Rock. Yeah, that other show mentioned in the opening credits. What, pray tell, is Cop Rock?





That's right: from deep within the furrowed grey matter of Steve Bochco, he who cut his teeth on Columbo and achieved nigh-unmatched TV notoriety for creating both Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, comes a pre-ironic musical cop show - complete with every embarrassing, epoch-anchored production gag & genre trope the late '80s had to offer! I'll wager that this here li'l ditty (complete with caricatured "negro drug dealers") about how snorting blow is within the constitutional rights of rich white folks is a reasonable indicator of the show's genesis.

No, this is not some tangential sight-gag from the scathingly self-aware 30 Rock; this show happened for real. But then again, I thought Mad Money was a contextual one-liner created by Arrested Development. Goes to show you never can tell...

Sing a Song of Simians

So apparently the guys behind Gorillaz are back with... Monkey. I'm already looking forward to hearing Marmoset. Basically, Damon Albarn was like, "Blimey! A 1000-page novel about a supernatural chimp running around feudal China! Sounds like an opera to me!" (People seem to have that reaction to almost anything these days.) So he got Jamie Hewlett and Chinese director Chen Shi-Zeng to stage said opera, pizzazzified the tunes to be palatable to skeptical pop consumers (as well as to market the Beijing Olympics), and it hit #5 on the UK album charts, so well done indeed.

But slow down a second: a doorstop-sized novel about a magic monkey? You bet! One of the pillars of China's literary heritage, Journey to the West (西游记) is probably better known by its common English title, Monkey. (Good job, lads, took a lot of time to come up with that one, eh?) Finding its roots in millenium-old Buddhist & Taoist folklore, the epic narrative was anonymously published in the late 16th century and credited retroactively to poet Wu Cheng-En. It possesses a canonical importance equivalent to the Iliad and Odyssey in the West, and boasts more than a few of the same narrative features: instructional pop-ins by dead souls? Check. A kingdom unfathomably run by matriarchy? Check. Attempted seduction by grotesque beast-woman hybrids? Check, except now they're arachnids instead of predatory waterfowl.

The story itself? Well, over the course of 100 chapters, the titular simian, Sun Wukong, races through the three-act rise/fall/redemption arc before becoming the disciple of Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang (a.k.a. Tripitaka, as he is known in most English translations). Together with the literally-nicknamed Pigsy and Sandy Priest, they travel with the sun to fetch the Theraveda Buddhist sutras from India, for the benefit of the Chinese people. And, as they do in folktales, they live happily ever after.

Though the 5.4 billion of us who aren't Chinese can be forgiven for our unfamiliarity with the tale, it's actually been a remarkably popular cultural reference point since its first Occidental publication in the 1942. In China, it's a perennially popular stage production and has spawned at least a dozen films, the most recent of which starred Jet Li and Jackie Chan (a Hollywood blockbuster is currently in preproduction, with Will Smith rumoured to play Tripitaka). Proto-ambient prog-rockers Jade Warrior peppered their albums with references to the story, including song titles like "Water-Curtain Cave" and "The Mountain of Flowers and Fruit". British and Japanese men pushing 40 probably recall the surprise TV hit of the late-'70s, Monkey Magic. Even otaku mainstay Dragonball was conceived as a liberal adaptation, though that pretense was swiftly defenestrated.

So am I recommending Journey to the West as essential to your post-globalisation edification, or as some Rosetta Stone for primate-oriented global junk-culture? Nah. Bottom-line, Journey to the West is handicapped by that same Achilles' heel as all those other big, important books written before paper replaced papyrus: bad writing.

The narrative sputters with the start-stop-stall rhythm of someone making it all up as they go along. There are innumerable passages fattened with pointless kipple, to the effect of:

And Xuanzang knelt by his mother, his hands folded piously within the folds of his robe. "But mother," he said, as he knelt, "how did you come to recognize me as a man for you have not seen me since I was but a baby?"

"My son," said the mother to her son who now knelt by her side, "I despaired that I would not recognize you as a man for not having seen you since you were but a baby. In my despair I decided that I must mark you, so as to recognize you as a man, and thus bit off the last knuckle of your baby toe so that when I saw you as a man I would recognize you by the absence of the last knuckle on your baby toe."

And mother and son embraced, and there was much rejoicing.

This, of course, after a good half-page was already spent in chapter 8 describing the foresight of such knuckle-severing as it happened. Yeesh.

And then, when it comes to the fantastic blood-fountain battle scenes and magical invocations, they race by with less detail than an AP report of some tribal melee consigned to a sidebar on page 14:

And Monkey and Erlang Shen clashed with a ferocity that cannot possibly be imagined, let alone described, until Erlang Shen was exhausted and Monkey returned victorious to the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit.

Then his monkey minions threw a feast, and there was much rejoicing.

Boo. Disappointing. (Dept. of CYA: lest an overzealous Chinese literature major accuse me of mangling the text, the above passages are not quoted from the story; it's called parody, people.)

As a final illustration of how lopsided the story is, please note that chapters 13-99 document the quintet's travels from China to Vulture Peak in India to obtain the sutras, and chapter 100 - the final chapter - describes not only the whole journey back, but also the protagonists' divine recompense in (I shit you not) various bureaucratic posts in Heaven.

A grimly comic footnote about Journey to the West's enduring popularity in China is that Sun Wukong/Monkey was frequently cited by Mao Zedong as a role model for "his fearlessness in thinking, doing work, striving for the objective and extricating China from poverty." Right. A workshy, megalomaniacal chimp prone to hissy fits, who declared war on Heaven for being fired from his post as holy horse-groom for incompetence; who cut such a swath across the celestial palace that Buddha himself imprisoned him under a mountain for five centuries; who only submitted to Tripitaka after being strapped to some alchemical electroshock torture-halo - a good role model. That's like Lenin citing Gogol's madman diarist as an exemplary Bolshevik.

And you already thought Mao was fucked in the head, eh?

So why did I slog through this absurd & seemingly slap-dash epic? Well, aside from a lot of enjoyable picaresque, the friend who lent me the book pitched it as "the story of a flying warrior-monkey whose divine title is Great Sage - Equal of Heaven." Not a hard sell when it's presented as such. Of course, whenever I started skimming pages or furrowing my brow at particularly awkward passages, I kept the issue of translation in mind. Perhaps I was handed the Ford Edsel of English editions, and doubtlessly the cadence gets dismembered when removed from its mother tongue.

That being said, if you've got the time to learn classical Chinese and read a hundred-chapter Lord of the Sutras, get back to me about how that worked out.

Retroreferential Postscript: You know how "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. struck me as the anthem not of third-world animus but of illiquid asset robber barons? Called it. Hoodies with Saturday night specials aren't the only ones who use terror to ply people from their wallets.

The truly maddening thing about the bailout is how close we are to flipping the script in a sweeping way: if only Congress & the Senate looked ex-Goldman Sachs man Paulson in the eye and said, "Yeah, we've got your $700 billion, but this ain't a bailout, this is a buyout. They had their chance and blew it big-time, so no, they can't have their company back once we've resurrected it." But no, instead the gov't is acting like lax parents whose shithead sixteen-year-old just totaled the minivan; shrugging that "kids will be kids," they hand the budding sociopath the AmEx card to rent a car so he can still get around.

I Prefer Not To

Jane Dark's recent meditation on voter-abstinence echoed something I wrote a year ago: defined purely by what it doesn't do, non-participation gives body to the absence of a good reason to participate, and (quoting myself) "there is no room for rationalisation, appeasement, evasion, obfuscation, or half-assing in a void." There are always a thousand reasons not to do something, but doing something only needs one good reason to recommend it; if that singular profactory reason remains elusive, well - there's no good reason to do it, so why do it? As everyone's favourite funktacular walking disaster once said, "I never just did things just to have something to do... I got a little more sense than that!"

Of course, voting within the context of American politics is a coin-toss wherein the coin is replaced with a Moebius strip; it's the spin of a blueblood Wheel of Fortune on the ball-bearings of buzzwords, greased by archaic demographic alliances, the two possible outcomes Jackpot or Bankrupt (not including the $300 "stimulus cheque" consolation prize). Serendipitously, Benjamin of No Useless Leniency recently published quite the post tackling the Lesser of Two Evils, as informed by Eyal Weizman and Immanuel Wallerstein. The truly heinous feature of a dilemma, wherein "no refusal of the terms of the situation is allowed," is that

when it comes to the calculation of consequences these are cut-out of the temporal flow. Each incident of calculation is treated anew, as if the previous accumulation of violence had not happened, and the future implications are also strictly delimited. The injunction is always “choose now!”, hence the attraction of the usual “ticking bomb” scenario.

The only context in which picking the lesser of two evils might produce a striking outcome is within the temporal flow. Over the course of a couple decades, judicious & careful compromises (that is, making damn sure the truly lesser evil is chosen) can gradually effect a sea change - "the patient work of political education," as Benjamin wrote, "even if the rewards are not immediate."

But not only does the American election cycle not operate along such a timeline, the Democratic party seems incapable of thinking in anything other than the "ticking timebomb" context. This is obviously abetted by the Rube Goldberg hypemachine of 24-hour newsfeeds and viral memes. Even so, it's as though nothing has been learned by the Republicans' generation-long gestation into the porcine behemoth that rules from inside the Beltway. Their view was sufficiently long that they were willing to suffer many a defeat (e.g. the Democratically-dominated Congress of the Reagan era) along the way; the Democrats and their supporters, on the other hand, soil themselves at the slightest setback and have already begun offering prehumous repentances & electoral eulogies. Even worse, if Obamania does fizzle and dissipate like an Alka-Seltzer belch, the only thing sweeping about the Democratic party's apparent future strategy will be itself into the dustpan of failed political parties. Are these jelly-skeleton'd realpoliticos possessed of some fatalist Morriseyan melancholy or what?

Of course, as a Canuck who forfeited his Green Card, I'm part of the global 80% whose opinion is worth bupkis. There's plenty of good-faith grassroots agitation on behalf of Obama, but had even the most aggressive tactics been employed before the primaries, it's too small a time-frame to complete "the patient work of political education." (Especially when you consider that, historically, African-American politicians fare better in advanced polls than they do in the actual election.)

So - fuck it. I'm going to take the above advice from Chappelle-as-Rick-James and try to unwind for the weekend. I almost blew a gasket yesterday at the ever-rising tide of online idiocy (details forthcoming in the near future), and if Friday night ain't right for a little mindless self-indulgence, then I quit this stupid specie.

Sub Pop

Recently, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a surprising number of those rarest of musical jewels: stuff I'd never heard before. Obviously, this isn't to say they've never alighted upon the ears of another human in history - were that the case, how would I have found 'em? But let's be honest, someone else passing you some tunes is never as satisfying as excavating something yourself.

The great danger of crate-digging is that a record would be valued strictly because of its obscurity. This (along with its equally-evil twin, Popism) replaces any aesthetic considerations with cut-throat market ideology. There's a Sophie's Choice in approaching music strictly as a consumer: either the log-hollow pretension of the DJ who announces (to no one in particular) the "first UK spin!" of some forgetabbly muddy funk 45, or Girl Talk.

It's hardly controversial to note that some pop music is popular for good reason, and much obscure music is obscure for good reason. Less baffling than when something good goes unnoticed, though, is when something without popular appeal is popular nonetheless. I'm not talking about Timbaland's continued ubiquity despite the series of gold-leafed turds he's been handing his audience; booty-shakers three bottles of "woooo!" into their Saturday night are hardly going to care whether it's Madonna, Nicole Sherzinger, or Aaliyah cooing at 120dB. No, I'm talking about Jandek becoming standard on student pub jukeboxes; about Les Rallizes Denudes' swampy second-rate psychedelia getting glowing reviews on Pitchfork; about any band in the Nuggets collections singled out as geniuses despite the stylistic anonymity that earned their inclusion in the boxset in the first place.

In some cases, like Wesley Willis or Daniel Johnston, the story is too good to ignore. In others, a ridiculous name that goes viral as a punchline (!!!) is all the PR a band needs - or, for an unlucky few like Holy Fuck, all the PR a band doesn't need. Or (adopting squirrely Robert Downey Jr. voice) here's a theory, I'm just gonna throw it out there... maybe people are lot more sophisticated than the RIAA and Clear Channel give them credit for; maybe there's a reason Revolver, not A Hard Day's Night, is routinely cited as the greatest rock album ever; maybe something broader than rotation on 120 Minutes put Sonic Youth in arenas during the '90s.

Of course, the Smithsonian Institute ain't big enough to archive all the music that is, en fin, fucking ridiculous. Some white-label singles aren't worth spinning, and not every Italian horror soundtrack is worth sampling. But the sick joy to be found in dead-baby jokes and episodes of COPS is also in listening to people that should never have been sat in front of a microphone. (Hello, Liam Gallagher!) People stop more often to study a dead bird than to smell the roses.

Accordingly, here's a hodge-podge of some of the more peculiar curios in my collection; some of them are fresh discoveries, but most have been just weird enough to be worth hauling halfway around the world with me. A couple of tracks have been edited, 'cuz seriously, you don't need a quarter-hour of Gracious! quoting Beethoven and relating some thuggish reverie. Click on the mix title to download.

Less Allegro More Retardo

1. T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo - "Intro" (00:00)
2. Jackie Wilson & LaVern Baker - "Think Twice" (Alt. take; 00:11)
3. Klaus Doldinger - "Sitar Beat" (02:40)
4. The Bangers - "Baby Let Me Bang Your Box" (04:04)
5. Chinga Chavin - "Asshole From El Paso" (06:37)
6. Merv Griffin - "Have a Nice Trip" (11:19)
7. Cookie Monster - "Cookie Disco" (13:31)
8. Ray Sanders & Friends - "Karate" (15:35)
9. Alex Chilton - "Girl After Girl" (17:48)
10. Unknown - "Big Al's Country Bus" (20:06)
11. Boredoms - "Which Doo Yoo Like?" (22:15)
12. Machida Machizo - "心臓賭博" (24:09)
13. Plywood 3/4 - "Travailler Dans l'Beurre" (25:48)
14. Brainticket - "The Space Between" (27:46)
15. Les Baxter - "The Devil's Witchcraft" (30:43)
16. Ging Nang Boyz - "あの娘に１ミリでもちょっかいかけたら殺す" (32:39)
17. Tony Lowry - "Screw On the Loose" (36:44)
18. Marvin Pontiac - "Bring Me Rocks" (37:43)
19. Sex - "I Had to Rape Her" (41:13)
20. The Brainbombs - "Lipstick On My Dick" (45:23)
21. William Trytel - "Saw Theme" (49:55)
22. Apryl Fool - "The Lost Mother Land (Part 1)" (50:33)
23. Gracious! - "Dream" (55:55)
24. Dark - "R.C. 8" (57:51)
25. Aphrodite's Child - "Infinity Symbol" (59:47)

The Breadcrumb Trail Went Stale

It's a state of mind!

I blinked and May had gone from a pert grape to a granite-textured raisin. This isn't to say nothing happened. Plans were hatched and wheat was seperated from chaff. Resources were marshalled, laughs were had, doubts formed, and panic ensued. But before I can connect the dots, a little late spring cleaning is in order. Below is a tossed salad of epistemological detritus that I need to recycle out into cyberspace to unclutter my ontological niche. No particular theme, thread, or narrative is implied, but that doesn't mean one cannot be inferred.

Click on the title to download, peeps.

Record Needle In a Haystack

1. Amon Düül II - "Archangel Thunderbird" (00:00)
2. Laddio Bolocko - "As If By Remote" (03:36)
3. The Focus Group - "The Thre" (06:14)
4. The Golden Catalinas - "Can Your Monkey Do the Dog" (07:19)
5. Delia Derbyshire - Theme to Dr. Who (09:43)
6. Buck 65 - "Can of Worms" (11:58)
7. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "Spontaneous Apple Creation" (15:15)
8. The Lounge Lizards - "Incident On South Street" (18:07)
9. Duck Flowers - "Wicked Chicken" (21:26)
10. Pavement - "Gangsters & Pranksters" (23:29)
11. Los Saicos - "Demolicion" (25:04)
12. Andrew W.K. - "McLaughlin Groove" (27:56)
13. Cloudland Canyon - "You & I" (28:43)
14. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - "The Rider #2" (35:06)
15. Santo & Jonny - "Sleep Walk" (38:00)
16. Jade Warrior - "Borne On the Solar Wind" (40:19)
17. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - "In the Canyons of Your Mind" (43:18)
18. The Playboys - "Mope De Mope" (46:16)