Because the Internet

Symptom? Sign? Cause? Not a damned clue.

Never Say Never

Almost exactly two months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Carl of The Impostume fame in a rank Fukuoka nightclub. He'd been kind enough to come see my band on the last night of our tour - a gig that promised to be, and indeed was, a sweaty madhouse with bodies & beer flying around the room. Not only is Fukuoka our bassist's hometown, but it effortlessly lives up to its reputation as a city of hard-drinking yet unreasonably good-looking shit-kickers.

Stumbling offstage a sweaty & smoke-wreathed mess, I joined Carl at the bar for a lively & lengthy chat that meandered from music to trade deficits and everything in between. Since we'd previously only been acquainted as brothers-in-blogdom, it was inevitable we'd wind up talking about life online and, specifically, how so many amateur bloggers are either turning pro or - more often - unplugging completely. Carl was refreshingly upbeat about this cyber-sea change: he felt that the expanse of online existence was helping crush provincial arrogance and petty indignities. "Once people get off their soapbox and take a breath," he said, "they might see that, actually, reality is far more interesting and varied than they might have thought."

 

I'm considerably more cynical about what's driving this shift. The thing that upsets me about the ballooning number of abandoned blogs is that so many smart, sharp voices have been steamrolled into silence by the bleating glibness of microblogging, the Book of Face, Pintrest, tumblr, Twitter, et cetera ad nauseum. It's a tl;dr world and a great many writers who refuse to reduce their ideas to bumper-sticker sloganeering have simply thrown in the towel.

Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't good writers to be found in abundance online. There's Mobutu Sese Seko at Gawker, Glenn Greenwals, Paul Krugman, and Adam Curtis, not to mention the whole of Alternet, Counterpunch and - oh yes - Cracked. But every one of those writers is a reliable shake of the left fist, as essential yet dully predictable as the coffee I sip while reading them. The writers unfettered by assignments or editors, writers with rangy & irregular interests who'd frequently delight, sometimes infuriate, and often surprise me - K-Punk, Ads Without Products, Pere Lebrun's Kasper, Owen, and yes of course Carl too - where have they all gone?



But if I'm so interested in keeping the conversation alive, why haven't I posted a damn thing in over two months? Well, because Carl is right. Every time some rant-worthy outrage would arise (Kony 2012, the coup in Mali, Marine Le Pen, Golden Dawn, HBO's Girls) I'd promise myself a moment to type some appropriate invective... and then life would intercede in all its fluid, multifarious glory and I'd just never get around to it. Gigs, band practice, playing with new microphones, learning a foreign language, perfecting my Italian sausage soup recipe. Reality is indeed interesting and varied.

So why does it still bother me that I've been so absent online? It has something to do with Hipster Runoff - a website that has rapidly degenerated from a once-amusing, affectedly disaffected pomo think-tank into the bastard of Vice magazine and TMZ. The one qualitative buzzword that HRO seems to fret the most over the most is "relevant," and that is precisely what I am guilty of as well. Social media's hyperacceleration of the nanosecond news-cycle means that, between the time that an event occurs and that I finish doing the laundry, the window for pithy au courant commentary has already closed and what I have to contribute is no longer relevant.

But relevant to whom exactly? Who am I trying to impress? What am I missing that I can't elaborate, examine, and enjoy with my friends, my bandmates, my peers, my wife?



Obviously, I need to get the fuck over myself. I should consider myself lucky that anyone outside of my tight little cohort would find anything I have to say interesting. I should also stop kidding myself that this - spewing bile into chasmic indifference of cyberspace - is a priority. That doesn't mean I'm withdrawing exclusively to meatspace. I'm sure, on occasion, something will be so irresistibly aggravating or exhilarating that I'll be compelled back here. Hell, as long as I'm here, the blog's here. Or it will be until some of that unendingly-threatened legislative napalm is dropped on the internet.

But really now: I turn 30 today. I should at least start to consider growing the fuck up.

Threshold of the Lift Hill

The presumptive, lumpen fantasm of the internet - typically referred to as "we" - did it, folks: SOPA and PIPA are D.O.A. Following the massive online blackout that terrorized digital natives and the late majority alike, the legislative tide has swung overwhelmingly against the inoperable & draconian bills. Let the celebratory fist-pumping & occasionally smug self-congratulation begin!

But hang on a moment. For such a media-savvy throng, the triumphal netizens appear to be totally ignorant of the classic horror movie narrative dynamic. Want to know what happens next? The moment that the protagonist relaxes, having apparently dispatched the villain, said incarnation of evil is hideously resurrected, more powerful than ever before, and attacks anew!

Thus it was that the FBI shut down Megaupload yesterday and has arrested four of seven people (including the site's founder) indicted for copyright infringement and conspiracy. Almost immediately, Anonymous went beserk with retaliatory shut-downs of just about any website operated by an acronym: the DOJ, the FBI, the MPAA, RIAA, UMG, EMI, WMG, and both the American & French copyright authorities. It appears to have been Anonymous' largest online attack ever.

But believe it or not, Anonymous are late to the party. The Megaupload raid is actually the second major development regarding a copyright-related international incursion by an American agency within the past week. Last Friday, a British court decided that British undergrad Richard O'Dwyer may be extradited to the U.S. where he faces a potential 10-year prison sentence:

US customs agents are seeking his prosecution over a website O'Dwyer set up when he was 19 called TVShack, and ran until his arrest last year. This provided links to other sites hosting pirated versions of TV shows and film. It was so popular that the student earned £15,000 per month in advertising revenue, US prosecutors claim.

O'Dwyer's lawyers said the site was little different from a search engine like Google and was thus most likely not illegal under UK law.

However, Purdy noted that visitors to the site had to register, and could post their own links. He ruled that the case met the test of so-called dual liability, also dismissing arguments that extradition would be a breach of O'Dwyer's human rights.

The real story, however, comes at the tail end of the article:

Separately, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has faced criticism for perceived over-reach, targeting websites which, like TVShack – which had servers in the Netherlands – have no direct link to America.

In July the agency's assistant deputy director told the Guardian that ICE would now actively pursue websites similar to TVShack even if their only connection to the US was a website address ending in .com or .net. Such suffixes are routed through Verisign, an internet infrastructure company based in Virginia, which the agency believes is sufficient to seek a US prosecution.

Read that last paragraph again: any website registered as either .com or .net is subject to the full extent of American copyright law because those suffixes are routed through Virginia. A website's administrators, staff, servers, even users & advertisers can all be outside of America and it doesn't matter because the suffix alone is sufficient ground for prosecution. Hell, compared to the O'Dwyer case, shutting down Megaupload must have been a slam-dunk since Megaupload actually maintains servers on American soil.

By the above legal logic, the government has the authority to shutter any file host, any private web host, any website to which material can be uploaded of which users claim ownership - in other words, everything from YouTube to Flickr, from Facebook to 4chan, from Wordpress to BoingBoing to Blogger to Twitter. This is strictly according to current law regarding copyright & intellectual property. It doesn't matter that neither SOPA nor PIPA will pass, because clearly the government doesn't need them.

Also noteworthy is that, on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the authority to remove works from the public domain. The real shocker of the 6-2 decision is that the dissenting justices, who felt the ruling was against the public interest as it discouraged the spread of knowledge, were Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito. Yeah, Alito - appointed by Bush, condemned by the ACLU, guardian of Guantanamo and concurrent of Citizens United. Since when does Alito make decisions that would prohibit further bloating of corporate power & profit?

Anyway, the Golan V. Holder ruling allows U.S. policy to comport with the Berne Convention, a European copyright treaty first introduced way back in 1886. It can hardly be argued that the Berne Convention has been legal strangulation depriving the French, Germans, Italians, or Swedes of easy access to each other's cultural wealth. This has much to do with how liberal the Convention's language is, especially within Article 2.3:

Translations, adaptations, arrangements of music and other alterations of a literary or artistic work shall be protected as original works without prejudice to the copyright in the original work.

However, the main factor at work is the massive discrepancy between how Europe and America value the arts. Despite how fundamental art is to cultural identity, America has evermore lost sight of art's symbolic value and assigns it exchange value accordingly only to its sign value. This means that all art is subject to the whims of the market: the only art that deserves to survive is that which excites the market. This cultural Darwinism blends with a libertarian phobia of propaganda ("You know who else favoured public funding for the arts?") to ensure that the government does little, if anything, to support the arts.

This is why public-domain material is indispensable to the livelihood of orchestras, performers, publishers, and repertoire cinemas in America. Over half of the average nonprofit arts organization's income is contributed - 13% publicly and a whopping 43% privately. Art, therefore, is less a common good than a private investment, and its investors obviously want a handsome return. This means artists have to make a hit to reward their investors' faith; but creating something new is dangerous & uncharted territory, and few artists have the cash to license performances of established favourites. Therefore, it's back to scavenging the public domain for tried-and-true yet free-to-use materials. The public domain is what gives permission for orchestras to perform Stravinsky's Petruschka, for arthouse cinemas to screen Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and for publishers to print new editions of Dracula, Ulysses, or Pride and Prejudice.

So how can European artists continue to perform, screen, and publish if all the material is still protected under the Berne Convention? Public funding. European governments understand the immaterial worth of art in daily life, and so there are subsidies and grants to ensure the public's easy access & steady engagement with their and others' culture. Were similar funding available in America, then orchestras could afford to license Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf if its copyright were renewed. But as it stands, the social dimension of art is a communist conspiracy and art is only worth something if it's for sale.

Finally, on a more prosaic note, now that Megaupload's been deep-six'd, all the various MP3 mixes I've uploaded over that past few years have been likewise erased. Would anyone like them back up? Are there any special requests for a particular mix that's missing? Does anyone give a toss?

We Are All Big Brother

As my existence in meatspace has elaborated & unfolded into an every-wider array of activities & obligations, I've felt less guilty for letting this space lapse into occasional torpor. There's always some guilt, given that I know there are a few kind individuals on the other side of the internet who actually pay attention to, think about, and even respond to my self-indulgent wortschwall. I honestly enjoy their participation and so feel neglectful, even ungrateful, whenever my side of the conversation slips into silence.

Some of my friends - real friends, not "friends" or Friends™ - ask why it's been so long since I last posted regularly on this blog, to which I can only reply, "Because I'm talking to you right fucking now!" Point taken, they suggest that perhaps I sign up for Twitter or Tumblr and start "microblogging" if full essays are too burdensome. But I find that thinking & conversing in bite-sized nuggets leads to a kind of mental constipation. Besides, I don't have a cellphone (the ultimate act of roguish delinquency here in Japan) to enable such incessant content-regurgitation.

So reality took precedence over my online presence for the past couple of months. A significant factor was that my band's current effort to release a record had turned into a blunder-plagued clusterfuck. (You know you're in trouble when your contact at the record-pressing plant is an accountant, not a technician.) But the bulk of my time offline has been on the road: my band has played more shows over the preceding month than we did all of last year. However, it wasn't simply that incessant touring kept me away from the computer and that explains my absence; there was a particular phenomenon recurrent on the road that made me want as much distance from cyberspace as I could get.

Over the past two years in Japan, Twitter has gone from marginal novelty to ubiquitous modus vivendi: the estimated number of Japanese "tweeters" exploded from a mere 200,000 in January '09 to over 16 million by August '10. Japan holds the current record of 6,939 "tweets-per-second" and sends around 14% of all "tweets" despite comprising only 8% of Twitter's user base.

This can produce some peculiar social dynamics in the "real" world. I've lost count of how often I find myself sat at a table, surrounded by friends, utterly ignored as they, every one of 'em, thumb-tap away on their Twitter accounts to tell thousands of anonymous voyeurs what a kick-ass time we're all having "together."

But that's simply a dull annoyance. What I find disturbing is, thanks to the Japanese fondness for interminate & omnivorous tweeting, I've been assimilated into the Twitterverse without even trying. This past July, I was chatting with some acquaintances after a show in Nagoya. In the midst of the usual catch-up chit-chat, one of them asked me, "So how did you like your lunch? It looked super-American!"

I didn't quite understand. "Super-American?"

"Yeah, you know - your wife prepared you a lunchbox with pizza and a green apple. That's a totally American thing to eat for lunch; Japanese would never eat pizza for lunch!"

My initial offense at being mistaken for an American was very quickly overcome by befuddled panic: how did they, a relative stranger, know what I'd eaten for lunch in such detail? Yes, I had eaten pizza & a green apple that my wife had stuffed into tupperware for me, but I'd done so sat under a tree in a rest area 120 miles away from Nagoya in the company of only my band's bassist...

Then it hit me. "Ken put a picture of my lunch on Twitter, didn't he?"

This was only first of what have become regular intrusions on my quotidian activities that I'd like to think were autonomous & anonymous. Last week, I arrive in Nara after an overnight drive to discover that a fellow traveler had shared a snapshot of my slumbering form with his 1,500 Twitter followers. This isn't to say that on-the-road naps & snacks are embarrassing in & of themselves, but it's upsetting that even such boring & inconsequential activities cannot escape the all-seeing eye of the electronic multitude.

The obsequious cliché is that if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear, but the nefarious implication therein is that if you did have something to hide, you wouldn't be able to. The flipside of the superficial "empowerment" of social media's self-expressive potential is that it creates a volunteer surveillance state. There is no need for informants, spies, or state-sponsored treachery when citizens opt-in to the Panopticon - a truth sadly demonstrated by how the Iranian government turned the 2009 "Twitter Revolution" against itself in its crackdown upon self-documenting dissidents.

Insofar as "rights" are merely privileges bestowed by the state upon its subjects, privilege cannot exist except in contrast with its opposite, penury. As Jean Baudrillard argued in The Consumer Society, "rights" become legally sanctified only at the point that they become recognizable by their punctuated & selective absence:

This whole phenomenon, which seems to express a general individual and collective advance, rewarded in the end with embodiment in institutions, is ambiguous in its meaning and one might, as it were, see it as representing quite the opposite: there is no right to space until there no longer is space for everyone, and until space and silence are the privilege of some at the expense of others. Just as there was no `right to property' until there was no longer land for everyone and there was no right to work until work became, within the framework of the division of labour, an exchangeable commodity, i.e. one which no longer belonged specifically to individuals.

This is certainly why arguments about the "right to privacy" have become more commonplace & heated concomitant with the rise of the internet & global telecommunications. As opposed to privacy of physical property (the long-enshrined fundament of liberal democracy), privacy of deed & thought are of greater value & concern the more impossible they become under the ever-widening purview of the self-imposed surveillance state.

To the extent that I expose myself online, I may be justifiably subject to ridicule, argument, censure, or acclaim much the same as I may be for picking a fight in a convenience store, being a drunken lech at a wedding reception, or helping an old lady cross the street. We're judged by our public performance, online and off. What has changed is that I - we - no longer have control over which aspects of our lives are subject to public scrutiny, because even if I choose not to broadcast a certain deed or thought across the internet, I cannot stop my friends/"friends"/Friends™ from doing just that.

iCame, iSaw, iConquered

Come December, I'll be curious to see whose death ends up earning more year-in-review ink: that of Osama Bin Laden or Steve Jobs. For now, I just feel bad that Bert Jansch was robbed of his last moment in the spotlight.

The only thing I feel about Jobs' sudden passing is surprise at how quickly it followed his resignation as Apple's CEO. Perhaps this is another instance of how intimately entwined are sense of purpose and will to live. Jack Layton, for example, took the New Democratic Party of Canada from a marginal parliamentary presence to the official opposition in a single election and was dead within a couple of months. Even T.E. Lawrence - a man whose feats of endurance & military daring read like pulp fantasy - was scarcely two months into his retirement when he met an ignominious end in a minor traffic accident.

Beyond that pseudo-philosophical chinstroke... so what? Can't say I particularly care. But judged by the online tsunami of farcical grief, I am starkly in the minority. So maudlin & wracked is the tenor of the bereaved I'd have thought that all these people were personal friends of Steve Jobs, that he'd brought them chicken soup on a cold November night, that he'd awarded their kids college scholarships, that he'd given sight to their blinded-by-moonshine great aunt.

But no, they are not a one his friend. They aren't Steve Jobs' acquaintances, they're his customers, his consumers.

Lest we forget that Apple is a corporate behemoth whose liquidity exceeds that of even the world's largest national economy. Lest we forget that Apple is a technocratic Goliath which dodges corporate taxes and whose idea of "healthcare coverage" extends to suicide-prevention nets but barely any further. Unlike his oft-maligned doppleganger, Steve Jobs is not a philanthropist - he's a corporate padrino whose brilliance lies less in innovation than elaboration & refinement - making borrowed ideas better. Apple's very first personal computers (the Lisa and the Macintosh) were little more than liberal imitations of the Xerox Alto. Similarly, Jobs did not invent a GUI platform to (re-)distribute digitized music, but he did figure out how to monetize one.

The true genius of Jobs was his aestheticization of appliances. He transformed utilitarian machines into the fully syntactic symbols of a lifestyle; his public-relations alchemy made technological amenities into elite totems. Between his products & his customers, Jobs fostered not just a relation but a relationship - a transubstantiation presented literally in those anthropomorphic "I'm a Mac" TV ads.

At least the UK got to watch the guys from Peep Show make smug pricks of themselves.

Anyway, this explains why Jobs' death is a big deal beyond the business section. A man like Philo T. Farnsworth arguably had a more revolutionary effect on daily life, but Steve Jobs was a man with whom people felt they had a personal relationship, a friend who had enriched their lives & enabled them to unleash their expressive potential. It's no exaggeration to say Jobs' death has elicited a despair whose scale and substance are equivalent to - perhaps even greater than - the passing of the Pope. Within a mere hour of the news, floral tributes were piling up outside Apple stores the world over. Social media was more choked with endless inspirational quotes than a Deepak Chopra book. The grief was so sensational it would've been considered too stagy for a Broadway musical.

Against this backdrop, the latest essay on Adam Curtis' blog made for some serendipitous reading: in his endless trawl of audio-visual archives, Curtis has managed to trace the evolution of demonstrative emotion on TV. Within barely a generation between the '50s and '70s, spilling one's guts on air went from being anathema - "shameful agony" - to the necessary signifier of human authenticity. This sentimental overflow has become a carved-in-stone commandment not only of broadcast media, but of western social relations in general. However, Curtis warns that this hysterical style of emotional "authenticity" may actually be anything but:

There is a creeping sense of someone pretending to have the emotions that are expected of them. And in this way hiding their true feelings even further below the surface. Or maybe the truth is even more disturbing - that there are lots of things that people live through and experience that they just don't have emotions about.

As irrational psychic ephemera, emotions are difficult to understand and even harder to reproduce convincingly - particularly positive, sympathetic emotions. This is why tearful confessions & expectorating fist-fights became mainstays of daytime television far earlier than the joyful hug-orgies & triumphal backslapping of more recent shows like The Amazing Race or American Idol. So how did gushing exuberance become part of the public's expressive mode? Curtis points to the rise of "self-help" and collaborative craft shows like Trading Spaces and its British counterpart, Changing Rooms:

I think the man that really brought the hug into British television in a big way was the producer Peter Bazalgette. His genius was to spot that the idea of transforming yourself as a person could be intimately linked to transforming the things around you - starting with the rooms in your house.

I think the first real hugs of these kind began in the series Changing Rooms in the mid 90s.

The original revolutionary idea had been that by changing yourself emotionally as a person you would then change society. Bazalgette created an easier and quicker variation. By simply changing the physical things around you - you could then change your inner feelings and became a better and more expressive human being.

Wallpaper as redemption.

Steve Jobs understood this perfectly. By emphasizing his products' artful design, and by casting them as tools of creative composition, Jobs enabled his consumers to feel they were more fully-realized, expressive individuals thanks to him.

What I find disturbing is that, by surrounding themselves with beautiful expensive objects that encourage a melodramatic solipsism, people are encouraged to construct & occupy their own private fantasy wherein the crueler aspects of reality are not allowed. No one wants to feel bad. No one wants to struggle with criticism, dissent, violence, or acrimony. This relentlessly positive self-regard creates the illusion of a cozy but false consensus: by engaging only with the familiar & agreeable, we diminish our ability to cope with difference. Think different, but not so different that it unsettles you.

This is why there is no such thing as a "Dislike" button.

Phoning It In

The overwrought pageantry that passes for political punditry is so hackneyed & calculated, it's a wonder anyone pretends to be surprised anymore. Everyone so desperately admires & awaits a Howard Beale or Barry Champlain moment, forgetting (or ignoring) how expertly stage-managed & corralled by corporate interests those fictional "mavericks" were. Thus audience & broadcaster alike have managed to turn yet another non-event - Glenn Beck's exit from the Fox News network - into frothing political scopophilia.

Personally, I could give a fuck, not the least because I live outside America and have no TV or radio. More importantly, Beck himself is not special: his is a role to be filled by whatever appropriately attention-hungry ex-cokehead lunges hardest towards the microphone. But, as I explained last month in an e-mail to a friend, I'd had an appalling premonition about Beck's next step:

Beck can get the fuck off the air already. The only thing I'm worried about now is that, for his next act, he'll undergo some histrionic "crisis of faith" in the conservative movement and refashion himself into a pseudo-libertarian leftist and everyone will eat that shit right up. Don't think it can't happen! Ariana Huffington pulled off that stunt with startling efficacy (though I believe she's far more sincere than Beck has ever been).

But surely such a mawkish turn would be so transparent & tacky, no one would fall for it, right? I mean, come on. Yet, yet, yet, as I click across to Crooks & Liars this morning, what do I see atop the front page?

Beck on Republicans: 'I hate them'

Well, stomp on frogs 'n' shove a crowbar up mah nose! Who'da fucking thunk it. As good forgive-and-forget liberals, we should presently, if prudently, embrace the Fox News rodeo clown, not only for his dubious disillusionment with both mainstream political parties, but because Beck is (now) solidly against extraordinary rendition:

"Ghost planes - we're picking people up in the middle of the night. We're saying talk to us or we're going to drop you off over in Egypt. That's insane... We don't stand for anything."

Beck is unconvinced of the efficacy of state-sponsored kidnapping & torture (for which legal repercussions have just been forever swept off the table). Welcome to the club, buddy! Everyone against zapping civilians' scrotii with car batteries gets a gold star! If you disapprove of kidnapping, you get a cookie! How about this: as long as we're doling out special credit for shit you're supposed to do, can I get extra sprinkles on my sundae given that I've resisted the temptation to chainsaw off my neighbour's head & fuck his wife?

Solitaire With a Deck of Fifty-One

Hey, why haven't you been writing anything on your blog recently?

Uh... wait, you actually read my blog?

Well, yeah, it was kinda interesting back during that whole earthquake/tsunami clusterfuckalypse. Not to mention you're one of the top hits on Google searches for "I Hate Animal Collective", "lonesome cosmonaut", and "Thijs Van Leer".* But you've more or less vanished recently, what's up?

Well, I've been busy. Most of May was recording, then it was mixing, and now it's back to gigging. I'm spending my birthday playing some nicotine-tarred, beer-stank basement outside an American military base. Which has a certain unshaven charm to it, but I'd rather just stay at home, eat some cake, and listen to this Harmonia record my wife got me. Then play it backwards to see if there's any discernable dissemblance.

That's your excuse? Two months of near total silence because you're playing with microphones and compressors? Dude, Steve motherfuckin' Albini has engineered over a thousand records and he still finds time for a food blog.

Yeah, well, that's why he's Steve Albini and I'm not. Besides, when it came time to mix my own band's album, no one had a clue what they wanted it to sound like - roomy & loose? Cold & claustrophobic? Aspirationally big? It was a long road with many detours and much backtracking.

Why not write about the whole process of making an album then?

No. Certainly not before the album's actually out. The only thing duller than specialized tech-talk is when there isn't even any music to supplement the conversation.

So that's really it, you've just been locked indoors de-essing vocals and tweaking spring reverb for six weeks?

And look how stir-crazy it's made me: I've started thinking in duologue with some phantasmic other! But recently, I also finished reading a couple of books about the internet's oppressive demand for participation and its dilution of politics. Hell, Adam Curtis just aired a new documentary series about that very subject.

That was pretty good. Except for the second episode, it lacked the narrative cohesion of his earlier work, but they can't all be home runs.

Ain't that the truth.

So you've been a bit put off of self-important polemics & pop-cultural diatribes?

I mean, how much can I really contribute to the juvenile snickering or Malcolm Tuckerish political spinning of Weinergate?

I will, however, say this about last week's riot in Vancouver: watching the chaos unfurl on live TV, it was striking that news anchors repeatedly referred to the drunken miscreants as "protestors". Protesting what? That Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo played with all the skill of three pool noodles roped together? I don't know if it was an unfortunate tongue-slip or deliberate semiotic sculpture, but either way, it's disturbing to see that "protest" being impoverished as a legitimate tool of political struggle by directly associating the word with boozy troglodytes burning cars and smashing storefronts.

Sure enough, slanderous suggestions that the chaos was in fact an opportunist operation by the Black Bloc have proven completely false: it was the work of a bunch of beer-soaked bourgeois kids who were looking for an excuse to explode.

It's interesting to see the role social media played in the riot: on one hand, the mere presence of hundreds of gawkers wielding iPhone cameras must have egged on the more ambitiously destructive delinquents; on the other, the excess of close-range documentation did away with the anonymity of the crowd, effectively unmasking & shaming those who did the most damage. Do you think-

Look, that's a topic that absolutely merits more discussion, but I've gotta pack my gear for the gig tonight.

Okay, go on then. Well, come back soon and keep writing. If nothing else, you need the mental exercise if you're spending so much time locked indoors away from summer's swelter. Oh, and happy birthday!

Thanks.

* - I'm not making this up.

The Drift

If Japanese streets are emptier than usual, it's more likely because of the sodden weather than fears of irradiation. Cabin-feverish though we may be, today's national holiday couldn't be better timed. Those of us lucky enough to live outside of eastern Tohoku are depeleted from a week of incessant dread - a hangover minus the happy hedonism that usually precedes the headache.

By now, the excesses of mass-media Cassandras appear obvious even to audiences abroad. The irascible Charlie Brooker did a marvelously caustic take-down of last week's sensationalism. Confessing to some cognitive dissonance from the barrage of conflicting analysis & reportage, Brooker succinctly nailed why all anchors & analysts ought to be taken with a metric ton of salt:

Like most of us, I've no idea whether the fear is exaggerated or not. All I know is that I'm having advanced atomic theory explained to me by people who, last week, were struggling to describe the colour of Kate Middleton's dress.

The chief concern remains assisting the stricken in Tohoku, but throughout the rest of the country, life has largely picked up where it left off ten days ago. From where I sit in central Tokyo, the most immediate threat to my well-being is the precipitous rise in coffee prices.

And so Japan has fallen below the fold. Fair enough that the eyes of the world have drifted elsewhere. Sectarian violence continues in Côte D'Ivoire, the West continues its feeble bet-hedging regarding the democratic uprising in Bahrain, and then of course there's that other oil-rich autocracy descending into blood-swamp anarchy: Libya. Having been a second-banana boogieman for forty years, Qaddafi is finally the world's top-billed despot. If the wanton slaughter of his own citizens wasn't enough to turn news network talking heads, then NATO nations' swift assault on Libya guarantees round-the-clock coverage. After all, when was the last time the French took the lead militarily? That itself is news-worthy.

The speed with which France attacked Libya while fleeing Japan seems paradoxical, but it's all part of Sarkozy's renewed effort to appear authoritative in the run-up to next year's election. Sarkozy's credibility hinges upon his actions in Libya: not only was Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie forced to resign after vocally supporting the since-deposed Tunisian regime, Qaddafi's son is now claiming to have contributed to Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign.

Furthermore, the French government was "stung by criticism they were slow to react to the crises in Egypt and Tunisia." Not only did this ensure military dick-swinging that would be lauded as bold & assertive, it explains why French citizens were the first to be evacuated from Japan following the hydra-headed disasters of March 11. Sarkozy could afford to be ambivalent towards the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt, but he would not survive being perceived as indifferent to French citizens caught in one of the greatest natural disasters in recorded history. However, now the evacuation seems premature and even the aerial assault upon Libya has been called "impromptu." Instead of swift-thinking and determined, Sarkozy risks appearing like (in The Economist's words) he is "policymaking by impulse and improvisation."

Meanwhile, as the newshounds sniff out new scents, a different kind of drift may be occurring in Japan: intercultural estrangement. This is arguably the first Japanese disaster with international consequences since the Second World War, a side-effect of which will be a warp in Japanese-foreigner relations. As countless others and I have noted many times, Japan is arguably the most homogeneous & xenophobic of developed nations (which is really saying something). As such, it's a delicate high-wire act for both Japanese and foreigners to engage each other's culture without retreating to unflattering stereotypes. The foreign community simply isn't large enough to stake its own turf unapologetically, and the Japanese have to tolerate - however grudgingly - those among them who are different.

So it does neither side much good when foreigners collectively lose their cool and stampede the exits like laggard rats. The libidinous pessimism of western media has been perhaps the biggest push out of Japan:

The heightened sense of fear may be due to foreigners consuming an "unfiltered diet" of panic-stricken Western news and worries that the domestic news isn't trustworthy.

Unfortunately, this media-spawned panic spreads virally from foreigners to the Japanese too. After all, when 3,000 Chinese from Tohoku alone have gone home, and the embassies of Japan's major allies - France, Germany, and America - are all encouraging their citizens to evacuate, of course the Japanese are going to wonder what decisive information foreigners are privy to that they're not. Widespread mistrust of the government's candor has persisted since they took several hours to issue a statement after the first explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leaving a vacuum the collective imagination filled with all manner of apocalyptic fantasy.

One of my Japanese bandmates told me tonight that I've become the canary-in-the-coal-mine for our circle of friends. During the peak of last week's confusion, he received a phone call from a friend outside of Tokyo:

"You're alright? Is your girlfriend okay?"
"Yeah, we're both fine."
"And Kentaro? Satoshi?"
"Yeah, they're fine too."
"What about Seb? Is Seb still in Tokyo?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Whew! Well, then, we've got nothing to worry about!"

It's nice to know that I'm thought of as a solid judge of circumstance. But the quickly-decamping foreigner has fast become such a stereotype that it's earned its own ignominious bilingual nickname: the "bye-jin". Clearly, the expat community suffers a considerable deficit in credibility. Ergo, another friend has wisely made his cataclysmal barometer a group of old ladies at his local community center - all with long memories and life experience to match. Once they begin to get rattled, it might be time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

But for now, abandoning a country in its darkest hour does not leave much in the way of goodwill. I wonder how little those that have left really have invested in their lives here, and I can't imagine their Japanese friends will be terribly impressed with their fitful selfishness. If actions speak louder than words, then the point at which someone tucks tail and runs speaks with a megawatt bullhorn. The one possible benefit is that those of us who've stuck it, who've neither headed home nor even withdrawn to some western Honshu hotel, could earn some extra respect from the locals for our solidarity & stoicism.

Who knows. Depending on how this whole episode finishes, our stoicism might very well end up being stupidity & sloth.

Situation Normal, Albeit Fatigued & Uncanny

The mouse-click marathon through a dozen different news sites is now as essential to our rise-'n'-shine ritual as the first cup of coffee. "Welcome to day eight of our live coverage," the BBC live feed greeted me yesterday. Wow, already a week? It feels more like an impossibly protracted bad day. Imagine how long it feels to the folks up north.

Given the tenuous & mercurial situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, we're all but enslaved ourselves to the news cycle. By the time we've checked our various e-mail accounts, friends' blogs, live streams, and embassy websites, it's time to recommence the rotation - after all, something might have changed in the past four minutes! But a snake can only swallow its tail so far before it wants to vomit. The cost of constant connectivity is ceaseless stress. This paranoia has prompted a mass exodus of foreigners fleeing Tokyo for Kansai and Kyushu - which strikes me as an ill-advised strategy. Not only are hotels out west packed like sardine tins, but what will happen if (god forbid) a major aftershock strikes the other side of the country? The ensuing panic & local strain upon resources would be double what it would otherwise be.

We've already seen how quickly support systems can be stretched to the breaking point by a shell-shocked populace. The above photo, snapped this past Tuesday by my friend Lee, captured a sight common to every convenience store & supermarket in the Tokyo metropolitan region. Everyone now has their pet story of some asshole panic-buying. I saw two young women march out of my local mini-mart with eight loaves of white bread and a half-dozen boxes of Frosted Flakes. A day later, a friend witnessed a single woman lugging 15 kilos of rice through checkout. My neighbour Jonny watched one man sweep a whole shelf clean of tofu, and later saw a couple wipe another store out of their entire supply of diapers. (Maybe all that Wonderbread was giving them the sugar-shits?)

Selfish shoppers, however, have marked the nadir of post-catastrophe panic in Japan. Many an overseas commentator has noted the lack of looting, rioting, or other such bedlam that typically rides disaster's coattails. Explanations for the near-undisturbed order of Japanese society have tended to note the culture's homogeneity, immense pride, and innate collectivism. (There's also the ubiquity of authority figures, both legal and, er, other.) But Jonny feels these interpretations ignore the taciturn unease that can be felt around the city: "This feels more like resignation than stiff-upper-lip stoicism to me." This would explain all the panic-buying minus the panic; it does feel as though we've surrendered to the dull inevitability of the worst-case scenario and are merely acting accordingly.

For sure, Japan has suffered a miscellany of worst-case scenarios over the past century. The relative calm of the Japanese amidst misadventure may be part Pavlovian, part harrowed familiarity, but it certainly doesn't stem from an abiding faith in state power. Mistrust of the government has clearly crested when even MTV is accusing Prime Minister Kan of diffidence. Emperor Akihito's five-day-late* televised address provided the perfect analogy to the country's administrative & corporate leaders: in a suit more rumpled than Japan's topography sat an aged man, shielded by privilege and power, with a prehistoric grasp of P.R. offering platitudes instead of strategic substance.



There's certainly panic to be found if you're looking for it - just not amongst the Japanese. Thousands of foreigners have either fled westward or are seeking safe passage out of the country. On Tuesday, the French were the first to loudly shit themselves by calling for their citizens to evacuate; the Germans weren't far behind, spurred by scaremongering news sources like Der Spiegel.

Which brings me to the current bête-noir of every foreign resident: alarmist mass media. To hear it told by the Western media, everyone not yet dead is vomiting blood from radiation poisoning and this airborne death will gradually blanket the globe, crippling mankind and leaving us vulnerable to invasion by Venusians who will kill your grandmother and punch your baby in the face.

By now, every foreigner I know has received a frightened & tearful phone call or e-mail from abroad, pleading with them to leave the country. What else would our families think when every report suggests an outcome of, at best, a cancerous time-bomb, or at worst, "bigger than Chernobyl." Consequently, there's been a massive push-back amongst local bloggers to combat media delerium, emphasizing the relative (and it is relative) normality reappearing across the country. After all, how immediately desperate can the situation be when Japan's already been replaced by Libya, Bahrain, and Côte D'Ivoire for above-the-fold coverage?

Yesterday, my wife & I strode out across Western Tokyo to assess the level of local pandemonium that CNN et al. were reporting.

As you can see, it was utter ataxia, total societal dissolution. Granted, there's an uncanny pall created by the number of still-shuttered shops; electrical shortages have dimmed the neon glare and silenced commercial loudspeakers. But by the most important measures, life continues undaunted.

The most infuriating side-effect of the nuclear neurosis is that it's distracting from the true disaster still unfolding in Tohoku. So displaced is the world's worry that donations are currently a measley sixth of the amount pledged towards the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. Of course, playing up the nuclear problem appeals to the solipsism & self-interest of the West: what happens when/if the radiation hits there? Could a similar catastrophe strike their nuclear facilities? News outlets can't sell ad placements at premium prices while reporting that the Fukushima meltdown is strictly a localized danger. Meanwhile, the American government (and others hoping to avoid Katrina-style embarrassment) is covering its ass by overplaying the urgency of the situation - while nevertheless requiring disaster-stricken American citizens to pay for their own evacuation. Consequently, as opposed to helping the suffering in Tohoku, many in the West are crying narcissistic Chicken Little, weaving the calamity into their own twisted agendas, or retreating into masturbatory navel-gazing.

The bottom line is this: there are 50 selfless workers literally giving their lives to ensure that the nuclear problem remains a limited & local one, while over 10,000 victims remain unaccounted for and 380,000 people have been left homeless. There is little, if any, clean water, fuel, or electricity in Tohoku. These people need help, not impotent hand-wringing.

As for the rest of the country, we're no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop. We've got our lives to get back to, though after a full week of confusion & tragedy, it's nice simply to stop and smell the roses. Or ume blossoms, as the case may be.

* - Interesting trivium: this is also how long it took George W. Bush to reach New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

To the Delight of Caucasian Dullards Everywhere

Well, look who took home top prize at the music industry's annual closed-circle-jerk. Doubtlessly, such an achievement by a 1.3 million-selling band that has licensed its songs to major corporations, has performed at private functions for political insiders, and whose record label doesn't happen to have a corporate parent, will be hailed as another culture-industry equivalent to David taking down Goliath. Backslaps all around, you smug pricks!

Honestly, who is excited by this band any more? Scratch that - who ever thought an anemic, sphincter-clenching hybrid of "Once In a Lifetime" and "Born To Run" was a good idea? I swear, anyone thrilled by the Arcade Fire's coronation at the Cocksucker's Ball is such a boring, beige-souled, conservative bastard that they'd have similarly picked Tom Jones' "Green, Green Grass of Home" over anything off Revolver for Record of the Year 1966.

Today's Aphorism

Anyone who complains that their "tweet" was misread, has misread Twitter altogether.

War of Attrition on the Listener's Attention

As irresistible as list-making may be, it presents a problem that I've purchased precisely zero albums released within the last calendar year. I've been given quite a few records by friends, but I can't convince myself (let alone anyone else) that the best albums of 2010 happen to be by all my buddies' bands, whom you've never heard.

But I've not been incurious as a listener; I think I've explored a wider array of new sounds than I have in at least several years. It just so happens that almost none of this exploration has been contemporary - not that contemporary music has encouraged me to explore it much. (Seriously, with Best-Of lists like these, who needs Worst-Of lists?) Thanks to the Internet's obliteration of the over-/underground divide, even the most subterranean acts are tempted by the possibility of a pop crossover, implicitly depressing experimental daring.

The other problem posed by the Internet is what Patton Oswalt dubs "etewaf": Everything That Ever Was - Available Forever. New musicians must compete not only with each other, but with the sum-total of musical history which is now but a right-click away. Rather than liberating listeners from the dull hegemony of current trends, this suffocates them with option paralysis. From this, the modern audience appears to bifurcate into obedient contemporaneity on one hand, conservative retrovision on the other.

This presents career-minded musicians with three wholly unpleasant options:

• Craft face-punchingly moronic Aspartame pop that seizes listeners within the first 30 seconds and fails to disappoint by going precisely nowhere.
• Pattern your tunes after a tried-and-true template (be it Springsteen, Toni Basil, or Klaus Schulze) with plagiaristic fidelity.
• Give up and enjoy your obscurity.

And the first two options all but guarantee music that is dogmatically diatonic, rhythmically regular, and grindingly dull.

Many would argue that the very curse of the internet is its blessing: everything that ever was - available forever! But, as Oswalt explains, "that creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists — just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?" Indeed, this is the fundamental problem of the digital environment in general, as Jodi Dean elaborates in her brilliant book, Blog Theory:

...no authority tells the subject what to do, what to desire, how to structure its choices. Žižek argues, however, that in fact the result of the Master's decline is unbearable, suffocating closure. The online environment Second Life clearly demonstrates this closure: able to do or create anything (there aren't even laws of gravity), the majority of users end up with avatars that are sexier versions of themselves walking around shopping, gambling, fixing up their houses, and trying to meet people ("meet" can be read euphemistically here). It's not only boring - it's stifling as it confronts users with their lack of skills and imagination.

To be sure, there are those (myself included) to whom "etewaf" has been a boon. Anyone with a dram more discipline than the average subcultural tourist has access to whole goldmines that before were largely inaccessible by time, distance, and/or cost. Then again, we're the very people who, in Ye Olde Offline Times, had the curiosity & dedication to pursue our niche manias despite the prohibitions of time, distance, and/or cost.

As such, my chief means of musical exploration is the same now as fifteen years ago: talking with friends nerdier than myself. Ergo, to give credit where it's truly due, here are the top 5 influences upon my listening habits across 2010.

1. Watching Too Many Old Movies

As I mentioned a month ago, I was recently inducted into the gruesome world of giallo cinema. What's odd is the genre's initial appeal lies not in its cinematic strengths (which, depending on the film, are frequently few) but in its soundtracks. The friend who introduced me to gialli made no attempt to sell the genre on its Swiss-cheese screenwriting or Mexican soap-opera acting; instead, he pointed me towards the tonal warp of Bruno Nicolai's strings and the violent arrhythmia of Ennio Morricone's scores for Dario Argento.

If a score was particularly striking, I'd actually get around to watching the movie. Occasionally, the movie would exceed my (admittedly minimal) capacity for guts 'n' gore, which sent me in search of less graphic films of the same vintage. Spy thrillers fit this bill perfectly, from the cartoonish Danger: Diabolik to the more cultivated Harry Palmer trilogy. What these films held in common with the gialli is that the soundtracks often outstripped the films themselves in quality - especially John Barry's ominously exotic score for The IPCRESS File.

2. Co-Producing a Hip-Hop Album

The friend who introduced me to the giallo films had an ulterior interest in their obscure & outlandish scores: as a largely-untapped source of samples. For a couple of years, he's been quietly piecing together a hip-hop album that, even in its unfinished state, is more musically compelling than damn near any album since Fantastic Damage. I was flattered & a little intimidated when he asked me to help sculpt the record's sound, given that I'd yet to produce any hip-hop. This prompted me to research as much left-of-center hip-hop as I could handle, starting with prolific oddballs Madlib and his brother Michael "Oh No" Jackson. Though their total lack of self-editing makes for an uneven discography, I far prefer their analog grime to the slick digital minimalism that currently dominates mainstream hip-hop.

3. Talking To Other Bands On Tour

Obviously, what I've enjoyed the most about being back on the road is playing gigs. But it's also the perfect idiom to geek out as a listener - after all, what greater music nerds than musicians themselves? Our March tour with Lostage was especially enjoyable, whether it was comparing the spoils of some dedicated crate-digging (Karp for ¥300!) or turning each other on to unfamiliar acts. I'm especially grateful for the introduction to Z, whom I became immediately convinced are the best band in Japan.

4. Attending Salford University's Noise Conference

When in spring I blagged my way into an academic conference on "noise," it became suddenly incumbent that I know what I was talking about. I've never actually been a great fan of noise music: I usually find it either a pompous incursion into the "unintentional" soundworld, or just plain boring. But if I was going to participate in a 3-day conference on the subject, I'd better be on more intimate terms with it than merely having attended a My Bloody Valentine concert. Mercifully, I'd chose to focus primarily on the No Wave scene, whose "noise" was less noise outright and more about the expansive blurring of rock's outermost boundaries. This way, I got to listen to my Swans & Sonic Youth records on loop and legitimately call it "research."

The conference itself was every bit the brain-massage I'd hoped. Not only did everyone have something interesting to say, they were quite affable & easy-going. I was thrilled to have found a social milieu where the slurry pub talk would be about, say, the apparent dearth of right-wing prog rock. This niche of ne plus ultra nerdom also exposed me to musical cul-de-sacs of which I had no previous knowledge. Who knew that the Madchester sound owed its very existence to the early-'80s Sheffield scene, and why hadn't they told me before about long-forgotten visionary acts like Hula?

5. Not Being Sated By All the Above

Finally, the maniac's calling card is that there is never enough. Despite musical riches heaped upon my ears by the above experiences, I still craved more strange sounds, more uncharted territory, more unfamiliar artists - which is why I have to acknowledge a certain debt to the "etewaf" phenomenon. Between online retailers like the unequaled Aquarius Records and such appetent blogs as Son of Zamboni, Dayvan Zombear, and OngakuBaka, I became acquainted with countless enthralling artists I'd not yet had the pleasure of hearing: library funkmeister Janko Nilovic, space-rock svengali Walter Wegmüller, Ulaan Khol's rustic soundscapes, and (possibly my most oft-spun album of 2010) Getatchew Mekurya's barnburning collaboration with Dutch post-punks The Ex. I eagerly anticipate what exotic & intriguing sounds I'll be exposed to in the coming year.

And to you, I give a small cross-section of the fruits of the explorations detailed above. Click on the mix title to download, and all the best for 2011.

The War of Attrition On the Listener's Attention

1. John Barry - "Main Title" from The IPCRESS File OST
2. Tyler, the Creator - "French!"
3. Karp - "Forget the Minions"
4. Sonic Youth - "Major Label Chicken Feed"
5. Hula - "Red Mirror"
6. Ennio Morricone - "Trafelato" from Giornata Nera Per l'Ariete OST
7. Walter Wegmüller - "Der Wagen"
8. Getatchew Mekurya & the Ex - "Ethiopia Hagere"
9. Oh No - "Smoky Winds"
10. Z - "新今日"

But that joke isn't funny anymore...

Possibly the strangest consequence of a twenty-four-hour infotainment cycle is that it's mobilized the infinite monkey theorem: all that round-the-clock, Quixotic, chaotic, vanity-pressed, niche-filling flotsam multiplied by the power of the internet means that sometimes, what was once an absurdist brain-fart will be made a reality. Our Everest-sized trashmound of pop-cultural ephemera is performing a cold reading on the future and it's bound to score the occasional hit.

For example, it's often claimed that Mark E. Smith is psychic, having predicted (among other things) the 1982 Guatemalan coup and the IRA bombing of Manchester City Centre in 1996. But after thirtysome years of packing thousand-word screeds into three-minute post-punk morsels, it'd be utterly baffling if none of Smith's words proved prescient. A kind of counter-clairvoyance, that would be.

So it's less appropriate to say Monty Python predicted the Tea Party than to say Cleese's anti-Communist freakout simply crystallizes the American conservative's most consistent style of paranoia of the past (yikes) sixty years. Granted, the resemblance between Glenn Beck and Dave Foley's "right-wing paranoid reactionary" is eerie, since it extends beyond content into cadence & rhetorical style. But surely between the combined archives of Kids In the Hall, SNL, SCTV, Fridays, and This Hour Has 22 Minutes there would be at least a single sketch starring a jeremiad-spouting jingoist?

But the MADtv sketch below is graying my hair - not the least because it's MADtv yet is actually damned funny. This is a particularly chilling example of something that was once patently screwball mutating into de facto plain-statement: 2000's most repellent, line-stepping satire (listen to those "boos!") is 2010's Republican populism. Again, I'm not saying Nicole Sullivan & her co-writers are psychic. It's just impressive when people continue to surprise you, albeit in the worst way possible.



(Hat-tip to FARK. There, Drew, are ya happy?)

Headbutting

The bugbear of every audio engineer is a problematic sonic wobble called "phase cancellation": when two identical soundwaves are a half-cycle out of sync, one soundwave peaks exactly when the second craters, thus negating each other and producing silence.

This is a handy visual for thinking about the results of the U.S. midterm election. The outcome could've been worse for the Democrats and better for the Republicans; control of Congress is now split between the two parties; and voter sentiment towards each is more tepid than day-old banana pudding. All this signifying nothing, nada, niente, null will get done. Each party can spend the next two years accomplishing absolute bupkiss whilst blaming the other guys for blocking every bill that hits the floor. Victory and defeat nipping at each other's asses in the kind of Moebius-like cycle only quantum physicists can explain. Champagne for everyone on K Street!

I highly recommend Richard Seymour's class-oriented dissection of how rigidly inert the political status quo will remain in the wake of the mid-terms. His writing is crisp, his conclusions rational yet depressingly predictable: the GOP is the party of the obscenely wealthy; the Tea Party has mobilized a pathetically minute minority of xenophobes within the white working class; Democrats are supported by a middle-class too terrified of losing their luxury goods to attack the American power structure; and in the absence of a political party that truly reflects their own interests, the working class overwhelmingly opt not to vote (thus reinforcing the two ruling parties' misconception that they alone represent the electorate).

In other news about people who don't fucking get it, FARK founder Drew Curtis blasted Jon Stewart for failing to properly credit news aggregator Reddit.com for drumming up support for the Rally To Restore Banality. But it quickly became clear that no one cared about a pissing contest between a Viacom employee and Condé Nast's IT department, and all was forgiven post-haste. However, in both his initial rant & his grudging "s'all good," Curtis accused The Daily Show and The Colbert Report of failing to cite FARK as a source for much of the material they lampoon:

Am I'm butthurt about not getting mentioned on the Daily Show? After 10 years, yes I am. Do they owe me? No. Is it common courtesy to do it once in awhile? Yes. Is that what this is all about then? No.

At least he got it right that TDS owes him nothing and that proper citation is not what it's all about. But evidently, Curtis doesn't understand how the internet works: what matters is not who is communicating, or even what is being communicated, but the act of communicating itself. This is the greatest relay network in human history; individual nodes don't matter. Surely Curtis wouldn't argue that an individual gear-tooth is significant compared with the smooth & steady operation of the machine as a whole. Yes, a bad gear will gum up the works, but then it gets replaced, as surely as Facebook swallowed MySpace's clientele and as quickly as I can find a video that was taken off YouTube over on Megavideo or Daily Motion.

The machine speeds on well-oiled and without a care for its cogs. Because if our corporate overlords can't control the content that we cough up, they can at least make sure we're not making any money off it.

An Honest, Straightforward Entreaty

So there's this website you might have seen 'round, Chunklet, that hits like a bucket of ice water to the smug, disaffected face of indie culture. (They also kick a little dirt at those feckless twee ninnies for good measure.) The point is they're hilarious, and actually fine people aside, playing the invaluable role of subcultural gadfly.

And they're putting out a new book! I managed to blag my way on board as a contributor, so when you sit down with your copy of The Indie Cred Test, I am among those administering the exam. No favouritism, either.

But first we've got to get the book out, and so we humbly ask that you donate towards the book's publication at Kickstarter. I know times are tough and you were really saving for that box set of the complete first season of Glee or whatever, but please. If you want to demonstrate your support for talented, whip-smart writers in a rapidly withering, calcifying literary environment, please contribute what you can.

J'accusatory

Whenever I read remarks about the dire state of music journalism, I'm shot through with potential guilt - until I go read the examples of what constitutes genuinely shit writing. I then thank/curse The Internet for operating upon such a gross baseline of stupidity that someone of moderate talent (such as myself) sounds like Bangs or Christgau by comparison.

Honest Question

Crooks & Liars asks what I've been wondering myself: why is Helen Thomas (who held G.W. Bush's feet to the fire more than any other White House press corps suck-up) ignominiously shoved onto an ice flow because people confused anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, while bloody Ann Coulter & Glenn Beck are not only still on the air but are boosting books by Nazi sympathisers?

Making Jesters Into Kings

Readers my own age may vaguely recall the name Jesse Camp. Folks older likely won't, since they had better things to do in the late '90s than watch daytime basic cable; folks younger won't because they hadn't yet been trained to care about the culture machine's wet farts. So, to put us all on the same page: a recap.

The 1990s were tumultuous times for MTV. After its Faustian dalliance with the semi-disinterested, ironically-distanced grunge/alternative audience, the network (like everyone else) was desperate to fill the Kurt Cobain-shaped hole left in the popular consciousness. Various ugly, ill-fitting hats were tried on: ska, electronica, swing. Before long, this pre-millenial tension & post-modernist introspection congealed into catharsis through wanton aggression, and self-parodic celebration of artifice through unmitigated consumption - manifested respectively by "nü-metal" bands and the resurgence of prefab boy bands & pop princesses.

MTV had hit the jackpot. Acts like Limp Bizkit and Slipknot allowed the network to court a nominally hostile & overwhelmingly male audience that fancied itself "transgressive" and "anti-establishment"; meanwhile, the legion bleached-blond teases from Florida captured the hearts of tweens, teen girls, middle-American prudes, and pedophiles alike. Best of all, MTV could pit these two camps against each other, a culture war between the minions of Light and Darkness for the soul of America with all the depth & stagecraft of pro wrestling.

The true masterstroke, though, was when MTV fully embraced the dawning information age's ethos of interactivity. A forum was crafted upon which the epic battle of the saccharine V. the sinister could unfold in realtime, with each side's footsoldiers beating back the other via telephonic vote. It was called Total Request Live.

Total Request Live (or TRL, as it rebranded itself in text-and-Twitter-era Newspeak) was the last of MTV's programs that dealt explicitly with music to become a pop-cultural touchstone. Ironically, its success also ushered in the "reality TV" format that ultimately eclipsed it in the mid-Aughts. TRL's emphasis on audience participation (both at home & in the studio) conditioned viewers to be entertained by - and want to be - shrieking, inarticulate narcissists pulled right off the street.

The most important erasure of the line separating MTV's on-air personalities & its audience came in 1998, with the inaugural Wanna Be a VJ? contest. Participants were pulled from the throng surrounding MTV's Time Square studio and vetted according to their music knowledge & on-screen charisma. Whereas candidates for MTV's first "reality" flagship The Real World were selected exclusively by the show's producers, the VJ-wannabes were eliminated by phone-in & online vote. Eventually, the contest was whittled down to two candidates: former college radio host & music geek Dave Holmes and trashionista space-cadet Jesse Camp.

Despite Holmes' experience & skill in front of the camera, Camp was voted the victor thanks to his dynamic personality & his populist persona as gutter-punk everyman (despite his plush prep-school background). There were, however, allegations of ballot-stuffing, an earlier incarnation of the "Vote For the Worst" culturejamming campaign that upset the sixth season of American Idol. Possibly in response to this, MTV hired Holmes as well, entrusting him with celebrity interviews while limiting wild-card Camp's onscreen responsibilities to occasional colour-commentary on TRL.

His popularity couldn't compensate for his obvious incompetence, and Jesse Camp unceremoniously left MTV after barely a year - a full two years less than Dave Holmes' tenure on the network.

Since then, Camp has more or less been off the radar. (Holmes still works as a TV commentator & host.) In 2006, Camp was seen working at a Los Angeles pet shop and is currently rumoured to be on staff at a McDonald's franchise. It's a fate commonplace to flavour-of-the-month reality TV "stars". But in retrospect, Camp's case seems excessively unfair. Let's review the particulars: a charismatic but unqualified character is plucked from obscurity; obfuscating their inherited privilege, their sloganeering performance as a populist simpleton foments a popularity that eclipses their better-experienced colleague. Their general cluelessness & inexperience, however, mark them as a liability and they're effectively marginalised by the very powers that anointed them. Finally, their inordinate fame precipitates them to abandon their office to follow their "true" calling and achieve their "proper" potential - despite a total deprivation of apparent skill.

Why, with that kind of backstory, you'd expect Jesse Camp now to be treated as an esteemed expert in his field, to be the elected figurehead of a "grassroots" movement... to be a candidate in the 2012 presidential election.