Hiding In Plane Sight

The second I go off the grid, several new holes erupt in civilization's creaky, buckled hull. A delusional white supremacist single-handedly shell-shocks Norway; England explodes; and Malawi - my parents' current place of residence - takes a big, bloody stride towards becoming yet another penny-ante despotism. And to think my greatest personal concern for the past three weeks has been a single sickly bat fluttering about the rafters of a drafty cabin in rural Nova Scotia.

I'm going to have to work overtime upon my return to Tokyo to tap out appropriate responses to all of the above (not to mention my recent take-down of John Maus has unexpected renewed relevance and could benefit from further examination). For now, though, it's 1:14am in Vancouver and my wife is pleading with me to turn out the lights, so I'll leave you with an ornery screed I sent a friend from within the grey bowels of the San Francisco airport...

Well, instead of an 8-hour layover in your fair local airport, our inbound flight was 3 hours late and consequently we're stuck in the terminal without any open amenities or services and - because this is fucking California - nowhere to smoke. Fer chrissakes, if I could either smoke or get a cup of coffee, I wouldn't be one wry comment away from a Chris Benoit-class air-rage episode.

At least there's free wi-fi, so I thought I'd wax insomniac a bit about the flight into San Francisco tonight. Good god, it was sold-out economy cabin of living clichés. You'd couldn't have written a harder-stereotyped cross-section of the Bay Area populace. Towards the front of the cabin was a twentysomething black dude reppin' Oakland a bit too hard; also, the long-suffering wife of some Silicon Valley luminary was struggling to corral a newborn & a vaguely bratty toddler. (How do I know she was married to a tech-head? Who else would put an iPod on her infant, an iPad in the hands of a 4-year-old, and not stop talking ever on her fucking iPhone?) In front of me where two late-'30s first-time parents percolating with excessive pride in their bulge-eyed free-range baby which made disturbingly animalistic noises and was mostly charming until he shat himself with an hour left in the flight.

I was sat next to a young Russian blonde who was reading a book titled Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? and, despite being on the chapter about "Managing Social Distance", totally blanked me the whole flight. She had a mole like an anti-melanoma PSA behind her right shoulder. Two rows behind were a couple who weren't really a couple, having just met each other in the departure lounge, and broadcast the arc of their burgeoning flirt-friendship in loud, smug conversation. She actually hissed at the TV screens during the welcome message from United's new CEO, before going on at length about (despite "not really being into nationalism") responsibly representing her country & her gender during her Peace Corps stint in southern Ghana. He reciprocated with anecdotes of his time in Beijing. He was wearing these glasses. By the time the plane had landed, the two had moved on to lovingly (if critically) describing their parents and talking about their "really, like, totally healthy" relationship with their mother's French lesbian partner.

Currently sat amongst a planeful of furious passengers awaiting their connection to Dallas-Ft. Worth. I'm going in search of coffee somewhere in this Dantean mezzanine.

Oh Noooooooo-ah!

Even if not one single other soul vanishes today from this earth, this proves that the Rapture has indeed come. Give God the ol' figure-4 leg-lock for us, Randy!

Shuffle-Play in Dark Days

We're at a bit of a loss for what to do. On the one hand, there's elevated amounts of Godzilla snot floating over Tokyo; on the other hand, the UK's chief science adviser and a moron who once declared war on crows say that it's perfectly safe to be out & about. What's a media-gorged foreign resident to do?

But, happily, our ward is currently exempt from the rolling blackouts, so we've the internet & a handsome record collection to keep ourselves occupied as we fortify ourselves against radioactive intoxicants with spinach (high in iron!) and hard liquor (a.k.a. "The Chernobyl Method").

...Hey, another aftershock! Ain't no party like a tectonic party because, evidently, the party don't fucking stop.

Anyway, in our idle hours under self-imposed house arrest, we've come up with a kind of apocalypse playlist, reproduced below. Each link leads to a YouTube clip, so you can enjoy each song discretely.

And the Earth Died Screaming

1. AC/DC - "You Shook Me All Night Long"
2. Tom Waits - "Misery Is the River of the World"
3. The Fall - "Lay of the Land"
4. David Bowie - "Panic in Detroit"
5. Tricky - "Aftermath"
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "City of Refuge"
7. Talking Heads - "Life During Wartime"
8. Kraftwerk - "Radioactivity"
9. Loop - "Burning World"
10. Black Sabbath - "Into the Void"

Postscriptual Requests
11. James Q. "Spider" Rich - "Yakety Sax"
12. Spacemen 3 - "Things'll Never Be the Same"
13. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Cabin Fever"
14. John Lennon - "Nobody Told Me"
15. The Mothers of Invention - "Any Way the Wind Blows"

Tuesday Morning Theme For Japan's Pacific Coast

I can't tell if I'm being ironic or not.

Pick Up the Pieces

Well, I was about two edits away from completing posts about the ongoing guitar-solo battle and America buttoning up its brownshirt - but given current local circumstances, both those topics seem, if not irrelevant, low-priority.

When the quake hit Friday afternoon, it took me about 20 seconds to realize this was not an average tremor: instead of the normal side-to-side shimmy, the ground was undulating in an unnervingly fluid manner. That it hadn't stopped after 20 seconds was an even worse sign. Not wishing to die pancaked under concrete, I dashed out into the street. I couldn't immediately tell quite how frightened I should've felt: my neighbourhood is populated largely by stoics, slackers, and seniors, all of whom were stolidly standing around watching the streetlights & stop signs rattle and groan. Taxi cabs and bicyclists obstinately struggled to steer straight as the asphalt warped beneath their wheels. Was this a fucking disaster or not?

Once the shaking stopped, I ran back inside to find my apartment totally intact - a minor miracle, considering its seemingly-shoddy construction and our laissez-faire approach to storage. Returning to my computer, I noticed my Caltech scientist friend had just logged on. I broke the news, to which he replied with the appropriate amount of incredulity:

me: Dude, we just had the biggest earthquake I've ever felt.
Scientist Friend: !!!
you ok?
hasn't shown up on my feed yet
me: No, I mean like JUST hit.
Scientist Friend: oh shiiiit

We then spent the better part of an hour swapping links & updates as information began flooding in... 7.9, epicenter near Sendai, 8.8, tsunami warnings, 8.9, the largest earthquake in Japan's history. This was a fucking disaster.

Wow, what an grossly unsuitable turn-of-phrase I just used. "Flooding in..." Less than an hour after the quake, I sat slack-jawed & stupefied watching live coverage of tsunamis bulldozing whole towns along the Pacific coast. There's no point in trying to describe the sight. Not only has the 24-hour news cycle chiseled these images into everyone's retinas, but there's no joy in, uh, eloquently and succinctly relating the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of people.*

Having had my fill of calamity-porn infotainment, I stepped out for some fresh air. The streets were eerily empty for a Friday evening. With mass transportation at a stand-still, everyone was still stuck at work. The signs of catastrophe were quietly obvious, as most shops were either shuttered or sweeping up their shattered wares. (As unpleasant as it is clearing away smashed liquor bottles or ceramics, I can't imagine how exasperating it must be to tidy up a pachinko parlour after an earthquake - ball bearings all over that sumbitch...) A couple of billboards threatened to fall from their perches. The ferroconcrete facade of one shop had collapsed, exposing the building's dainty wood skeleton. But mercifully, Koenji had escaped the quake largely unscathed.

Later Friday night, my wife & I were interviewed by CBC Radio as "eyewitnesses" to the disaster. We were dramatic enough to keep our account interesting, while at the same time emphasizing how little we could justifiably complain. Our misadventure wasn't a pale shade of the terror experienced by residents up north. We were speaking from a heated apartment with hot coffee and clean socks - how bad off could we really be?

Yesterday was a gorgeous blue-sky day with the resiny chill of early spring in the air. A friend & I enjoyed a lengthy hike across Western Tokyo to cure ourselves of cabin fever and the lingering stink of apocalyptic presentiment. However, whatever cheerfulness we'd won during the walk evaporated upon arrival at a friend's house, where we learned that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor had just popped its top. Our immediate course of action was obvious: start drinking like a bastard and pray the jet stream would whisk any & all radioactive toxins up over Siberia, because fuck reindeer, man.

I was spurred to an early retreat home by sudden rumours of rolling blackouts and supply shortages. I must have been slow off the blocks because already there was not a slice of bread, not a carton of milk to be found in any shop I entered. Faced with such a depleted selection, many shoppers had opted for foodstuffs that would strike a penniless college student as grossly unhealthy: boxes of Frosted Flakes, microwave pasta, chocolate-covered potato chips, and enough six-packs to make the U.S. marine corps plotz. I suppose diabetes kills you slower than starvation.

Today, further steps towards normalcy have been made. Electricity, gas, and water are still running. Bread & milk are back on the shelves and the trains are on time. But again, I speak from the privileged position of the resource-greedy capitol almost 400km from the epicenter. The slowly-unfolding horror of nuclear meltdown continues, and the people of Tohoku are in desperate need of assistance. If you're so inclined, donations can be made to the Red Cross and Globalgiving.org. It may seem unlikely that a first-world nation would so be in need, but remember: this is a first-world whose debt is over twice the value of its GDP with a population so aged that it makes the SCOTUS look like spring chickens. If the West still wants someone to manufacture semiconducters and service the American national debt, then help is absolutely necessary.



* - Having neither a television nor the interest, I haven't really watched CNN outside of hotel rooms until this weekend - wow, I had no idea they were such a lousy network. Not "lousy" meaning "transparently propagandist," à la Fox News, just straight-up bad. They've got analytical prowess of a 10-year-old and the emotional tenor of Woody Allen after a bout of heavy drinking. The spectacle will no doubt reach its faked climax Monday night when Anderson Cooper will stroll around the demolished mise-en-scène where the news used to be, feeling the story at us. Ugh.

And I swear, come Monday, if Stewart or Colbert falls back on one goddamned Godzilla joke...

Apocalypse No

Poor Evan Calder Williams... I never give the guy a fair shake. Every mention of him here and every comment I've made on his blog has been from a combative, borderline-bullying stance. But the truth is that we're both Marxists of one sort or another; we both try to imagine means by which capitalism can be choked; and we both have unruly beards that do us no aesthetic service. We're on the same side - and yet I can't read his writing without taking a swing at him.

How ferocious the battles are when so little is at stake.

Anyway, Williams has contributed to Mute magazine an article a propos apocalyptic cinema. It's well worth a read, and makes some interesting distinctions between crisis, catastrophe, and apocalypse. Most of my disagreement with the piece is specific & quibbling. For example, whereas Williams tacks to the original zombies-as-consumers interpretation (updated with a Žižekian notion of drive), I think the new glut of zombie films differ significantly in intent from the original Romero movies. The old Living Dead films were satirical critiques of persistent consumption, whereas the current crop are exploitation flicks preying on the audience's fear of the Other. Suppurating blank slates as they are, zombies are floating signifiers for whoever the audience fears are tearing at the fabric of civilised society: leftists may see fascists; Christians may see Muslims; conservatives may see immigrants, gays, or communists. (The heathen/immigrant/homosexual angle is especially persuasive, given bigots' fears of corruption of the blood & conversion by a kind of lobotomisation.)

I also think Williams gives The Road incredibly short shrift when he calls it "a terrible, terrible film." I see why many people wouldn't enjoy it (long, bleak, proud of its own straightjacketed sentimentality) but to call it "terrible" is unfair & inflated. I think the film is as embarrassed as proud of its nostalgia for good ol' late capitalism, especially considering how quickly the film's survivors/survivalists turn to cannibalism. Taking this literally - as an animal "urge" to digest human flesh -, Williams utterly misses the obvious symbolism of the cannibalistic act: that we as a species have eaten ourselves out of house & home, and will continue to do so until the last man gnaws his own kneecaps off rather than suffer from want.

I also get the sense that, as a good Marxist, Williams finds The Road's lack of faith in the collectivist spirit repellent and perhaps inaccurate. Maybe in Santa Cruz, where Williams lives amidst the redwood-shaded spectre of hippie utopianism, a group-oriented, egalitarian approach to survival would prevail. Let's hope it would. But from the rust belt to the Gulf Coast, where the bibles are beaten the hardest and the Gini coefficient is at its widest, American citizens faced with the deprivation & desperation presented in The Road would make the marauding motorheads of Mad Max look like British aristocracy.

A greater problem with Williams' piece is the writing itself - what happens to academics that bleaches any style or wit from their writing, leaving in its place a skree of adverbs and neologic nouns? Most infuriating (and this almost ruined Dominic Fox' Cold World for me) is an over-reliance on stock first-person-plural devices that affect the tone of the dullest college lecturer ever:

• To start, we should...
• Let us...
• What do we mean...
• Let us...
  
• To conclude, we should...

No, not "what do we mean," but what does "we" mean? Who is this phantasmic "we" that I, as a reader, have been presumptively lumped into by the writer? What are "we" fighting for, and can I get a deferment?

Ultimately, it's Williams' apocalypse fetishism that bugs me the most. Clearly, he's found his theoretical niche, and I can't begrudge him that, but his pontifical embrace of the eschatological suffers from two problems of perspective. The first is that Williams has never experienced first-hand the truly catastrophic. I'm not asking that he suffer, but anyone in Haiti or the Gaza Strip would probably find him naïve & privileged.

The second is the same arrogance that every post-apocalyptic film appeals to: that "I" am one of the lucky ones, that "I" am smarter-faster-stronger, that "I" will survive.

What are the odds of that? Well, how many heroin addicts aren't William Borroughs or Iggy Pop?

Quick Aside

Who wants to bet that the US gov't paid off NBC to launch the late night wars so that no one would notice the SCOTUS putting American democracy up for sale? Of course, the 2012-style near-eradication of Haiti was a hell of a distraction, but given that most Americans have no idea who "Baby Doc" Duvalier is (or that he had a papa), Haiti was not a reliable long-term distraction. So roll out the big guns - er, big chin & big hair! "Go back to bed, America..."

Don't get me wrong, I stand among the many who are desperately waiting for Leno to choke to death on a Dorito, but - come on.

And they call it "news"...

Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.

Of course, we as a species have always been fascinated with our own fates, interpreting even vaguely adverse events or signs as portents of some inescapable apocalypse. But the idea that we were hurtling at high speed towards total collapse in the immediate future used to be peddled only by fringe cranks, religious screwballs, and schizophrenics. Now, this has somehow become the consensus - though for anyone looking for ill omens, if reality does even 30% of the work, confirmation bias will do the rest.

Speaking of which, I'm currently cooking up something about how Japan's attempt to "civilize" something inherently barbaric & unnatural will someday contribute to its dissolution as a society. In the meantime, I ask y'all what you'd care to hear more: tunes about the end of days, or junk food?

If There Is a God, He's a Total Bastard

I hadn't even reached for my first cuppa coffee this morning when I encountered this utterly gutting headline. Slumping CD sales shake hands with the recession, and now the loss is personal. Shellshocked and as-yet-uncaffeinated, I'm bereft beyond being able to muster a cogent commentary, other than that sucks the big one, so here's a handful of videos from seminal Touch and Go acts across the decades.










If only there were any YouTube'd videos of Brainiac that weren't dinotech camcorder-quality!

In terms of a conduit for new ideas closing to the world, this makes the prior first-quarter death swell feel like a minor exhalation. You'd better make good on that promise of "probably" releasing new music, Rusk - especially if I'm not going to be able to find releases from KRS, 5RC, or Drag City anywhere other than fucking Amazon...

Chilling So Hard My Ass Almost Froze Off

Man, I am gonna sleep like a baby on a morphine drip tonight...

Were the alternative results a fact, I'd simply have pointed you all ibidem to the master of bilious visual parody, Tim Krieder. Thank fucking god I don't have to do that.

Of course, what with all the discussion about "accelerationism" raging around a certain blogipelago, the question begs to be asked: wither all the McCain endorsements? Yesterday would've stood as the ultimate test of accelerationists' integrity. After all, if we're serious about running this crazy neoliberal corporate-militarist train right off its blood-slicked rails, isn't a McCain/Palin administration the shortest distance between here and oblivion? Or is that too Bakuninist a version of Give 'Em Enough Rope, one that invites a degree of violence we don't wish to see exacted on innocent civilians? Or is it that we un-Amerikaneren don't want to risk getting nuked on principle by putting Palin - better suited to Twin Peaks than DC - within reach of kick-starting a fission-feuled Rapture?

Last night, it crept into the pre-dawn hours here in Hamburg as the tallies began to trickle in. I called a dear friend at whose house I attended an election party four years ago - at which we all drank ourselves through the shellshock with an endless supply of Cuba libres. (The specific choice of drink, much like voting in the '04 election, was a defiant yet ultimately empty gesture that left us feeling gutted & raw the following morning.) This time, though my friend was in considerably better spirits, her celebratory mood was owed chiefly to the modest relief that the next four years won't be as totally shit as they could have been.

I'm not, nor have I ever been, under the illusion that, at long last, all the problems will be solved. Obama is several supersized strides to the right of where my ideal elected representative would be; nah, scratch that - my ideal political rep would probably refuse even to consider joining as compromised & cynical an enterprise as a late-stage capitalist democracy. In fact, given the genuinely weird array of soft-scabby Culture War-wounds that have been ripped back open in the last couple of months, I'm feeling bold enough to wager the Balkanization of America will come in my lifetime - a prediction seconded by the friend I phoned last night.

"I don't expect miracles, especially not from a politician," she said. "He's a charismatic guy with a good head on his shoulders and a hell of a learning curve; he's campaigning and talking to people better now than he was even three months ago. A messiah? Gimme a break. But he is a catalyst for all the ugly shit that's been festering within this country for the past three hundred years. Basically, he's the guy I think can best talk America through whatever tragic and difficult, but necessary schism is coming in the near future."

Three cheers for Barack Obama, divorce-counselor-elect!

Update (about 12 hours later): Y'know what? Fuck it. I'm happy. I'm fucking ecstatic. I am THRILLED that, thanks to the choice made by the American electorate, I can stave off point-of-no-return misanthropy for at least another few years. When was the last time the US told the rest of the globe that it actually gave a shit and kinda meant it? Have I revised my expectations for the coming Obama/Biden administration? Nope. My ideological differences persist, and blah blah blah... I don't care right now. As long as air strikes aren't launched against Tehran between now and January 20 (which *sigh* remains a distinct possibility), at the very least civilization will collapse at an organic rate of decay, as opposed to with all the grace & austerity of a shotgun blast to the face.

And to all those who actually cast their vote for the Republican ticket... suck it, losers! You had six years of unmitigated control in Washington, every one of Leo Strauss' oligarchical wet dreams came true, and what did all that get you? Small gov't? Fiscal responsibility? An end to "nation-building"? Growing wages? Financial security? Transparent domestic policy? The overturn of Roe V Wade? Federal protection of the sanctity of marriage? The capture of Osama bin Laden? Victory in the wars on terror, drugs, and poverty? The restoration of honour & dignity to the White House?

In the immortal words of Ice-T: y'all can eat a bowl of dicks. Good night and get fucked.

Many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment and will die here like rotten cabbages...

I'm going to be otherwise detained between now and next week, but rather than leave this blog as blank as a blink, I wanted to just share a few words of discouragement about an event over which I have no tangible control and probably won't have another chance to comment on before it comes to pass. *Ahem*

Anyone who votes for McCain & Palin has decided that the accessibly ideal leaders of the global power-locus nation are a hypocritical crank & rent-boy to Wall Street whose greatest claim to fame is dropping napalm on men, women, and children; and a psychotic millenarian separatist with a double-digit IQ who couldn't successfully manage a Gap store if her life fucking depended on it.

Anyone who votes for McCain & Palin is an irredeemably selfish & myopic cunt who, by all standards, will have proven themselves unfit to participate responsibly in a legitimate democracy (not that America is such a thing).

Anyone who votes for McCain & Palin is a poster-child for forced sterilization who ought to be ineligible for a driver's license or passport, and is a psychic sponsor of a budding sociopath strapping on a suicide bomb.

America, if you vote for (or if SCOTUS installs) McCain & Palin, the next time anything bad happens to your damned county, the extent of international sympathy will make Stockhausen's reaction to 9/11 look as syrupy-sweet as a Hallmark card.

For those of us powerless to prevent this potential disaster, we can always turn to Patrick McGoohan for comfort - that is, if this 40-year-old TV episode weren't so depressingly prescient.

Post-Millenium Tension

Here's what I don't quite understand about blogging: how does anyone get around to writing anything whilst wading in this swamp of digital distractions? (And I mean writing, not this blockquoted, hyperlinked juggling of other people's words as a substitute for content generation.) By now, I should have been done this post three days ago, nevermind folding the laundry and scoring a trailer. But how the hell am I supposed to ignore Onion-worthy headlines like "People run for lives as flames explode around them"? Or this Ed Wood-worthy non-sequitor that was so gloriously awkward, I actually rented the movie to see how bad that shit was? I mean, even the really good flotsam in this horizonless sea of 0s and 1s is keeping me from some real-world responsibility.

In a similar spirit, though it's a little late for thanks by now, big up to Carl for pointing everyone in the direction of this fine (though apparently abandoned) blog. Right off the bat, I was taken by the incisive stance Alex adopts whilst pissing on graves:

Hauntology's ghostly audio is seen as form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument... link[ed] to a mood of melancholic defeatism in Western left wing politics.

This is an idea I've stewed in until my hands got pruney and my hair stank of chlorine, but never really got around to writing about. I'm grateful someone finally put it publicly with such immediacy.

As many savory sounds have been channeled via this necrocultural seance (I especially like the notion of "ghost genres"), the obvious term that no one has so far applied to hauntological music is Dead End. The overarching message seems to be, "Give up. Sounds are neither created nor destroyed, they simply change form. Everything's already been done - probably by Eno*." This hasn't sat well with everyone: almost two years have already passed since this suicide of the imagination and insistence on being bored was ruefully dubbed "Transcendental Miserablism" over at Hyperstition. But if the Fukuyaman "End of History" proved patently false in the political realm, why can it not be an equally invalid prognosis for culture?

Where hauntology is as bankrupt as any other stripe of post-modernism is: can a creative philosophy be called such when it lacks the essential act of creation? There's obviously a creative aspect to reconstitution, translation, and deconstruction, but nothing that crackles with the shock of the new. As I've touched on before, part of the blame has to do with the available tools: the focus has shifted from hardware - between the instrument and the amplifier - to software; consequently, sounds are less created now than they are reformatted, simulated, and sampled. Sounds that are not born of air technically do not exist - they are undead, bastard vibrations exiled from their essential medium. This orphaned, unphysical quality is essential to most hauntological music, (re)constructed as it is from ashy samples & decayed soundwaves**, but it also requires hauntological music to be trapped in some bereaved fantasy of "utopias that never were***, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism." In this regard, hauntology is less a meditation on one's own scars than some sadomasochistic chimera about the fresh, stinking-meat wound that produced someone else's scars.

Am I selling short the opportunities offered by music software? I don't think so. Once the novelty of time-stretching and pitch-correcting wore off, the digital domain didn't actually epxand the sonic palette by much. Random-access, nondestructive editing is undeniably convenient, but how much further can nanosecond splicing be pushed beyond "Windowlicker"? (Don't answer that.) In fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of an unheard-of sound produced since the digitally-elongated bellow at the heart of "Come To Daddy".

I wonder if the pervasive pre-millenium tension of the previous decade hasn't led to a serious case of apocalyptic blue-balls. Amid the growing din of millenarian fundamentalists, technophobic survivalists, numerological fruitcakes, and rubbernecking cynics, it was impossible not to anticipate - with some degree of excitement - the systemic aneurysm & subsequent pandemonium of Y2K. It possibly came as a greater shock that nothing happened. The lights stayed on, nothing exploded, and computers only crashed if they were running Windows 98 (and so was par for the course). Since then, people have been desperate to declare every new disaster as the Day the World Changed Forever. Granted, the mere seven years of the new century have already accrued an impressive catalogue of catastrophes: September 11, the Iraq War, Katrina, and the current economic meltdown. But as of yet, very little has fundamentally changed about the way the world works. Hell, Bill Hicks could rise from the grave and (much to his apopleptic chagrin, I imagine) do a verbatim rehash of his early-'90s routines. Could it be that we're all just a bit... disappointed?

(*) - I'm a bit surprised that no one's cited the "Eno mix" of Massive Attack's "Protection" as an obvious precursor to Burial's diffuse, stray-transmission aesthetic.

(**) - Some artists who've been lumped under the hauntology banner, like SunnO))), are a little ill-suited to the "genre," given that they actually originate sounds by tangible means. In this regard, they're better suited to the "post-" (i.e. reductio ad absurdum minimalist deconstruction) prefix.

(***) - Need we be reminded that Burial himself is "too young to have ever gone to a warehouse rave."

Non-sequitorial postscript: Oh, Marnie... Marnie, Marnie, Marnie, I hear you, I dig what you're saying, I can relate, and you're a motherfucker of a guitar player, but... goddamit, just stop singing in that fuckin' cat-in-heat bleat and we can hang, okay? Please?

Insert Goliath Analogy Here

Well, the Large Hadron Collider has already broken down, but a blackhole opened up on our planet this week anyway!

As new media-savvy, well-equipped, and omnisciently hip as the new robber-barons may be, apparently none of them are down with the Wu: protect ya neck, for fuck sake. They didn't, and evidently the world as we knew it ended not in September 2001, but in September 2008.

Appropriating the words of Eddie Izzard, "It's the cutting edge of politics in a very, extraordinarily boring way." No one I know (or at least care about) changed their plans this week: groceries were bought, laundry was done, Columbo reruns were watched, even as financiers wept on Canary Wharf or quietly shat themselves behind Rockefeller Plaza.

But never has there been as theoretically exciting & confused a time in my life. Suddenly, my bickering over the insignificance of that 3.3% GDP bump is hardly dogmatic contrarianism. Small-gov't enthusiasts, who very recently equated taxation with "confiscation at gunpoint," swiftly adopted an oddly zen-like, self-nullifying stance towards their tax dollars. There's an astounding amount of invigorating chatter about not only the pragmatic positives of public ownership, but also the fundamental inviability of neoliberalism. And as "deregulation" entered the breakfast-talk lexicon of America, Obama jumped back into the lead.

At the very least, America's unimpeachable economic power is a thing of the past. Central banks dumped near-unprecedented sums of cash in a bid to build domestic stability, which may kick-start a feeding frenzy upon the American market by foreign entities. Around Deutsche-way, for example, the chairman of insurance giant Allianz (flush from its recent sale of Dresdner Bank) was quoted last week as saying, "From what I see of some of our competitors in the US, this is not a bad time to look at the US market." With the recent merger of its four biggest banks into a mere two - with assets among them topping €3.3 trillion - the world's No. 3 economy has players positioned to place Germany higher upon the economic podium. European bank champ Alessandro Profumo, for one, welcomed the news: "A market with fewer competitors is more profitable."

Of course, nevermind that Profumo was ignoring the 9,000 pink-slips passed out during the Commerzbank-Dresdner merger, a universally-puffing CPI, and that his fellow Italians pay the steepest bank fees in Europe - he said the above before the financial shitstorm. We've all seen now what happens when all the eggs are in one basket (or, rather, the eggs are on layaway with extortive API and have already been promised to several other baskets at the same time).

An ironic postscript to this week's dramatic developments: the most expensive condo in Canada just went on the market, for a handsome $30 million (yes, that's CDN, but if you've checked the exchange rates, the Yankees can't pay that price in pocket change anymore). A common criticism of late-stage capitalism is that it engenders inequity; to be sure, the wealth gap has been growing (an average top 1% household is worth 190 times a median household) as fast as social mobility has been slowing. As the in media explodum bubble swelled over the past decade, the growing number of occupants of said bubble greeted these critiques with a shrug and a wag of the middle finger. Now that their portfolios have been flushed and their penthouse dreams all towering infernos, maybe we can stop pretending poverty is a personal shortcoming, eh?

Pop the cork and join the chorus!

Well, never have my own words tasted so succulent. As I was writing about unwarranted hostility and being "in an uncharacteristically conciliatory mood," the Lehman Brothers financial-services firm filed for the biggest bankruptcy in American history - and the crowd goes wild! Now the word is that the US gub'mint is about to pull AIG off the ledge and wrap it in an $85 billion security blanket to avoid an immediate sequel. I suppose one $691 billion giant biting the dust will have to do for our September dose of schadenfreude. I wonder if, once I roll my wagon eastward at year's end, I won't be followed by hordes of refugee financiers and carpetbaggers flying the flag of F.I.L.T.H. - "failed in London, try Hong Kong."

As good a sarcastic chuckle as this has been, there is a shadow cast across our little anti-capital celebration, as a grim spectre was invoked on the campaign trail. Eric Rauchway knows the seance:

Responding to the collapse of several major investment banks this week, John McCain reassured us, "I think still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong." That move comes from an old playbook: On Oct. 25, 1929, Herbert Hoover declared, "The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."

As Ezra Klein duly elaborated, "This is a guy who has said, proudly, 'I'm always for less regulation' and ...who, three years ago, wanted to turn Social Security over to Wall Street." And should you, even for a moment, find yourself deaf to the echo of Hoover, I'd point you in the direction of Lenin's Tomb for a swift reminder: "This crisis is rooted in the fundamentals."

Anyway, my modest goal for the week is to make a mix of musical misanthropy before I'm back off to Berlin. Currently in the capital is an art exhibition called Exactitudes, "a taxonomy-in-progress of street style," according to Momus. In spite of my sartorial ineptitude, I actually fit into one of the project's tidy tribal pigeonholes - archetype #19, Vagabonds, within which I am frighteningly similar to this guy. Were he wearing a John Lennon mask, he'd be a friggin' dead-ringer. Ignoring that whittling the breadth of the human guise to 96 "tribes" is still woefully insufficient (I know about three people who could conceivably be found in the Exactitudes chart), I'm a little disturbed by how the project casts appearance as an elected self-symbolisation, not as a product of circumstance & lifestyle. As though everyone from the religious devout to trustafarians, from yuppies to genuine street people, put equal consideration & effort into how they present themselves - and have access to the same kinds of tools & accessories to sculpt their exteriors. This looks awfully like more condescending poorism, though since it's billed as an "art exhibition" instead of a glossy multipage advert, I doubt it'll ignite the appropriate level of ire.

They're American planes...

No Future If...

A McCain-Palin victory would tell the world in loud, unequivocative terms, "Fuck you."

Jonathan Freedland predicts a much louder, uglier, more vitriolic reply of, "No, fuck YOU."

(Just in case anyone thought saying, "Everybody except US citizens should elect the American government", was strictly well-humoured hyperbole.)

Mixed Media

So: which is it, lads? Is it "false to frame the biofuel debate as a choice between people or SUVs," or is it literally a choice between "a Prius hybrid on a trip from San Francisco to San Diego and back... [or] feed[ing] a person for a year"? Having enjoyed not one, but two burgers of locally-raised red meat last night, is my moral credit as bad as someone who commutes downtown from Bergedorf in a Beemer, or, alternatively, who sups on tofu flown in from Japan and Pink Lady apples? Are we trapped between complicity in the deaths of either up to 150,000 Iraqis or at least 130,000 Burmese?

Please note, naturally, that all four articles linked above were published via the same website. It's very hard to move forward when you're not sure which direction to face.

...Until the Worst of All Happens

Not to be all Chicken Little, but:

The Death of Free Internet: Imminent

The Orphan Works Act: Your Work Will No Longer Be Yours

The Middle Class: Going, Going...

Habeas Corpus: ...Gone!

But at least, uh, if there's no internet, it'll be harder to steal people's creative work... right?

This Just In: More Bad News!

Charm City lost a true original: DJ K-Swift, R.I.P.

But hey, at least someone out there is owning up to the horror they unleashed.

What Do Unicorns, the Tooth Fairy, and a Good Start To the Week Have in Common?

I'm not Catholic, so why do I insist on beginning every day with merciless psychic self-flagellation like this? Nothing prepares you to finish that first cuppa coffee and face the world like:

Global mitigation [of climate change, fossil-fuel consumption, and imbalanced, unsustainable development] ...would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. ... If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. ...The current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.

"If this seems unduly apocalyptic," he says. The true horror is that it never does. These kinds of articles evoke a soulquake the magnitude of which I never feel when reading about good ol' fashioned murder, war, crimes against humanity, or even a single natural disaster. Because these kinds of articles are a meticulous mesh of every apocalyptic fear, self-identified moral shortcoming, and paralysing neurosis a human can have: class guilt; the hollowness of good intentions; the futility of good deeds; binarily symbiotic twin lifestyles of (1) victimhood & (2) exploitation or an accessory thereof; every filmic nightmare from 28 Days Later to Mad Max becoming a reality (coupled with the sneaking suspicion that you wouldn't cut it as either Cilian Murphey or Mel Gibson); and all Four Horsemen riding through for good measure.

And of those offering solutions (and not merely pointing to the myriad portents of DOOM), it's hard to delineate between bold, outside-the-box thinking and batshit lunacy. Seriously, how dire a sign is it that a proposal initially submitted as satire a mere three years ago is now being peddled as po-faced pragmatism? Our species is careening towards one of the two fundamental options posted by that extraterrestrial trio.

Anyway... a couple of days ago, a friend forwarded me this speech by Herbert Meyer, out of the sneaking suspicion that it was, in common parlance, bullshit. Indeed it was, as I outlined in an e-mail that bears re-printing here. It's hardly my most eloquent & exhaustively researched rebuttal, but that's hardly ever the case with e-mails hammered out after midnight. Begin transmission:

[Meyer's speech is] interesting & provocative, for sure, but it's mostly bullshit. The only thing the guy gets indisputably right is the grim prognosis for the Japanese economy based on its aging demographics & resistance to increased immigration. To take a closer look at the issues...

1. The War in Iraq

No, the war is not fucking going well. By any standard. From the $3 trillion price tag, to a minimum of 100,000 dead Iraqis; from the neglect of the Afghan war (which just passed the Iraq war in monthly casualties for the first time in May), to the skyrocketing rate of terrorist activity with the war as an excuse; from the total depletion of America's global political capital, to the increased prestige Iran has enjoyed strictly out of saying, "I told you so..."

Obama as president is possibly the best thing that could happen for US-Iranian relations: if Obama follows through on his promise of an open dialogue with Iran, then Ahmadinejad is robbed of his "Great Satan" boogieman. (Never mind that Ahmadinejad has no say in Iran's foreign policy and thus isn't the threat he's made out to be - America needs its own boogieman, after all, and bin Laden's no good, because to invoke his name would only remind the public that he's not been captured.)

As for the threat posed by radical Islam... I quote Carlin: "Certain groups of people - Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and just plain guys from Montana - are going to continue to make life in this country very interesting for a long time." The fact is that Christian fundies pose a more direct threat to the civil liberties of any American citizen than some Koran-thumping fist-shaker. But then, I believe to be religious at all is to be radical in a dangerous way.

2. China

Don't believe the hype about China being the next global hegemon. It's a country that was overpopulated to begin with (fuckin' Mao) and has since lost a half-billion of its agricultural workforce to cities with incomplete infrastructures and no effective environmental controls. Then factor in a burgeoning middle-class that's driving the prices of life's essentials out of the reach of the massive working & poor classes in both China and its neighbouring new kid on the G8(+), India. The countries won't be able to support their own bulk.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing: do we want the next superpower to be a country that has managed to combine the worst elements of capitalism and totalitarianism? People who believe the "free market" will literally bring freedom with it obviously don't understand that the market needn't be free if one entity owns the whole fuckin' market.

3. Demographics & Birth Rates

This is where I start to see "culture," "Juedo-Christianity," "birthrates," etc. as coded language for outright racism. Meyer is half-right when he says a spike in anti-Semitism indicates a perfect storm of political instability & economic struggle; the other half of the truth is that general xenophobia - not just anti-Semitism - rise rapidly during troubled times.

Hence, the recent anti-Roma riots in Italy and refugee camp slaughters in South Africa. Meanwhile, hate crimes against Latino-Americans have increased over the past year as Neocons use the illegal immigration issue to galvanize their (bigoted) voting block. They pulled this same stunt in '04 screaming bloody hell over gay marriage.

In fact, far from diluting or swallowing their "host" culture, there's much evidence to indicate that immigrants assimilate faster & more completely today than ever before. This precisely why, when Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck talk about undocumented workers or how Germany will be "a Muslim nation" in fifteen years, all I hear is thinly-veiled WASP-supremacy.

Another question is whether the goal of culture is to preserve & maintain certain linguistic/behavioral/religious/culinary dogma; or if it's to be a fluid, organic, evolving fusion of diverse influences. I'd argue ardently for the latter, but that's a whole doctoral thesis, so I'll save it for later.

Meanwhile - what the fuck was that about euthanasia becoming "popular" throughout Europe? On what fucking evidence can he make that claim? And high birth rates in the developing world are nothing to laud. In India, for example, of the 26 million children born annually, 2.1 million will die before they reach the age of five. Of the surivors, over 26% will live in poverty, which is set at a standard of living under $0.40/day. Boy, I bet they're thrilled to know they're out-breeding those smug Occidental motherfuckers!

4. American Business

For starters, I hardly see how the cost of benefits, healthcare, insurance, etc. becoming the individual responsibility of every worker will benefit the economy. It's one thing if white collar middle managers, lawyers, and investment bankers can afford to opt out of & in to whatever coverage & benefits they like, but how will service industry staff & blue collar workers (nevermind the invisible keystone of undocumented workers) possibly afford it?

Secondly, Meyer is correct that statistics (and especially how the media report them) regarding the economy can be misleading. True, if the GM cafeteria staff switched affiliations to Marriott, the headlines would probably cry over lost manufacturing jobs and not new service industry jobs. What Meyer conspicuously avoids mentioning is how the White House has tampered with definitions, demographics, and criteria over the past 40 years to create a wholly misleading portrait of the US economy. For example, if inflation were measured using criteria in place prior to the Reagan administration, it would sit not at the "official" estimate of 4%, but at a whopping 12%. Similarly, the Bureau of Labour Statistics estimated January 2008 unemployment at 5.2% - but once you expand the definition of "unemployed" to what it meant before Clinton tampered with it, the actual rate is closer to 9%. And that still doesn't include anyone on disability.

Kevin Phillips wrote a brilliant piece summarizing the spin-doctoring of the American economy in last month's Harper's, but he discusses it at some length in this video.

...So there you have it. Not that I particularly expected some rational truth out of a professional spook. Those guys have a nationalist fervor that rivals the Pope's religious rigor - and since the Devil can quote scripture, they've no qualms mobilizing the profane in the defense of the sacred.