Paper Napkin Chicken Scratch

Errant observations and imprecise opinions hastily scribbled over the course of three weeks bouncing between several countries...

It takes most directors and screenwriters three-ish films to arrive at either their apogee or the plateau along which they'll comfortably cruise for the rest of their careers. Taxi Driver was Scorsese's fourth film and Paul Schrader's second script. Blue Velvet was David Lynch's fourth effort as writer/director. By the release of The Royal Tenenbaums, you knew a Wes Anderson film would be wealthy eccentrics shot in diorama-style mise-en-scène over an old Kinks song. It didn't even take until Eternal Sunshine to realize that all of Charlie Kaufman's films are basically Annie Hall if Woody Allen had grown up reading French post-structuralists instead of German psychoanalysts.

J.J. Abrams' films follow a reliable formula: one part Spielberg, one part lens flare, and one part daddy issues. (Some would argue, therefore, the proper formulation is two parts Spielberg to one part lens flare.)

Drive is a terrible goddamned movie - the kind of faux-arthouse poppycock that portends to work that style-into-substance alchemy when it's merely a spitwad of smug artifice transubstantiating up its own ass. The pacing would put Jim Jarmusch to sleep, there's as much teal-and-orange colour correction as a Michael Bay movie, and the characters are so stock they're listed on the NASDAQ. (It takes all of two lines before Albert Brooks' jowly Italian mobster says "Wuzzamattawichoo?") Man of the Moment Ryan Gosling spends about 15 seconds of the film acting, and the other hour-forty-minutes-and-twenty-five-seconds playing a mannequin with a fake Brooklyn accent whose "principled" refusal to carry a gun is kind of undercut by the drownings, stabbings, and beatings he delivers unflinchingly throughout the film.

My wife and I are utterly baffled by Ryan Gosling's apparently universal appeal. His much-heralded sexiness eludes us ("He just looks like he's from rural Ontario!" says my wife) and we've yet to see any acting chops above the standard of, say, a guest appearance in an HBO series. Also, his phony Noo Yawk accent just pisses me off. I addressed this specific complaint in two separate conversations with two friends, each a young, cosmopolitan French woman. Both immediately cited Gosling's tenure on the Mickey Mouse Club as the possible source of his aberrant accent. Ah, but that was shot in Florida! If Gosling had effortlessly sponged up the local dialect, he'd sound more like Hank Hill or (if he was really overachieving) Tony Montana. But no, he sounds like a truck driver on the BQE, so how can his accent be anything but fake? To this, both of my friends - separated by three days and 380 miles, totally unaware of each other's reaction - quietly shrugged and said, "Well, he might just be quite stupid."

Do they think Gosling is an idiot because he's a blond pretty-boy Disney alum? Because he's an actor? Or, indeed, because he sounds like a grease-monkey from Gowanus? Whatever the reason, let it be known: sophisticated, worldly French women think Ryan Gosling is a dumb-ass!

Overinflated New Yorker also happens to be Jon Stewart's go-to accent for impersonating morons, con artists, and garden-variety assholes. A canny choice on his part: tough & streetwise though it may be, the New York accent doesn't particularly appeal to many people outside of New York. Still, it isn't as ugly as the native Baltimorean accent, which sounds like a hillbilly crack-baby. Come to think of it, almost every accent is saddled with negative stereotypes. Received Pronunciation is the accent of the learned, the elite, but also the cosmically evil. In the UK, Brummies are idiots and Scousers are thieves. In the States, southerners are gregarious racists, Bostonians are either moneyed pricks or thuggish drunks, and mid-westerners (and by extension Canadians) are benevolent folks so simple they border on Autistic.

As much as I've love to tour its splendid whiskey distilleries, I don't think I'll ever get back to Scotland. My wife says the accent - despite being intermittently incomprehensible - poses a very real threat to our marriage.

Lots of people have a pet accent, one they find ineffably sexy & sensual. Not me: I might find a woman of another mother tongue alluring, but that has more to do with the woman than how she blends her vowels. At least that's what I thought until I saw Marion Cotillard in Les Petits Mouchoirs, swearing a blue streak like she was Linda Blair in waterwings. I can't begin to explain why, but woo lawd was that hot. Of course, I find French women generally fascinating: their faces are like fountain-pen caricatures and their hair is like choreography. The Golden Ratio - thought to be integral to our perception of beauty - seems to elude French features more often than not, which has the unfortunate effect of making many French men look like big-nosed, unshaven pimps. But it also makes the women so much more interesting to look at than their geometrically-regular, Teutonic neighbours.

Of course, it's inaccurate & unfair to suggest that Germans meet some mathematical ideal of physical perfection; that's only half of 'em. The other half look like the mustard algae staining the bottom of the gene pool.

There was a billboard in the Munich train station for a large commercial bank - I think it was Sparkasse - that posed the question, "Which bank is doing what's right for Germany?" in a friendly, white, sans-serif font. Next to the text was the image of a platinum-blonde, blue-eyed young girl, hands planted firmly on hips, eyes fixed sportively on the middle distance. Now then... I understand that as EU leaders (especially German chancellor Angela Merkel) attempt to balance the wildly discrepant economic health of its constituent countries, mutual mistrust and resurgent nationalism is rampant across the continent. But I wouldn't have guessed that a commercial bank in King-of-the-Hill Deutschland would appeal so baldly to some latent Aryan arrogance.

However, if you're intent on discussing Nazi architecture, then only do it after a minimum two mugs of mulled wine so your vocal chords are warmed up and your inhibitions have been properly shellacked. After all, buildings so bellicose & humourless that they look like clenched fists deserve to be discussed only in equally belligerent terms.

The Singularity, European Stereotypes Edition

I believe I've found the point at which total self-consciousness and zero self-awareness fold back upon each other Moebius-like. At least as far as the French and Germans are concerned.



A brief translation of that last bit:

Reporter: When are the regional elections?

Kindly old lady: I've nothing to say to that. I'm an anarchist and I want to fucking destroy all of capitalist society.

I swear, that is what she actually says. As for translating this next item...



None required. Or perhaps none possible.

Remote Psychoanalysis

First, it was three of the 9/11 hijackers, now it's a whole bunch of Mumbai wannabes. What exactly is it about Hamburg that apparently produces terrorists?

I believe I have the answer. It's not that the city is a magnet for, and provides cover to, religious fundamentalists intent on loosing bloody mayhem. As a former Hamburg resident myself, I just think these dudes are fucking bored. Hell, after five months of freezing rain, I was ready to stab a motherfucker on the Reeperbahn just to switch things up.

Sojourns in Meatspace

I always wince with a bit of guilt when I look back at this blog and see a scant couple of posts over as many weeks, like some expensive piece of exercise equipment gathering a visible layer of dust in the corner. That is more or less how I treat this site: as a means of streamlining my communicative M.O., of flexing my linguistic muscles, and of occasionally stretching my trains of thought. And just like everyone else's various exercise routines, it's neglected far too often in favour of more "pressing" and "immediate" concerns.

Such excuses are more often than not authentic (though they're excuses nonetheless). Outside of cyberspace, the end of the calendar year is such a Gordian knot of loose ends to be tied before singing "Auld Lang Syne", you'd think I had a legitimate job. Even the friends with whom I spend my cherished downtime ceaselessly needle me about how much I have on my plate:

Are you finished moving? When will the record be done? Have those friends come through town yet? Don't you have practice that day? How much more editing? Do you have an outline yet?

The good news is that it's by & large under control and I predict more-than-satisfactory results, so I'll be able to survey the past year with some satisfaction (in spite of my initial prognosis).

But I'm not entirely sure I can say the same of this blog. Sure, I've contributed a couple of interesting ideas, and I'd like to think I haven't let genuinely shit writing escape into the public sphere, but this site has been relegated to backburner status since I returned to Tokyo. I still enjoy sparring with anonymous antagonists half a world away, and I'll exploit as many outlets for my various projects as possible, but spewing invective online has been at most the third-most-important thing I've done any given day this year.

My banner year in blogging was 2008, when I lived in Hamburg and during which I was the least engaged with my real-world surroundings that I've ever been. This was as much my fault as anything, though that famous Nordische hospitality didn't fucking help. The point is, though, that the number of words I'd type per month exceeded the number of words I'd speak by a factor of perhaps dozens; I'd interact with as many online personas in a single day as flesh-&-blood humans in a week. I was communicating as often, efficiently, and prolifically as ever - the only difference was that I'd moved from meatspace to the electronic aether.

Sorry, did I say "the only difference"? Not quite: I was a goddamn wreck. The further I retreated into my online simulacrum, the more corroded my general mental state became. No matter how extensive the e-mails I'd write or receive, it was no substitute for the sizzle & synchronicity of a good conversation. What I needed was some sustained, resonant harmony among fellow human beings. But my contrary attitude towards my environment made it that much more difficult to engage in the kind of casual conviviality I needed. The horrid Catch-22 of any deleterious, addictive behaviour: the greater the need to be healthy, the harder it is to be so on even a minimal level.

The irony is that, now that I'm back amongst the living, everyone seems to be sinking deeper into the quicksand of cyberspace that I had at my most estranged from reality. Had Twitter been described to me a year ago, I'd have said it was destined to be the Pet Rock or Tamagotchi of Web 2.0, the most self-indulgent of attention-sapping trifles - not the fastest growing social tool on the net, and certainly not Time Magazine's "Person of the Year". Similarly, perhaps the greatest indignation I suffered in Germany was that almost none of my friends bothered to maintain even the most cursory contact. But barely a year later, I take for granted that the most meaningful relay of information I can expect from anyone outside of Tokyo is a Facebook status update. Of course, that I accept the new norm doesn't mean I must do so without bitterness.

I was mulling this over with a friend the other day; he just recently reconnected with the internet after eight-years of online abstinence. Having been without even the slimmest online existence while everyone else expanded their personal brand via MySpace, flickr, Twitter, Blogger, and Facebook, my friend has had to adjust to current cyber-conditions at whiplash pace. Understandably, he's fascinated with how ornate* a "life" somehow external to "reality" can be, and invoked the prophetic words of William S. Burroughs:

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Obviously, Burroughs was thinking more specifically of inner space (of which he considered himself a "cosmonaut"). I doubt ol' Willy B. had enough interest in the objectives of the Apollo missions to have meant outer space, nor do I think he cared enough about computer engineering to have specifcally predicted a communicative network of autonomously-manned machines. But in terms of man's future lying in some ethereal non-space, some subjectively-construed fog free of any realist metrics, Burroughs was absolutely right.

Regrettably, continuing the trend since the first neanderthal spurred sparks from between stones, our technology exceeds our understanding of its potential & power. As thrilled as we are that we can globally broadcast our most menial brainfarts, or watch every imaginable congress of naked people, we don't fully appreciate the danger the internet presents by allowing the from-scratch construction of our own bubble realities. Specifically, we don't appreciate that our online "lives" are pseudorealities predicated upon & filtered by our personal biases, and yet we profess shock, shock! when the bulk of online communication is profane headbutting between bullheaded fusspots who'll never see the other side. We bring our real-world certainty, our empirical surety into the scramble-suited paramnesia of the online "world", in denial that our realist epistemology is inapplicable in such a shape-shifting hallucinoscape.

Reality has always been a hard sell & an even harder purchase, far before the fluidity of the online "world" entered the picture. Most disconcerting is that the internet is the first "netherworld", the first extradimensional space (supplemental to the traditional four dimensions) of which we have direct experience & evidence. For all the talk of tooth fairies & deities, of heaven & hell, of grandparents staring benevolently down from some cloudy resort, no one has even been able proffer a single scrap of evidence thereof. But I know, without doubt or hesitation, that friends with whom I only communicate online exist, since I experience their presence in what can reasonably called a "real" way. Yet, in contemplating these "virtual" friends from my place in the world of bone & blood, I regard them as I regard other friends or family who no longer exist in meatspace: with sadness, with some sense of loss & lack, as "departed" and no longer corporeal. They are phantasmic in a way not dissimilar to the deceased, because their intrusions upon my quotidian existence are equivalently vague, intimated, and memorial. They are not "real" enough.

Or, in the unacademic candor of Mr. Patton Oswalt, "You can replace the Internet with five really smart friends."

(*) - He hesitates, as I do, to use the word "rich".

Homesteading On the Fringe

Okay, a return to meaningful content by way of an apologia: where have I been? Why have blog posts dwindled down to a bimonthly rehash of second-hand videos? Well... I've been busy. I actually have some kind of life again, and so haven't been able to spend my days tapping out long-winded dissections of pop-cultural minutiae or sonnets to some blinkered ideology.

So what changed since the last flip of the calendar page? I moved back to Japan. And the reintegration process (well, such as it is in a fairly xenophobic, homogenous society) has been smoother & faster than a greyhound slicked in canola oil. It's easy to forget that I did, in fact, spend a year-and-a-half living in northern Europe, and I'm frequently reminded only when people have asked me what Germany was like.



Okay, so it wasn't really like that - we lived in Hamburg, not Regensburg, fer chrissakes. But for all the memorable encounters I had in Germany, whenever I'm asked about my Teutonic tenure, I'm very tempted to launch into Ray Winstone's crowning monologue from Sexy Beast:

Nah. Fucking place. It's a dump. Don't make me laugh. Grey, grimy, sooty. What a shit hole. What a toilet. Every cunt with a long face shuffling about, moaning, all worried. No thanks, not for me.

I'm not advising anyone avoid Germany at all costs - by all means, go take a gander, the food's great! But the only expats I met in Germany who genuinely took to the place sported some combination of the followings characteristics:

• an affection for austere, undanceable electronic music
• an incurable, Morrisseyan melancholy
• a fatalism that precludes even treading water as a way of life (despite living amidst Occidental affluence)
• a fetish for black-booted thuggery
• and/or a German spouse

I, on the other hand, was a poisson en plein d'air. If I was forgiven for not learning the language (having given up when my shitty accent was invariably met with English), I risked becoming a pariah for preferring Belgian beer to the local swill. I found the audiences at live shows stiffer than a cadaver with lockjaw. People in Hamburg talked only of the weather, people in Berlin only of money. I got on better with the ursine Russian who (probably) ran a brothel above my apartment than with any of the other locals, including the senile pensioner next door who'd deliberately lock himself out to earn attention & pity. And over eighteen months, the closest I got to finding a musical collaborator was a guitarist whose head was way too far up Mr. Bungle's clown-painted ass and never returned my e-mails.

Meanwhile, here in Tokyo, I'm gigging around in four bands.

It became wretchedly obvious rather quickly that everything I found fascinating about German culture had been predicated upon a cultural schism & political tensions that have since been buried under a Starbucks. But I've never been romantic enough to be content laying flowers in the dust where once stood the Palast der Republik, or pining for the days when Hafen City was a junkie-strewn shambles. Once the cheap thrills of Cold War kitsch & neue welle nostalgia lost their lustre, there was little more than marzipan to engage my interest.

Yes, it's likely I was missing the bigger picture of being in Germany, but I wasn't interested in hearing that. Also, a particularly pupil-constricting light was shone on my unease about a year after I'd first arrived in Deutschland. I was speaking with two (sorry, dude) satirically textbook British hipsters about which Yankee bands manage success across the pond - or not - and why that may be. I brought up a particular act that, predictably, was poverty-stricken during its lifespan and praised ad infinitum posthumously; a band of which I was a vague friend, and to whom my own music has been compared a few times. Oh yes, the hipsters had heard of them, but this band wasn't necessarily more popular now than they had been in the days they'd actually toured the UK (which is to say: barely at all).

This surprised me a little, considering how unabashedly necrophilic the British listening public can be. What exactly was/is this band's UK audience like, then?

"Well," my friend mulled it over, "People that really actually listen to them are weird. But not like a good weird. Like an... antisocial weird."

Coming from a member of a sociocultural class that prides itself on exclusivity, petty defamation, and inconsistent contrariety, such careful, measured use of the word "antisocial" clearly carried some weight. This kind of "antisocial" wasn't the affected snobbery of a night out at an Upset the Rhythm event - we were talking about someone disconcertingly unknowable and genuinely hostile.

Naturally, if anything makes an already-unsympathetic character even moreso, it's accusing them of being "hostile". But I restrained myself from breaking into some lightweight Tommy DeVito routine and realised that, perhaps, my friend was right. I'd abandoned the American music scene for being an morass of incestuous backslappers, a feel-good feedback loop devoid of innovation. And since then, I'd discovered that Germany had imported the hyperdisposable dance fashions & fickle indie-oneupsmanship that plague the UK. There was no shortage of Adorno-quoting dilettantes with asymmetrical haircuts who talked a mean line of modernist bullshit yet still stumble into the po-mo pitfalls of archival pastiche that make K-Punk apopleptic. I wanted no part in any of the above, and thus far had done a damn good job of extricating myself from all of it.

Where I had felt totally, rhapsodically at home had been in Japan - a country with a long & continuing history of suicidal devotion to maintaining homogeneity; a country that does little (if anything) to discourage hardcore nationalism and whose multiculturalism is as substantive & meaningful as choosing a T-shirt.

Slanderous as this sounds, this myopia (born as much of happenstance ignorance as of supremacist ideology) is endemic and is not merely a function of aging reconstruction-era conservatives. A brief anecdote: in several of the bands I play with, I'm the lone foreigner. Packing up after one practice last month, I overheard one of my bandmates damning me with faint praise (in Japanese, of course):

Seb's an good foreigner. He doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, he's not a girl-crazy lech - okay, so he doesn't have a real job, but he's a good foreigner!

This wouldn't be unthinkable for a middle-American baby-boomer who pines for the fictive "golden era" of the '50s to say - but this came from the mouth of a chemically-indulgent twentysomething rock musician.

What is, for lack of a better term, totally fucked about these cultural biases & assumptions is that they are the very reason I feel at home here in Japan. Objective distance requires no social sacrifice. Existing well outside the mainstream is the starting point, not the endgame. "Antisocial weird" is the de facto existence of the foreigner in Japan.

And how bloody relaxing it is not to worry that we'll ever have to turn down membership to the club, because they will never have us.

Make Your Own Kind of Music

Ah ha well... as the yuletide finally rolled out, that glorious maritime weather barricaded me indoors. So I've been slogging around online, ingesting way more year-end ruminations than can possibly be healthy, let alone lead to a coherent understanding of the preceding twelve months. Which, by the way, has fuckin' flown by, though in media res felt unaccountably protracted thanks to the 24-hour news cycle's epistemological equivalent of Chinese water torture.

Not here to wax chronological, though. The eminent Simon Reynolds did the legwork of aggregating a cross-section of lists (cheers!) that betrayed both an ever-more-frayed fringe and a grudging congestion around the middlebrow. This certainly echoes my own concerns about continued subcultural splintering: on the one hand, there will be innumerable bands with, like, two dedicated (and viciously proprietary) fans; on the other, the only bands that garner even lukewarm widespread support will be charmingly uninventive. The hope is that, as the B(ands)P(er)I(nch) of the landscape increases, previous loners & drifters will eventually cluster into larger alliances - like stray hairs tangling into dust bunnies, or a handful of galactic neighbours ballooning into superclusters.

But for all the stylistic dissemination and cred-leveling that the internet affords, the musical world has not become an aesthetically omnivorous, polyglot utopia. Certainly, there are more artists than ever experimenting with sounds not native to their respective locales, and genre-specific supremacy is now boderline sociopathic as opposed to the norm. But at the same time, many year-end lists revealed a retreat to a kind of nation-based cultural essentialism - a sonic self-stereotyping. Best Of lists by Brits looked British when stood alongside, say, a typically solipsistic Yankee list or a counterproductively modest Canuck list. Music critics, professional and amateur, were painting comically unflattering self-portraits in the broad, typecast-tinted brushstrokes of hackneyed political cartoons.

So, in what might as well be "Explaining Us to Each Other, Part 2", let's examine how various countries are presenting themselves via critical & cultural consensus...

England (as seen from street level)


Yooouh'll NEEEEEH-VAAAAH waaalk uh-loooone... (smashes bottle over own head)

England (as seen from the ivory tower)


Grey, morose, melancholy dripping from our upturned nose, saddled by history in a way that arouses a misplaced pride, and routinely confusing "irony" with "anomie" - bloody right we're English!

Germany

We're basically the same as the *ahem* nobler classes of England, though unencumbered by something so base as a sense of humour...

...except on the occasions when we remember we have no aesthetic emergency brake, nor ironic safety net. We know not what we do, for our sense of guilt has been directed elsewhere.

Japan

We will bludgeon your every natural human impulse with gaudy trashionista glitz and five-year-old-on-amphetamine spaziness (with just a dash of uncomfortably unkosher sexuality) until you've been smelted into a goddamn robot. Have a nice day!

The United States of America

Yeah, 911 is a joke, and so is Rodney King, bitch. Grinding my considerable virtues into vice, 'cuz muthafucka, I'm ill, not sick. Wait, what the fuck is going on?

Canada

Hey there! I'm not just some anonymously boring dude in a winter coat: I'm a critically-lauded career musician who nevertheless comes fifth behind a bunch of Americans in year-end polls in my own country and is totally unheard of beyond our borders. Would you like fries with that?

Metamathemathics

This

multiplied by this

then divided by this

is, in an approximate, abstract way, what my 2008 was like.

Moving on...

Auf wiedersehen!

Autobahn Kriegeren

Via the always-awesome WFMU blog...


The creative geography employed by the editor is fantastically random. The largest geographic jump created by a single cut is, I guesstimate, just over 3km. Perhaps charting the chase on a municipal map will reveal some secret pattern or message - a constellation perhaps?

What I honestly find so intriguing about various filmic depictions of Hamburg from decades past is how rough the city looks - a bona fide blue-collar shithole with enough character to power the Tom Waits songbook. It's got stubble, grit, and spittle on its chin that makes the Baltimore of The Wire look clean-cut. Who'd have imagined then that, less than a generation later, it would be such a reserved, starched platter of bourgeois predictability?

Explaining Us to Each Other, Part 1-A

Yesterday, ads without products did such a marvelous bit of bicultural translation that I'm jacking it to expand and franchise. I'll be skipping the first contrast (about the availability of alcohol at family Christmas festivals) because the English shindigs are knock-offs of the spirit-soaked German Weihnachtsmarkt, and the Japanese don't really have Christmas festivals - y'know, what with the whole not-being-a-Christian-nation thing. I'll compensate by adding a new comparative criterion at the end. Allons-y!

1. Canadians are baffled and intimidated by these:

Germans are baffled and intimidated by these:

Everyone except the Japanese is baffled and intimidated by these:


2. On a crowded subway train at rush hour in Toronto, person B steps on person A’s toe or bumps person A thoughtlessly with his heavy computer bag. Person A casually remarks, "Geez, ya think with all the fuckin' fare they're havin' us pay, the TTC could buy some bigger trains, eh?" Person B replies with a familiar grin and chuckles, "Yah, you said it, buddy," because - by social mandate - Canadians are too polite to get into shouting matches on the subway. That's what Americans do.

On a crowded subway train at rush hour in Hamburg, person B steps on person A’s toe or bumps person A thoughtlessly with his heavy computer bag. Person A does nothing but glance icily at person B because - by social mandate - to publicly display any more emotion than an Easter Island head is a sign of human weakness and, thus, defeat.

On a crowded subway train at rush hour in Tokyo, person B steps on person A’s toe or bumps person A thoughtlessly with his heavy computer bag. Person A says nothing, though his ribcage is likely being compressed to the size of a soup can, because - by social mandate - the nail that sticks out is hammered down. In fact, person A feels meagerly grateful that he wasn't additionally kicked in the shins or elbowed in the gut. Meanwhile, the faint musk of gin & guilt is wafting up from under person B's collar.

3. In any ER across Canada, a young man enters with two of his front teeth missing - a consequence of the questionable tradition of combining cheap alcohol, ice skates, and adrenaline-charged men armed with sticks.

In any ER across Germany, a young man enters with tear-gas poisoning and a smattering of bruises - a consequence of the questionable tradition of combining cheap alcohol, riot cops, and inflammatory rhetoric with a theoretical basis flimsier than a B-52 built from balsa wood.

In any ER across Japan, a young man enters with second-degree burns and singed hair - a consequence of the questionable tradition of combining cheap alcohol and rocket-propelled explosives.

Duh-Duh-Duh-Deutsche Unit!

Dear Jessica,

Yes, Peter Fox is what passes for domestic hip-hop here in DE (not, however unlikely this may be, to be confused with Delaware). The pisser is that Fox is as good as it gets, and easily has the most musically sophisticated production. Here's the most popular *ahem* hip-hop group in Germany, Fettes Brot (Fatty Bread), from Hamburg:



And you thought anyone who still thought "Whoop! (There It Is)" is the bollocks was now confined to sharing a padded cell in a Miami psych ward with Luther Campbell. At least, contextually it renders the fact the Bloodhound Gang still have a career in this country a little less flabbergasting. But I don't give a shit if Thom Yorke rates 'em, Modeselektor are persona non grata on my stereo just for producing this tune.

Meanwhile, here's Berlin's godfather of gangsta, Bushido:



Ignore the fact that he nicked the backing synth pads from Madonna's "Power of Goodbye". And finally, here's Sido, who I've heard is supposed to be Germany's answer to both ODB and Jay-Z, but you tell me how that works. Actually, just tell me what the hell this guy's on about in the first place. Here's your RDA of WTF:



Of course, here I am slagging off Deutsche hip-hop when I'm about to move back to Japan. Bless the Japanese, man, 'cuz they can outdo anyone at garage-rock hissy-fits or brain-burning psych-noise, but they can not fucking do hip-hop:



So there's the second big backslap of the week, my Yankee comrade: y'all elected a liberal-leaning black intellectual, plus you're still the only nation on the planet that does hip-hop properly.

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.

Fasci(oni)sta

A couple of days ago, the popular expat-in-the-Orient blog 不良外人 (a.k.a. Furyogaijin, a.k.a. Fucked Foreigner) excavated a talkshow excerpt of military history enthusiasts dressed in Nazi regalia. As the doe-eyed, helium-voiced hobbyist insists his fetish is pure fashion, a panel of international Japanese residents rips into him for being so blind to the substance behind the symbols. The end of the clip is particularly surreal: one of the exiting hobbyists taunts the audience by snapping off a quick sieg-heil salute (disproving his claimed ignorance), prompting an enraged Frenchman to spring from his seat with intent of something stronger than a verbal reprimand. After he's physically dragged back to his chair, a German (!) panelist admonishes the Frenchman for overreacting, saying, "It's just a symbol, it's okay!"

Now, following their defeat, both Germany and Japan were culturally reindoctrinated and forced into schizoaffective reconstruction by a foreign occupier. The significant difference is that, in Germany, the reindoctrination became the keystone of domestic policy; Japan, on the other hand, has remained at best unrepentant, at worst revisionist with regard to its crimes during WWII. Yet, in spite of these opposite approaches to ingesting (or not) history, hard-right & fascist movements persist in both nations in apparently equal measure. It's harder to track the prevalence of hardcore nationalist & xenophobic group in Japan, if only because there are no "hate crimes" from which to derive statistics. But Japanese fascists (uyoku dantai) are boisterous and blustering enough that they'd needn't turn to violence to influence the nation's internal dialogue. Meanwhile, their German counterparts appear to have been gaining ground with each year since reunification: not only are racists attacks reaching record numbers (to the point of becoming a permenant fixture of quotidian life in some parts of Germany), but neo-Nazis are a growing presence in legitimately-elected governing bodies.

A climate of general intercultural ignorance in both countries works very much in favour of these fascists - but, of course, intercultural ignorance is the stock-in-trade of xenophobes worldwide. But if forced to pick between Germany and Japan the country with the greater potential for a racially harmonious future, I'd say: Japan. This is not to excuse the obvious extant problems (not the least of which are the racist cops), especially in light of Japan's minuscule foreign population (approx. 1.6%) and its extensive history of deliberate isolationism. But Japanese nationalists aren't even the looniest goons in the neighbourhood. The irony is that Japan's lack of contrition for its wartime acts has produced a particularly spineless, neutered stripe of nationalism. Not facing the active popular & institutional opposition that, say, the NPD does means that the uyoku dantai are never forced to exercise any real conviction in the face of adversity. It's the same brand of laziness afforded to Manchester United or NY Yankees fans: when there's no serious opposition, nothing need be sacrificed to the cause. On the other hand, German fascists, racists, and nationalists are as opposed a constituency as it's possible to be (without resorting to crimes against humanity, that is) - and still they persist with psychotically deep-seated defiance and dangerous dedication.

(Also, Japanese fascists are pussies. Seriously. I've had my picture taken striking goofy poses next to them, which earned me a bunch of red-faced rhetoric over the lance-voix but nothing more. It was also two years in Japan before I'd met a foreigner who'd been physically attacked simply because they were foreign - as opposed to five days in Germany. But would I pull the same goading pranksterism on Deutsche skinheads? Hell no.)

There's a grim punchline to all this. Japan is likely the only country where someone strutting around dressed as an SS officer could (maybe) convincingly argue that they're doing so apolitically - not that I'd excuse it. As po-mo manifest, Japan specializes in deconstructing, (mis)appropriating, and refracting symbols. (This is doubtless one reason for the anemic nature of its "hardcore" nationalism: the icons & figureheads of imperial Japan have seen their substance either rotted or gutted.) While European cultures similarly disbelieve in a symbol carrying any innate power, there's a reinvestment in reappropriated symbols here that gives them (often terrible) new life and new meaning. Thus, witness the German neo-Nazi incorporation of the Japanese imperial flag into its design arsenal (skip to the 3:48 mark for a full view). Of course, this is hardly a huge twist, though even if it were strange, strange bedfellows are scarcely so strange under closer scrutiny. I wonder what Momus would make of this...

Speaking of whom, I realize that a full week has already passed since the Adbusters bourgeois-boho flamewar came and went like a five-alarm fire in a toilet-paper factory, but I've been slowly tacking away at some kind of a thoughtful response. Extend your attention spans, and your patience will be rewarded, my friends.

* * *

Elsewhere online, Alan "I Started A Joke" McGee waited out the initial wave MBV-mania before reiterating his too-cool-for-shoegaze contempt for Kevin Shields & Co. In a MySpace bulletin, McGee wrote:

THE NEW MOGWAI ALBUM THE HAWK IS HOWLING VERSUS THE ''NOSTALGIC CABARET'' OF MBV LIVE IN 2008

Finally got time to listen to it and it's even better than the last two Mogwai albums which to me have both been wonderful... Their [sic] is a beautiful irony that the ''nostalgic cabaret'' that is my bloody valentine are throwing at people in 2008 gets critical acclaim in the easily pleased UK press with MBV still playing the exact same set they did 20 years ago and the only trick Kevin Shields has anymore in 2008 is actual volume and double extra pa to numb you and zero new songs.

Hear the new Mogwai record it's beautiful.Mogwai are 2008 My bloody valentine were a joke signing in 1991 maybe they got better..

Maybe as a token of gratitude, Mogwai can hire McGee a proofreader. Nevermind that to hail the genius of Mogwai in 2008 is as bold & iconoclastic as to do the same for, say, Echo & the Bunnymen in 1988. This flailing contrarianism is to be expected of an aging, conservative rockist. Given that, in signing Oasis, McGee may have single-handedly launched the reactionary atavism of Britpop; in that regard, it makes sense that he'd hate something as blurrily sublime and genre-obscuring as Loveless (to say nothing of the macho posturing that he sank a quarter-million quid into a "joke"). I'd even be willing to take him at his word, had he not allowed himself the pusillanimous emergency exit, "Maybe they got better..."

* * *

So it's 88 Boadrum day. I don't actually care, and not for the knee-jerk anti-appropriative reason. Honestly, the Boredoms fuckin' bore me these days - which sounds silly, since they've been doing the same orthodox drum-circle schtick for the better part of a decade now. But please, examine Exhibit A, followed by Exhibit B and tell me that Seiichi Yamamoto's meteoric guitar doesn't make all the difference.

Green Light/Red Light

There's only so far I can wander into the debate about minimal techno's lack of a certain sumbitch, because I'm in no way qualified: I don't dance, I hate clubs, and the last self-advertisedly "electronic" album I bought* was Amon Tobin's Supermodified. (My one snidely brief salvo: why listen to something labeled "minimal" then complain about its flatness?) But in his reading of minimal techno as a symptom of Berlin's - and perhaps Germany's - cultural listlessness, Mark K-Punk nailed it:

Berlin has in many ways become a capital of deterritorialized culture, a base for DJs and curators whose jetsetting lifestyle is indeed a "bizarre phenomenon". If hauntology depends upon the way that very specific places – Burial's South London Boroughs, for instance – are stained with particular times, then the affect that underlies minimal might be characterised as nomadalgia: a lack of sense of place, a drift through club or salon spaces that, like franchise coffee bars, could be anywhere.

Quite possibly as he was writing this, a British friend and I were busy slagging off Germany for not incubating any place-specific cultural idiosyncracies; there is nothing being created here that is innately of here, that couldn't be found in any number of other cities. I've met my fair share of creative types around both Berlin and Hamburg, but they're all either transients or have their ambitions and attentions focused elsewhere. Berlin in particular functions less as an artistic cauldron than a boho crossroads, a city-sized airport lounge where people encounter each other, debate ideas, exchange contacts, and then hustle off to where ever the real action is.

The Berlin mythology that seduces so many (Bowie & Pop, the Birthday Party, Blixa Bargeld, and Bruno Ganz with wings) was founded on an antagonism that no longer exists. Following the collapse of communism, it seems Germany swapped its aphasia for amnesia, forgetting how to speak as Germans, opting instead to speak as Europeans. Combine this erosion of self with the gentrification forced by an influx of "international 'creatives'," attracted to Berlin's cheap rents and scuzzy cachet (now minus any genuine danger) - that makes for one anonymously monochromatic playground. If this could be anywhere, then why be here?

* * *

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, an unexpectedly melodramatic exchange over at The End Times has Dan apparently "consider[ing] packing it all in." I'll assume the best: that this is a sarcastic jab at the defensive hysteria into which the conversation descended. As self-aware and ludicrously well-read as he is, surely Dan's not going to close up shop because of one dilettante with all the good grace, objective reason, and eloquence of a teenager who discovered Sylvia Plath and Garden State at the same time.

Nor should my second comment be misread as some P.C. plea for civility & offensensitivity. Wasting as much time I do online, I see way too many comment threads descend into coke-head-aggressive lobotomite name-calling of the "Fuck you!"/"No, fuck you!" variety. Reading Dan's deletion of the controversial link and denial of an ad hominem attack, it was refreshing to see someone who'll cool the rhetoric and commit to common courtesy to keep the conversation going while leaving identity out of it, in hopes that it doesn't come to shrill Stuart Smalley-esque self-affirmation and oblivious hypocrisy (e.g. "I'm hurt!"/"I'm strong!" and "I'm classless!"/"So what if I'm bourgeois?").

Didn't work that time, though, did it? Better luck tomorrow, Dan.

(*) Despite being a laptop musician, Tim Hecker's music is sufficiently vague, degraded, hauntological that I'd shelve him between Philip Jeck and My Bloody Valentine, not alongside Hawtin or RIchard D. James.

Doucheland Über Alles!

Note the knuckles

The above post title was a phrase I spat out last night while directing invective at the country currently accomodating me. (Can't believe I'd not heard anyone use it before, to be honest.) Evidently, in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Germany decided that GMail isn't allowed to call itself such, at least not within German jurisdiction. As evidenced by the snarky "error" page (direct quote: "Oh, and we'd like to link the URL above, but we're not allowed to do that either. Bummer."), Google is none too pleased about this. Granted, having to log in via the general Google Accounts page, then clicking through to the inbox is a minor inconvenience at the worst - but not only might it be enough to deter notoriously lazy netizens from jumping on the GTrain in Deutscheland, it's a minor example of a most disturbing trend in German telecommunications (an industry sufficiently xenophobic that it distrusts anything not branded in its native tongue).

For example, content on Flickr.com is regulated in a fairly arbitrary fashion, reportedly due to Germany's extra-stringent age-verification laws. YouTube is similarly restricted in some vague manner (as opposed to Google Videos, which allows users to choose any geolocational filters). Yes, isn't it nice that troublesome elements within society can't piss in the e-well... which, of course, is the exact excuse that China, Korea, Singapore, Turkey, etc. use to restrict online freedom of expression.

But we needn't worry about Germany, which - unlike those other countries - is a democratic society devoted to transparent communication and progressive ideals, right? Right. Then remind the folks at Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Post, and Lufthansa. If it's all about winning the hearts and minds of the people, then victory has gone to the GDR in a knockout. (Economists agree!)

And while we're on a roll...

Recently, the inimitable Patrick J. Mullins went ballistic over at I Cite when his slightly obtuse attempt at empathy was rather curtly rebuffed. Granted, when Mullins declares, "You can call it incomprehensible garbage, but it could be you just don't know what the fuck I'm talking about," the danger is that his elliptically self-referential run-on sentences lean more obviously towards the former. Much the way bores confuse a large vocabulary with having something to say, assholes & self-righteous pricks often attempt to transform featherweight obscurantism into lead-heavy philosophy - forgetting, of course, that alchemy is a myth.

This time, Mullins cut to the chase, explaining that the misfired exchange of comments

was a kind of direct encounter that we should have been capable of executing at this point. It didn't work, so my understanding of the tacit agreement of internet shallowness is, if not complete, at least I can see that the large percentage of the 'communication' is fearful.

I'll be a witness to that. Following last week's surprisingly thorough exchange on Reagan, I figured I'd found reasonably fecund turf for conversation over at Micah Tillman's blog. And then I was soundly cut off at the knees when Tillman effectively killed our conversation by condemning my tone as too confrontational. Okay, fair game: I don't fancy myself some online Attila, and won't tread where I'm not welcome. Otherwise, I'm no better than any troglodytic shit-talker (or a typical McCain supporter, for that matter).

Yet, not two days later, Tillman was bemoaning the lack of lively debate on his blog dedicated to "Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Etc." Gosh, I'm sorry; was I just making Yo Mama jokes or what? Was my mistake that I'd chosen to harp on, I dunno, something of literal substance, instead of semantic nitpicking or the ad-nauseum dissection of obviously empty rhetorical devices? Granted, every blog has its own esoteric focus, and perhaps Tillman's is linguistic microscopy. But for a philosophy lecturer, his obsession on absolute definitions of words seems to betray a near-total disregard for the decline of symbolic efficiency.

And another thing!

Really? This is the best we can do? Really? A mountain of lobotomite-dull Americana conservatism, delay pedal abuse as avant-gardism, a Vertigo Records tribute act, a whole harem to kneel before Bono, Godspeed You Ball-less Bedwetters!, unabashed Breakfast Club nostalgia, and a bunch of shit that's straight-up boring? (Naturally, they choose the most mundane song off the new Earth record to highlight.) Never did I forsee a context in which I'd proclaim unironically that Lil' Wayne truly is the most compellingly whimsical, intriguingly weird artist out there these days.

Oh, cheer up, you gloomy Gus! Surely it's not all bad news, right?

Decks chairs on the Hindenburg, my friend. Deck chairs.

Last night, it was only the Turks...

...tonight, it will be every horn on every car.

Painting the 'Burg Rot

Whoop - wrong kind of spree...

With the proverbial Ball-'n'-Chain back in Baltimore for a bit, I've been adrift without her to anchor what rags of a routine I have. To avoid withering into some kind of indie-geek Gollum, self-bound in quarter-inch cables, I afforded myself a few nights on the town, to see what exactly it is people do with other people in consensually-social situations. Evidently, there is a tried-and-true template for an evening out in Hamburg. Please refer to the following instructions:

1) Begin by meeting your free-lancer colleagues and ex-pat compatriots (20% of whom are already plotzed) at a random pub in Sternschanze. Enjoy the bourgeois-bohemian ambience: feel smugly countercultural, because there's a fastastically vandalised cinema-turned-squat across the street, yet enjoy the luxury of overpriced Long Island iced teas & oggling college girls in horn-rim glasses and keffiyehs.

2) As the alcohol affects your auditory acuity, decide to escape to more happening, exciting environs. Spar with a gaggle of intoxicated dilettantes for a minivan cab. (Better to move everyone at once; arranging a rendez-vous is a Quixotic endeavour by this hour.)

3) Arrive on the Reeperbahn right as a single drunk dockworker manages to whup three junkies simultaneously to the delight of onlooking Turks.

4) Elect to patronize a nightclub that isn't overcrowded, not because of its exclusivity, discrete location, or unapproachability so much as its overarching mediocrity. The Cuba libres are both watered- and Diet Coke'd-down (for eight Euro a pop); the shirtless, leather-vested DJ spends more time tweaking his faux-JT hat than making his selections; the women are split evenly between disgusted and desperate; and the men are all too drunk to notice that they outnumber the women at least 2-to-1. The club itself used to be a brothel and currently sports an eyefucking fractal wallpaper that pushes the blacklit ambience dangerously close to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas before you've even ingested any illicit substances.

5) Once everyone in your party has successfully pulled a dodgy Serbian girl (or thought better of it), declare this scene dead and head towards the harbour via the impassably-packed sidestreets south of the Reeperbahn.

6) Find yourself redirected into a dim, woody pub with all the charm & conviviality of a Kentucky truckstop. The ursine barmaid takes her dentures out to sip from her pint and Black Sabbath is blaring loudly from the jukebox. Five of the six customers already seated around the bar are prostitutes on their break.

7) Decide to cut & run either when the sun's first rays strike the high-rise hotels, or when the eldest member of your party leaps atop a table whilst caterwauling along to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" - whichever comes first.

Mercifuly, not every night out has to conform to such a pathetic & dissolute pattern. I attended one of the most engaging (and physically exhausting) live shows I've seen in quite some time. Not only was the rock brought most forcefully, but I got to shoot the shit with some denizens of my former domicile amidst the post-collapse anti-glamour of Hafenklang. I'm hardly convinced that the operation is entirely legal (or competently run), but not only was everyone terribly unteutonically friendly, there was something uncannily comforting about seeing this once-posh, palacial department store gutted & ghostly, a four-story epitaph to consumer frivolity... now host to a hive of gleefully unconcerned, doom-positive counterculturalists. Dancing on the future's grave isn't quite as gloomy if you've got other people to do it with.

What's Pissing Me Off About Music Today?

From the always epic FAIL Blog

For starters, this juvenile act of dick-swinging will only impress people who can't tell a record press from a waffle iron. Never mind that way back when Nick Sylvester eviscerated their record, it was the one-in-ten he gets right. I can't tell if Ackermann & Co. are trying to push this pathetic bumper-sticker marketing about "loudest band in New York" into some all-encompassing dogma, or if they're just so gloriously inept as musicians that they're not even aware of how records are made. Hey, I know: let's just make the lock groove a square wave the width of the record and it'll be the loudest vinyl release ever! Sure, it'll only be 1.8 seconds long and break everyone's stylus, but... dude! LOUD!

And as Pitchdork becomes the MTV of the post-millenial, I barely know where to begin with why this is so wrong. Do we start with the porcine mouthbreather who was assigned to be interviewer? Or how transparently, self-referentially agenda-driven Pitchfork has become, as can be inferred by the smug, reverent tone in which Dave Maher referes to a fellow writer? How about that outrrrrrageous accent on Xavier de Rosnay?

I'll confess an immediate bias against Justice: I distrust dance music because, bottom-line, it wants nothing more than to please, and that makes for bad art. Dance music - rooted in nightclubs and, thus, fashion - exists on the ficklest of stimulus-response reflexes. Hence the thoroughly unenjoyable video for "Stress", a clear knee-jerk distancing from the cutesy bubblegum bounce of "DA.N.C.E." as though to prove their balls have dropped. This isn't speculation: in the clip, a teenager in a tantrum literally kicks "D.A.N.C.E." off the airwaves. Comment la Justice est MACHO! This is the same measured approach to image construction that, say, Carrot Top employed when he wanted, if not respect, at least fear. As for the video itself, yes, indeed, what hath France wrought by producing such disaffection in its youth, but as Anna Packard argued, how is watching a gaggle of adolescents acting like total cunts going to help anyone? (Other than Justice, what with the extra attention garnered by the controversy.)

Back to the Pitchfork interview... something very symptomatically European about les hommes de Justice is the manner in which they deny any fundamental significance of ubiquitous religious imagery. This is in stark contrast to Americans, who generally minimize the public display of religious accoutrements but loudly and ceaselessly profess their faith. While these are very opposite approaches to worship, they both display a certain characteristic: a disregard or even disbelief in the power of the symbol or image. For Europeans, the symbol can be appropriated (as on the jackets of the ASBOs in the Justice video) and carries no inate power; for Americans, the symbol is an unnecessary, though occasionally helpful, signifier. This stands in stark contrast to Islamic society, where the image is still unimpeachably important. (See: Danish Mohammed cartoon reaction) Could this be one of the cultural disconnects that led to the rage of unintegrated immigrant youths portrayed in the "Stress" video? Oh, snap! The irony!

Now, in closing, perhaps what's pissing me off the most about music today is that I've expended such mental energy dissecting & discussing such inconsequential bullshit because no one told me that this is what happened here in Hamburg on May Day. I understand that I was out of town at the time, but for fuck sake, isn't this disquieting and dire enough that someone would have mentioned it to me before today?!

I'm one Molotov cocktail or inflammatory speech away from "Screw you guys, I'm going home..."