Calling your store "Unionmade" (and modeling your logo on the AFL-CIO's) while not selling union made goods is just as asinine and insulting as calling your store "Americanmade" while selling things manufactured in China. It's blatantly misleading. It's fraudulent. It's the fashion equivalent of a TV preacher using Jesus love for the poor as a selling point to line his own pockets. On the other hand, subjugating the meaning of a real, serious political issue that affects millions of people's lives to the fact that you like the vibe of the sound of the name of it seems perfectly in character for a store that sells luxury-priced 1890s miners clothes to affluent people who will wear them while sitting inside their air-conditioned advertising agency office job.

Try this on for size

The real fun starts at 4:50: ED BALL goes ACEEEID!!

For electronic music, the central artwork was the night and everything spills off from that – a decentralised web that take in tunes, DJs, lights, friendships, drugs, after parties and dumb conversations that in some way go back into the scene. Which is, if you think about it, really similar to social networking and the online world, in that we’re all constantly creating this vast object that is made up only of the relationships and the actions of the people in it. It’s a lovely idea – that we should muck in, fuck up, have a bash and talk nonsense, and we should do it as much as possible, because every conversation we have and friend we make somehow contributes to this vast wibbly-wobbly thing we either call “electronic music culture”, “the internet”, or, by extension, “life”.

An open letter

Hey Matt. I just read your piece on Friday's show at Gilman. I appreciate you coverage of the show, but I am not cool with your attitude towards the queer band that played. I understand that you may not like their music (and I'm inclined to think I wouldn't either), but I think that your attitude towards them is dismissive (at best) and mocking (at worst). All this in an article where the premise is the diversity of the bands. Does that not seem a little strange to you? Between this and the internet war a few months ago about "there's no racism in the Bay Area punk scene," I get the strong impression that you have a hard time relating to people who aren't like you. And your attitude towards these people, as well as those who question it, comes across as particularly arrogant. All of which is terribly unattractive and is going to get you nowhere. I'm not passing judgement and I'm sure that your heart is in the right place. But I think you have a lot to learn about the world and how to interact with the people in it. So the next time before you speak or write, I suggest you try to be a little more humble and remember, it's not all about you. Jason

All crusties spending stomp night with Messiah Marcolin

Nuttin but tha truth

So this exists

Violet Theatre

Def: Revanchism

A term used since the 1870s to describe a political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement. Revanchism draws its strength from patriotic and retributionist thought and is often motivated by economic or geo-political factors. Extreme revanchist ideologues often represent a hawkish stance, suggesting that desired objectives can be achieved through the positive outcome of another war.

In a way, it’s not even mostly Romney’s fault. It’s the fault of the party and movement that introduced and spread this toxic propaganda in the first place. When Romney is licking his wounds on Nov. 7, that party and movement will fire all its arrows at him. He’ll deserve a lot of them. But they will have buried him with the ignorance and rage they demanded he adopt. His chief crime will have been his weakness in failing to confront them.

Related reading:
The Coming GOP Civil War
Things that self-satisfied millionaires say to each other

The plot thickens

I want to be a(n African heavy metal) cowboy

"We have a lot of ancestral beliefs - back in the day they used to believe that if someone dies and you touch the dead person then Gauna will come and take your soul."

It's a slippery slope

Dilemmna

Kathleen Hanna On Odd Future

I feel like, if you don't want to listen to them, don't listen to them. If you do want to listen to them, do listen to them. I couldn't really comment on exactly what their lyrics are about, because I haven't gotten that deep into it. But if people are writing lyrics that piss you off, hurt your feelings, and make you feel like shit, don't listen to it. I don't think the best idea is to have a boycott. Just don't talk about them and they'll go away. The more you talk about them, the more attention they get. Tegan and Sara fans probably wouldn't even know this band existed if they weren't talking about them. I find the whole conversation kind of boring. There are so many great artists that are doing interesting things, that I don't want to focus on boring people.

Stupid Humans

It may be that man is manipulable, as the owners of the mass media argue, or that elements of nature are manipulable, as the engineers demonstrate by their dazzling achievements, but ecology clearly shows that the totality of the natural world—nature taken in all is aspects, cycles, and interrelationships—cancels out all human pretensions to mastery over the planet. The great wastelands of North Africa and the eroded hills of Greece, once areas of a thriving agriculture or a rich natural flora, are historic evidence of nature's revenge against human parasitism.

-Bookchin

Welcome to 2012

American civilization's dying all around us and everyone's too busy playing on their iPhones to give a shit. Incredible.


Bill Moyers and Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’ from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

17th Street

Everybody's doin the metal dance

Someday

Plotting for a CHROME tee shirt. Runners up:

While we're on the subject of time

The worst thing you could say about Kevin Shields, in fact, is that he considers time to be an infinitely elastic concept. 'I suppose,' he mused recently, 'I've been more wrong than most people when it comes to time in the sense that I'm always late. But it kind of works. That's the weird part of it... everything works out in the end. I'm kind of happy.'

Had I spoken again to Kevin Shields, I was planning to read him a quote from another interview I did a few years back with the psychologist and author Adam Phillips. When I asked Phillips what would be the single thing that might make us more content in our ever-accelerating culture, he took his time before replying. Then, finally, he said: 'We need to find the time to daydream and be bored, and to see that, too, as a part of our creativity. We need, as it were, to find the time to waste time without worrying about the consequences.' Kevin Shields, you imagine, would have approved.

Jan 1985

Some old family friends just sent my folks these nuggets from the past. I sure do miss that little duck.

Hollow San Francisco

Here's how it goes: Creative people -- not web designers or software developers, but artists, musicians, activists, writers, and other colorful types -- tend not to make much money. As this city becomes less and less affordable, those people leave. And when those people leave, whom will the city's entertainment events target? The people who can afford to stay: Young, well-off tech workers or high-income young couples, whose tastes and lifestyles are cushier, more conservative, less driven by purely creative aims, and, often -- if only in comparison with the people they've replaced -- dull.

These bougies-in-training will want events to practice their conspicuous consumption, whether on food, booze, music, or all at the same time. And they'll get it at events like Noisette. This kind of high-minded consumerism -- fun as it is -- will become the norm, even more than it already has. So while it was once a respite for low-income creatives and real deviants, who would pay $5 or $10 to go a show or a party (at the Eagle Tavern, or Annie's Social Club, or Kimo's, remember those?), swill cheap whiskey, and watch something freaky and loud until early in the morning, San Francisco will slowly become one big pork-belly party, an amusement park for well-off residents to discover some new consumer good to become picky over, or for bridge-and-tunnel types to visit on the weekend, go to an overpriced club, and meet a hookup. Big concerts will draw kids from the 'burbs paying $50 or more a head. They'll never believe they could be rich enough to actually live here.

The freaks and creatives won't go too far -- they'll go to Oakland, where there's much more space, at much lower cost. The kinds of reckless energy that powered San Francisco music from the '60s through the '90s will trickle away, as much of it has already. And the city will be worse for it.

Experience

"How long it lasts, youth, that time of constant imposture, when you have to pretend to understand everything while understanding nothing at all. You understand nothing about time."

   

Though I'm growing up and getting old, I'll always be enchanted by the fantasy of cool young men in an overcast, tawdry old England.

Outside my window

Disintegrator/Incinerator

Two obsessions, combined into one

New Age Firebomb

Martin Newell

We didn’t think anyone would be listening, so maybe that’s why we felt quite free to do whatever. The good thing about it of course was it was just for ourselves, and not some prick at some big record label. In that way, it was sort of defiant; I was very uninterested in taking advice from producers, or anyone who had a record company, or even my fellow musicians. It was just the whole attitude of youthful defiance: "I don’t care if I’m not making any money, I don’t care if I die in a gutter, I’m doing this!" I can remember the spirit; I can still stand up now and applaud my younger self for being a completely defiant, awkward bastard who told everybody to fuck off, never made any money, and still won.

Nifty 50

Happy bday Ian!

Small change

Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the kind of cause” in the Internet age.

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución.

Peep Set Me Up!

Dome-related

You know what the most dangerous thing in America is, right? Nigger with a library card.

Choking on the past

How did we get here? Coming off the 1960s, that time of relentless and discombobulating avant-gardism, when everything looked and sounded perpetually new new new, cultural creators—designers, artists, impresarios—began looking backward for inspiration.

Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past. Our culture’s primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms. It’s the rare “new” cultural artifact that doesn’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes.

Life Sucks Die

Not exactly "funny" ha ha

Don't flex your head

Postmortem for a dying nation

The dominant thinking on the left, I suppose, is some variety of a “false consciousness” argument, that the elite have pulled the wool over the eyes of the vast majority of the population, and once the latter realizes that they’ve been had, they’ll rebel, they’ll move the country in a populist or democratic socialist direction. The problem I have with this is the evident fact that most Americans want the American Dream, not a different way of life—a Mercedes-Benz, as Janis Joplin once put it. Endless material wealth based on individual striving is the American ideal, and the desire to change that paradigm is practically nonexistent. Even the poor buy into this, which is why John Steinbeck once remarked that they regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Hence I would argue that nations get the governments they deserve; that the wool is the eyes.

The mess that lies beneath

Disgust represents a fear of contamination. And a great many traditional social boundaries and taboos exist as a way of protecting against contamination. The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously argued that the desire for purity and cleanliness is all about organising offensive things into acceptable social spaces – a place for everything and everything in its place. But the problem with a moral instinct that's all about policing the social boundaries created by disgust is that the sources of disgust are often the very same things that make us human. Cardinal O'Brien, for instance, is filled with disgust at the thought of gay sex. Which is why he is so intent on maintaining the boundaries of traditional marriage. But what a great many of us see in the Catholic church's response to homosexuality is simply a refusal of love itself – more specifically, love in all its sticky, squelchy reality.

Suck on this

Reviews

I really enjoy reviewing for MRR, but if there's one thing I hate/fear, its the monthly dude rock CD. Last month was DOWNLOW NYHC. Here's February's shit-sandwich:

GUTRENCH - "Ironside Anthems" CD

Here's another 90s NYHC-revival act for all the karate moshers out there. The songs are pretty straightforward, the vocals are throat-y and oi-inspired, and (luckily for me) they don't go too heavy on the breakdowns. If I were directing a dumb movie, this is the music that would be playing when the jock-bros arrive to ruin the party. (JH)

A Public Service Announcement

All Things Eno

Doin it up in feather boas and platforms

Keeping Busy

In the bathtub of our new place