Robobama

Foxconn, manufacturer of consumer gizmos for Apple and HP, has promised to replace workers with 1 million robots within 3 years—that’ll sort out that suicide nonsense! The Obama administration would do well to follow their example, if indeed they weren’t the ones to suggest the idea. Indeed, since Jim Messina has come on board as Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, the corporate cash will be pouring in almost as fast as the grassroots volunteers of yester-campaign are flooding out. So if there was any doubt left about Obama’s Republicanness, maybe the onslaught of robocalls launching the campaign season will convince even the dimmest Probamas who their inscumbent really is.

Wag the Dog

Dear Reader, this blog is not dead. However, it is a dog that is now wagged by the tail that is my Twitter account. For some time new posts have been announced there, and in lieu of checking here at any intervals it's best to follow/check my Twitter feed (most recent items at right)—which, owing to its nature, daily provides eminently more consumable units of Fahrenheit Googolplex tone and timbre. 

…OR TYPHOONS WILL DO IT FOR YOU!

As a number of tornadoes ravage the South and a radio show I listen to broadcasts from Georgia, expressing fear that they will converge on it, I couldn’t help but think of Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

"Do as thou wilt, he still wasn't born in Mahagonny."Trump,
subject to a copycat tornado in New Hampshire. 

Yesterday President Obama released his long-form birth certificate to quell the birther typhoons. One wonders how that'll work given an earlier CBS News/New York Times poll concluding that 45% of Republicans believe the President was born outside of the U.S. Shortly after, to all appearances a typhoon struck Trump’s hair (above) while he reveled in his “victory” at having forced the President’s hand. Meanwhile the Fukushima Daiichi complex is more radioactive than at any time prior, Rep. Paul Ryan fled hostile protestors at a town hall meeting who oppose his scrap n’ salvage budget bill, and an executive VP of the US Chamber of Commerce said “to quote what they say every day in Libya, ‘all options are on the table’” if would-be federal contractors are forced to disclose political donations when they go a-begging in DC. And of course, there’s the ongoing Libyan war: Senators (Graham, McCain and Lieberman) are recommending “regime change” assassination, and the brass are using predator drones so they can almost kill civilians less often. There may be omissions because I gleaned all this on the fly, while working my three jobs from late morning til dawn. The very last moorings of Yanqui civility, indeed of civilization, seem to be straining. 

In the scene from Mahagonny where the typhoons approach, Jimmy (a lumberjack on holiday from his Alaska choppery) is getting restive because the town is too quiet – Mahagonny is founded on the business of drunken fun, whores, gambling, and loafing. It’s full of ne’er-do-wells, grifters and drifters, and the crooks who run it try to regulate everything with signposts and censure because they have a weird utopian streak. There isn’t enough tension there for the cadre running it to profit, so they’re panicking about finances and people leaving just when a drunken Jimmy makes his great speech that people should do as they please, not live under the gang’s laws. This speech takes place as a tornado threatens to strike the town, and people in desperation seem receptive to Jimmy’s theory that we should do our worst in this world, that nature can’t outstrip our violence as “the most frightening force is Man.”

The tornado/typhoon just misses Mahagonny, but strikes elsewhere and kills the federal agents looking for the gangsters who run the town. They, and the idlers being milked in Mahagonny, interpret this as the universe’s approval of their new “do as thou wilt” philosophy. All launch on a new and bloody course of open, unregulated self-satisfaction that’s ultimately disastrous for the whole provisional community, which is a smelting pot anyway – of fools’ gold.

In his last State of the Union address, President Obama spoke of our “Sputnik Moment.” I rather think this is our Mahagonny Moment, just before the final movement of the symphony our founders wrote – which opens with a haunting passage from the winds and brass.

Circus Minimus

The old canard about the U.S. falling as did Rome rings hollow whenever you turn on the television. The empire may be collapsing, but like a mushroom, as it shrivels it releases spores by the hundred thousand. U.S. culture is viral—surely our biggest export after weapons is "entertainment."

Rome's entertainment in its twilight included the famous "panem et circenses," or bread & circuses: free bread given to the populo barbaro while they enjoyed gladiatorial entertainments—it was thrown, like meat to dogs, in "Gladiator". One could argue that Ultimate Cage Fighting is the first step towards the Circus Maximus, but in fact we have used our privilege as stewards of the earth to leap straight to televised eviscerations and gore: with bugs.

This one's vegetarian, so its tough's all bluff.

Monster Bug Wars is the Science Channel's new series about life and death in the insect world. Each segment (as it were) exhibits a different "Vs." battle a la Mortal Kombat, wherein the loser is processed by both victor and zoom lenses, overdubbed with gnashing, roaring, or screeching. What strikes me after the first couple of entrail smoothies is that every battle is decontextualized. The narrator always tells you in a nature show in what country the scene is taking place; here, it is "in the rainforest/desert...". 

It turns out these ARE real arenas. The woodchips and plants appear to be from a box store; I didn't know WalMart sold hollow logs. It's all artfully done but the settings' repetitive artifice becomes clear over time. There is no natural foodchain being sustained. Therein lies what bugs me about the show.

It's not the "pain" or "cruelty," since the scientific consensus is that insects do not feel pain. It's not the gore; at least somebody's getting a survival meal out of it, unlike CSI or Fear Factor. Adding to the blood sport feel are the two charming entomologists who serve as sports commentators, though there's no banter between them.

Animals eating in zoos is boring television fodder. We've seen every kind of sport. Nature shows have a limited audience. Everyone hates bugs. Graphic death is entertaining, and eating gross stuff is neat. At the bizarre nexus of these focus-group suppositions is Monster Bug Wars, satisfying numerous spectator impulses for its own sake, but without the integrity to admit it's more cockfight than natural phenomenon. It's a paint-by-numbers of the perverse tastes television has fostered in us, and the smallest circus maximus about the smallest gladiators that everyone is glad to see dead.

D'Elite Vol. 2: Big City Orchestra - 4 Cassettes of the Apocalypse

The "Saints" of this series are ambient noise compositions without abrasive or jarring frequencies/timbres, for the most part. My impressions are that Saint Noise is various layers of indistinct noise, Saint Fear involves mostly guitar hazes, Saint Plunder is composed primarily of saw and powertool sounds, and Saint Sleaze has a stilted metronomic beat, keys and some comical lounge-singing about it: "Easy you please, and he can ?????__??, to see you releaaaaasssed, of all theeeee Sleaaaaazzzze."  The Sound Effects Library tracks make great samples for similarly-inclined musicians.

As with most sound composition not driven by melody, rhythm or vocals, this benefits most from proper headphones.

Glad I dug this out of the attic, hope you enjoy.

DOWNLOAD

1. Saint Noise
2. Saint Fear
3. Saint Plunder
4. Saint Sleaze
5-14. Big City Orchestra Sound Effects Library, Volume 1: Tracks 1-10.

CORNERED

On three of this street’s four corners

Are banks.

The newest is shining and mint

Like coin.

And a river that has three banks

Is dead.

Shoulder to Shoulder: An Album of Industrial Action

FGPlex is always on the lookout for cultural documents that memorialize key historical moments. Such is the presently ongoing public workers’ strike in Wisconsin against Gov. Walker’s effort to deprive public workers’ unions of their collective bargaining rights. A great deal is at stake: the leverage of unions nationwide in a time of quasi-fascist (classical definition) ascendancy, the successfulness of Walker’s bait-and-sink budget strategy, even the Republican presidential candidacy for 2012. For if Walker pulls a PATCO on the unions, he’ll look more demoniacally conservative than any other current GOP candidate. He’ll be the Reagan Revanant.

Which reminds me of great union-busters gone by: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As I understand these, Reagan didn’t want to allow the federally-employed air traffic controllers a 32-hour workweek. He gave the striking 13,000 (of 17,000) 48 hours to return to work or get the sack. They didn’t, and he did—so we spent years training up new ones and there could have been monthly plane crashes, but luck held. This bold gelding set a precedent that continues to this day, of corporate revanche over FDR’s “welfare state.”

Thatcher did the same thing with striking coal miners, around the same time. Her government wanted to close coal pits all over the U.K., and laid up supplies in anticipation of a coal miners’ strike. The country did not go dark, the police stood firm with Thatcher, people were beaten and jailed (a few killed), the strike dragged on forever and lost momentum, finally crumbling.

Reagan had quoted Coolidge on public safety; Thatcher used military language and referenced her successful little dirty war: “We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.” Welfare benefits were withheld from the families of striking miners, and they slowly starved despite the aid of NGOs.

During those benighted times, the socialist industrial band Test Dept. collaborated on an album with the South Wales Striking Miners’ Choir.  Some exhortatory standards (Comrades in Arms, Stout Hearted Men, Take Me Home) are delivered with bracing style:

“Give me some men who are stouted hearted men/Who will fight for the right they adore/Start me with ten, who are stout hearted men/And I'll soon give you ten thousand more” —Stout Hearted Men (a propos, considering WI’s demonstrators number in the tens of thousands)

…rounded out by a couple monologues by Welshmen about Welsh vs. English culture:

“[The English, on trains] will put up their newspapers as a fortification against familiarity.”

…and the strike (video above): “I’ve been arrested twice and now the bail conditions are that I can’t go out again to go picketing. There’s a conspiracy by the police and the magistrates to stop us from winning this strike…now they’ve come for the trade union movement! You’ve got to get off your ass to help us!”

All this is rounded off by some industrial percussion and effects work pieces...must be the only album of industrial action about industrial action (haha). The whole package is a time capsule, timely yet. Listen in the spirit of Wisconsin, birthplace of the first public workers’ union, for I suspect this is no less a rubicon than PATCO or the mine strike.

Download the album (out of print) HERE

BLIZTERED

A Commute’s Commutation: Or, From Transit Flatlined to Guyanese Prostitutes Discussed in a Humvee

The routine indifference of the State towards its “constituents” is most evident during crises. At best its posture oscillates between indifference and impotence, as in Bush II’s Katrina response or the 2010 Pakistan floods. Sometimes it costs elected officials: Mayor Bilandic of Chicago lost in 1979 after two feet of snow went uncleared; New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg has suffered the worst approval ratings since he took office in 2002 over NYC’s snow dumps. And citizens complain, often while shirking their own duties.

The blizzard that hit New York City the week of January 23, 2010 closed all transit routes. I was supposed to get a car home from work at 2330 as usual, but there were three-hour delays as the wet, sticky snow piled up outside. By the time I left my office at 0030 without a car, four vehicles clogged the intersection beside the building. Helpless New York drivers spun their tires and the streets stank of burned rubber.

At the station I ran to catch the train because I still hadn’t heard from the car service and cabs were obviously out of the question. The snow was stinging and fragmentary, literally blinding and driven through clothes.

Having never taken that train back home, I was surprised when it was local, and worried about getting to the commuter rail station on time. I was three minutes past the rail’s departure time of 0200 when I dashed up the stairs and past a bank of monitors reading “NO PASSENGERS”, ending in a huge monitor announcing a system-wide shutdown.

This station is a rare meeting-point of commuter rail, subway and light rail to an airport. As such it’s bright, loud and huge 24 hours a day, a poster child for eminent domain laws. So is the neighborhood that it occupies, notwithstanding the blandishments of the city that Subway, Old Navy, Bank of America and Chase are improvements following on the station. As I was to discover, it was nice of Bank of America to provide housing.

The light rail entrance was too complicated to rest at. A man bent in half smoking a cigarette was there, and so was a man asleep standing up. A Transit Authority employee chased people out of areas cordoned off without clear reason; two women tried to sit where it was clean, and one screamed at this impassive man about being paid to chase people off clean areas. He muttered expletives. They went off to huddle in a muddy sandy corner. You couldn’t even pay to pass the cordoned turnstiles to sit at the light-rail station.

In this museum of civilized inhumanity I thought it best to slog 6 miles through the snow and turned on my phone GPS, zipping up and ripstopping everything to stay warm. This trek proved foolish, especially when I provided entertainment for some gentlemen of leisure lingering around the 24-hour McDonalds, across the street from a 24-hour Burger King. I made it about 15 blocks before I started looking for an ATM to call my fiancée, who could pick me up. The first one was a homeless bunker with cardboard, the second was open during daylight, the third was a homeless bunker, and the fourth was a Bank of America full of mud. The beep that tells you to open the door after swiping your card was busted at “on,” and so was the door, so I called from there.

Outside a car had been stuck against the curb, spinning its wheels against an incline and a sunken drain grate. I thought of my fiancée doing that halfway through the call (right around when she actually woke up) and told her never mind. A call to our local car service showed they’d packed it in too.

Walking back to the station past my McDonalds audience, one started screaming. My sunny disposition was starting to dim and I was soaked through. A man shoveling out an industrial garage with gusto made a joke about riding my scooter as I passed, and I was instantly cheered because he obviously wasn’t fussed that he had to shovel out parking for a Bradley.

On returning to the transit megaplex, I looked for someplace to sit and be warm, but there was none because that would have encouraged people like Bent Smoker and Sleeping Standing to move in. You could stand and be warm or sit and be cold, so I toggled between them—discovering when my nose thawed that Bent Smoker had last bathed when “Yes We Can” meant something.

I learned from a cop talking loudly to a still louder Jamaican gynaecologist (he volunteered this to all and sundry) that Bent Smoker, Sleeping Standing and some ball in a corner were waiting for the nearby methadone clinic to open, which explained why they could fall asleep leaning on trash cans. They had probably started on smack around the time that the “jazz musician heroin death” stereotype was minted.

HUMVEE EVAC…the punchline

Two hours later a kid in Louis Vuitton shoes waved at me near my headphones, which were drowning out the Jamaican gynaecologist so I could read. He asked me if I wanted a ride for ten or fifteen bucks. I had always been annoyed at the indie cabs, but couldn’t have been happier to see this one. Unfortunately his jeep was full, so he said he’d be back in an hour to get me if I were still there.

At 0600, I was still there, sitting on a marble counter only slightly warmer than the stone floor. The only commuter rail trains were running to the same station in the city I’d come from, already serviced by the subway. The kid led me outside to a sky-blue Humvee that had slammed itself a place in a snowdrift. His brother was driving, and I was the only taker for the ride. Typical of the neighborhood, a little rearview-mirror flag announced their ethnicity: Costa Rican.

They’d been driving since 1230: 17 hours. During the NYC Christmas snowstorm, they’d gone out for a snack and seen people huddled at a bus stop. They’d been there for 3 hours, and the brother thought to offer them a ride for a pittance. “They were practically climbing on the car,” the kid recalled. His brother said they made $40. As if to illustrate, they stopped by a guy dressed like a laborer and asked in Spanish if he wanted a ride. He hopped in for five dollars and we were off again.

It was striking how few people took them up on their offer. They would rather wait for buses that had been cancelled. But they were risking their lives and expensive car to give rides to broke strangers! Beer-bonging gas, the Humvee moved and stopped effortlessly, and I savored the irony of being saved by a conceptual enemy. An old man got in and we were full, but he didn’t speak anything anyone understood. The Costa Ricans were puzzled and discreetly amused at his ramblings.

I’ve listened to a lot of dub poetry in fairly deep patois over the years, and after this one-toothed oldster jabbered away for a while I realized he WAS speaking English—but creolized. “You’re wearing four pairs of pants?!” I exclaimed, and while the Costa Ricans laughed he said it was so much warmer in his country, he couldn’t live in this cold. This scion of English was almost as hard to grasp as a French Creole:

“You know what time I been out there since four o’clock I’ve been out there…Four pants I’ve got on me and I’m still feeling fucking cold.” / “You’re wearing four pairs of pants?” / “Yeah yeah four pairs of pants I’ve got on me!” / “It’s not so cold, you don’t need that now.” / “NOT COLD? …You fucking American you…your fucking country not cold?” / “Where you from?” / “From Guyana.” / “It’s hot there.” / “Hot hot hot!”

It was only when he combined monologues on drinking too much rum and “poosey” that we realized we had picked up the dirty old misogynistic Granddad who tells nasty jokes, complains about the man exploiting him and brags about how much money he has (in Guyana of course). He had the foulest mouth of any pensioner I’ve met, and I worked for years in a retirement home—even the foulest mouth I’ve heard bar none. Apparently Guyanese prostitutes are the best, but “dey na suck dick ova deyah in Guyana.” I have more video, but this is some of the more intelligible. It was still night and I was trying to be stealthy, so hardly a thing can be seen. He almost cracks up at one point, so you have to suspect this is all some deep theater. This translation is sketchy too.

“They not suck dick over there in Guyana. Only them fucking nasty ones…you give them thousand dollar, come man and clean it out (?)…Anything you care for you give a fucking twenty dollars them, you forget and fuck them all over suck them you hard, you suck them all over they fuck you.”

He was telling us a yarn about a traffic stop in Guyana for watching porn on an overhead DVD while driving when we got to my place at 0645. My Korean neighbors, ever industrious and shoveling instead of snowblowing like all melanoid locals, were astonished at this personnel carrier pulling up in front of their driveway. The Korean mom just gaped, shovel in midair. Nasty Gramps thought they wanted a ride, so he started to roll down the window—but the kid quickly talked him out of that. I got out as quickly as I could to reassure them, and paid the brother $30 for a ride that might have cost that under normal circumstances. Breaking practice and principle, I told them "God Bless."

I don’t truck much in “the [value] of the human spirit,” but sometimes the individual exceeds/accedes the state.

iP.F. CHANGED

Though I spent many a teenage night in Denny’s drinking decaf until I hallucinated, I’m not a fan of monolithic chains. I had to be dragged to a P.F. Chang's recently, which interestingly enough is not only in the States but also in Mexico City, Kuwait and the UAE. I’m sure there’s some geocultural commentary there, but that’s not the point. Full disclosure: I enjoyed the food far more than I had expected.

I won’t pretend I’m above playing Angry Birds; Salman Rushdie does it with pride. But I'm an adult playing on an Android phone (often with the audio off and listening to Democracy Now!), not as a kid on an iPad at a table full of boring adults. I would have loved to read a book at table when little, but ironically that was not allowed; no one took any issue with this kid pictured, and occasionally adjacent others, being completely absorbed in this game that was illuminating half the party. This just seemed peculiar and alienated to me, like the generation gap just became a concertina-wired moat with vats of boiling oil poised above. Can anyone argue that this social milieu is an improvement?

THINK LOCAL NOT GLOBALIZED

All recordings are merely sketches. The quality is not representative.

While in Puerto Rico, I saw the above street music performance in a public square. It was free and attended by all ages. Songs were played that got every age group dancing at the same time, from children to older folks who'd barely budge in the U.S. (proper) without The Clapper and Life Alert – and they moved without the deliberate delicacy and caution so common among the elderly in the mainland. It was beautiful, and I teared up thinking of how unfamiliar such a thing is in the states as I've seen them.

I thought about local culture, and how much you hear about that from someone waving radicchio at a farmer’s market. In this case, it’s not about things grown 200 miles away that you drive 15 miles to buy. It’s routine life, not a commodity, and it’s free so everyone can enjoy it together.

Happily, something like that still happens in the States, though. I quite incidentally heard from an older acquaintance about a Christmastime doo-wop show in a local theater. It sounded like fun, and though the tickets were $35 (steep for me, for a night’s diversion) I went – and was totally floored by the performances I heard. A schmaltzy old Jewish guy, who owned the theater, would get on stage periodically and make awesome nasty jokes and other schtick by way of entr'acte.

The singers had been into doo-wop for the better part of their lives, given their ages and the spirit with which most of them performed. Occasionally they would tell something about the singles they were covering, when they were released, on what label, and folks in the audience would comment or “mmm” in enthusiastic support. I should probably mention that the majority of the audience and performers were white, which belies doo-wop’s origins. That happened to jazz, and blues, but not to hip-hop (probably because commercially and socially, it can be reprogrammed and deployed as a mole).

A large black woman was sitting near me, and conspicuously fell asleep for most of the show, which were classic love songs almost to a one. I couldn’t see why she’d paid $35 to be sandwiched and wedged until we were told The Persuasions were on next. Even in my doo-wop-proof bunker, I had heard who they were.

They were amazing…and flexed political. The large black woman woke up the moment they appeared, to shout that they were the fathers of doo-wop. Old Man River and Buffalo Soldier were braided into medleys, and discussions of slavery, house versus field slave dialectics, and union membership took place in skits that knitted their medleys together. At one point they seemed to acknowledge they might be alienating their white audience by covering Under the Boardwalk, but then even Africanized that by insisting on call-and-response and involving the audience: one member took his mic around to the seats and tried to get folks to sing. One white guy made a game effort, and a white woman was so embarrassed to have the theater watching her that she giggled through most of her 15 seconds. I admired The Persuasions’ boldness, which appeared more as infectious, veteran confidence. It was unchained, off the chain, denied even the possibility of chains.

These two things are examples of what I wish we USers, who pioneered globalization as our last sweeping gesture of significance, cared about. In a Christmas season festooned with economic recovery baubles ("Silver Bulls, Silver Bulls / it's Christmastime on the market") and orgiastic Black Friday coverage, this was the sort of localized cultural event that radiated me the elusive holiday cheer. Can’t we still share regional things that are not dictated by enormous international concerns? It was a fine Christmas present to see that we could, in a quiet corner of a senescing suburb – though a sad footnote that most of the attendees were old enough to be my grandparents.

DARK VAULT?

I found the above in my tatty "must scan" file and thought I'd put it up before it gets any more disheveled. These are the instructions to a hand-pump flashlight (example below) which generates power from users flexing their fingers as if on a Gripmaster, those springloaded plastic petits-fours that strengthen spelunkers or perhaps self-abusers.

What's interesting is that my unit was made in Russia, and the instructions depict its use in finding a bag of cash (USD, no less) in a dark vault. The user is a white-collar criminal, or perhaps a quaint gangster or mafioso. Was this a class joke by an underpaid Russian illustrator? Ah, stereotypes.

Kahve Defteri: Vol. 2

Next installment in the coffee-grounds readings journal. Same project specs as VOLUME 1, but with cups of unknown make.

Two people are rejoicing, maybe they are dancing. (This could have something to do with my impending marriage.)

Two paths come after the rejoicing, and because they are fat and straight they mean easy, blessed roads.

Someone (presuming me) is on top of a pile of something, probably kismet – good fortune/positive destiny – or money. I am trying to balance myself and stand up because I’m on my hands and knees. There are two spots exactly on either side of me, standing for a piece of news each that will arrive before and after I find my equilibrium atop whatever this pile is.

A palm is turned towards me/the viewer, or they could be cupped palms raised to the sky, full of some benediction. This means someone is wishing me well or praying for me.

Looking at the fulfillment of my wish as the drop of coffee and grounds runs along the underside of the saucer, it seems I will get my wish. It won’t be quite what I had hoped at first, but towards the end it takes the shape of a heart, which has to portend well.



Once more, if you missed the inaugural post:

VOLUME 1

CRYPTO-CRUSADE

The Optimum Business ad that included this image was so disturbing that even on mute, it stopped a conversation.

The woman depicted stands with her arms at her sides, then raises them slowly as she speaks, as though urging her apostles to walk across the water. If she didn’t have a halo and long hair, and if she weren’t wearing white, one could argue this is just design sloth.

As it is, it is unmistakably Christian. Even non-Christians who have been to enough art museums can see it. Then there are the “commandments” that encircle her: “keep it simple,” “be honest.” What about “thou shalt worship no graven images”?

It’s hard to track down clear evidence that Optimum and its parent company, Cablevision, have any investments or interest in religious programming. This screaming conspiracy person thinks that they do. But this website of “Christian Communicators” laments that Cablevision has been so resistant to “must-carry” rules that would force more locally-produced (often Christian) programming onto the airwaves.

We should be more alert to this after the Bush years. Daily Pentagon briefings to Bush Jr. used to include Bible quotes. Bushling himself used to speak in stilted Biblical phrasing (“there will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that day is drawing near”) or quote it directly.

Residents of predominantly-Muslim countries can find cold comfort considering that when their secular governments and business are being swept by fundamentalists and Crypto-jihadis, they don’t have to suffer this kind of hackneyed advertising thanks to the Islamic prohibition on religious imagery.

Plastic is Rewards

Exhibit A: At the very least, cash teaches you to count.

And read.

{D'Elite} Vol. 1 -- Inanna -- ORDER OV FECUNDATION

To dispel any concern that I am exclusively a dour grump groaning about the political inevitable, I am introducing some new themes to the blog (HINT: the next serial will also be audial). This will make FGPlex more of an esoklektik -- Greek: esoterikos + eklektikos, both cognates -- clearinghouse and less a whizbang of writing, for which someone must be grateful.

I've enjoyed almost a year of trawling for deleted albums with the help of Discogs.com, Wikipedia and countless music blogs the breadth of which is encyclopedic. The internet has made possible the preservation of commercially-suicidal sound on a massive scale; blogs like Zero G Sounds, Sickness (Still) Abounds and Nostalgie de la Boue are lovingly maintained libraries of the vanished. I have some bits to pool in this collective curatorial effort, but not enough for my own dedicated blog.

{D'Elite} is my contribution of the best market-unviable, deleted sound art to the informal interarchive. I will chiefly present things I could not find elsewhere; on some occasions, they won't be the best albums, but I will provide links thereto.

This effort is also a paean to my salad days of going to record stores and buying whatever was used and looked interesting, then sharing as I could. That was how I found so much of the music I still treasure: brume, zoviet-france, Controlled Bleeding, and Clair Obscur are just a few examples -- not to mention U Lovemore Majaivana, the first Zimbabwean band I'd ever heard and my favorite choral popmusic.

I start with Inanna because ORDER OV FECUNDATION is the finest ambient industrial I've heard. I spent months dredging the digital seas for this recording on the web rather than master the very difficult levels that are so high on the tape, which required sensitive EQing in the transfer to digital.
 This was played from the source tape on an Onkyo deck @ DolbyC through an Allen&Heath Xone:32 mixer, balanced and leveled before the record out to a Cowon S9 at 256kbps (regrettably the Cowon only records in .wma), then re-encoded to .mp3 at 192kbps.

These recordings are provided for information when determined with reasonable effort to be unavailable elsewhere. If any artist wishes to have their work removed from this blog, please contact me directly. So without further dithering --

Inanna: ORDER OV FECUNDATION

Mikael Stavöstrand is better known for his excellent minimal techno or his releases with (and as) Archon Satani. Inanna could have been just another casualty of the microlabel tape era, but hyperarchivers like Sickness Abounds have kept pieces like SODOM, limited to 200 copies, in circulation. Not.hing and Day ov Torment are still available on emusic, but those albums have more of a digital feel that doesn't seem sincere after the oft-muddy mastering of Sodom and Order.

Inanna is dark ambient industrial from Sweden, with a Satanic influence that is subtle enough to ignore on this release. The soundscapes on this album vary from subterranean sheetmetal banging to all kinds of tubing clangs, distorted strains of horns from Aida (Grand March, Act 2, Scene II), and treated tapeloops warbling over murmuring submerged chants. Occasionally it verges on abrasive but never distorts, even when the levels are red hot. It's not overtly dark or brooding, purple titles notwithstanding -- of Sodom, Not.hing and Day ov Torment, it's the least glowering and demonic by far. The feedback resonance narrative shot through "Tunrida", which sounds as though it's echoing around a sunlit canyon, is filmic in its vaulted beauty, and has been very moving to me for almost 20 years. I'm honored to present it, ripped from its Old Europa Cafe C60.
 
A1 Order Ov Fecundation. 1 11:03
A2 Annihilate Them 5:55
A3 God's Order 6:16
A4 Daughters Of The Mildewed Minds 8:29
B1 Order Of Fecundation. 2 11:03
B2 Tunrida 6:10
B3 Without Blemish 7:11
B4 Order Of Fecundation. 3 7:16

DOWNLOAD

SONG OF THE BANKS

I’ve been waiting for something momentous to return to the Plex, and the recent news about the “historic financial reform bill” is as good as any for springing my new translation. After a thorough search of the Internet and our city’s incomparable public library, I believe I am offering the only idiomatic English translation of Jean-Baptiste Clément’s “Song of the Banks”, an 1884 French militant ditty translated to German by Walter Mehring (“Bankenlied”) and set to music by Hanns Eisler in 1931. How could such a perennial problem go begging for an anthem in the Anglophone world? (left: Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs.)

I’m not much of a political wonk; my interests are too broad to permit the penetrating study of Washington arcana necessary to an educated opinion. Anyway, everything our “representatives” do is truncheoned to hash or diluted to inefficacy now. What’s the incentive to scry over the bureaucracy when one can only vote, most often for local politicians, laws, referenda and initiatives? Besides, MY state is not the problem in Congress. Yet it seems dangerous to have no idea and no opinion of what’s afoot. In these times it seems tantamount to succumbing to Good German Syndrome.

I thought this bill might be exciting until I read a bit more about it. It wasn’t endorsed by the august Senator Russ Feingold, whose voice is one of the few on Capitol Hill that makes me tune in anymore. “As I have indicated for some time now, my test for the financial regulatory reform bill is whether it will prevent another crisis," Feingold said in a statement. "The conference committee's proposal fails that test and for that reason I will not vote to advance it."

Ben “‘Unusually Uncertain’ Economic Outlook” Bernanke defends the bill, but uses the usual tepid language of feds to describe it: we’ve “taken steps” to close “important gaps in our regulatory system.” Also hot to trot, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent and another name I trust (relatively speaking) said, “It by no means goes far enough, but on the other hand, I think it is a step forward.” To his credit, he had contributed a measure to the bill that “requires the Federal Reserve to disclose by Dec. 1 the identities of banks and financial institutions that received more than $2 trillion in taxpayer-backed loans and other assistance at the onset of the financial crisis,” writes Burlingtonfreepress.com.

Oh good! Come December, maybe we can finally find out whether any taxpayer money was embroiled in Wachovia’s $378.4 billion worth of money-laundering for Mexican drug cartels, the most egregious violation of the Bank Secrecy Act since it was passed in 1970. Wachovia’s $110 million of laundered drug proceeds reported in March ’10 is peanuts in comparison, still more trifling the $50 million fine the Treasury levied for this skulduggery. The period covered by both investigations predates the bank bailouts, but recall the little matter of the bank mergers of ‘08/’09, when this blog was started (we come full circle!).

Breathless news outlets stumbled over themselves to report: Wells Fargo bought Wachovia for $12.7 billion! or $15.4 billion! Which finally ended up being $15.1 billion! after downing Citigroup who’d bid $2.2 billion! Wells Fargo said they didn’t use any bailout money to buy Wachovia, but check that last link to radical klaxon CBS News…I was too disheartened to dig further.

Want a laugh? Google “bankster+FDR.” The common denominator between then and now is the derelict financiers, on a frolic of their own from civil society.

“WE’VE BEEN DISMISSED…IT’S GONE TOO FAR.”

The terms of “Bankenlied” are so simple that they resonate across the late modern period. Jean-Baptiste Clément was part of the Paris Commune (1871), the first exercise of power by a government of working people in Western industrial history. “Time of Cherries” and “The Bloody Week” are his most remembered tunes, of romance and repression respectively. 

Eislermusic.com clarifies the origins of “Bankenlied” without mentioning its original name in French. The German edition is one of the most rousing tunes on “Keine Oder Alle,” a compilation of Eisler’s more political works. Walter Mehring, an anarchist who fled the Nazis like Clément fled repression of the Communards in Paris, did the German verse translation, rendered into literal English on Eislermusic by Andy Lang. Eisler was one of Arthur Schoenberg’s prize pupils (before they split over Eisler’s politics) and a composer who left his mark equally on apolitical pieces, militant songs and Hollywood scores in his long course fleeing the Nazis to the U.S., where he was forced by McCarthy to return to the DDR when it was established. Regrettably, history has slighted his significance as a composer because of his politics. (Above: Hanns Eisler: any resemblance is purely coincidental.)

 

I stumbled on the song a few months ago and dusted off my old college German for it because it was so au courant. The whole album is on Amazon, but I’ve included “Bankenlied” here...just click the song title below for a link to YouTube. I hope that my translation is in the spirit of Eisler: meant to be sung in the streets.

SONG OF THE BANKS

Refrain:
Now they have canned us!
It’s gone too far.
Countrymen, countrymen!
Let’s withdraw from the banks, then
Audit their accounts, then
And close their accounts, men.

When you find there’s no work to do
You roam the city, poor and blue
Like an ex-con whose freedom stumbles.
No piece of bread, no sip of beer
And how our stomachs always rumble
Outside every bakery door!

Ref.

It seems almost that the men in suits
The financiers and the factory groups
Only repeat the old clichés.
They drive the poor to bankruptcy
With ruthlessness so cold it makes you say
“When I can do that, wait and see.”

Ref.

But when the day of reckoning comes
Make sure to see where they cut funds
And close their bankbooks like a door.
So you can see how it is done
How we let robberbarons take more and more
While they have got us by the short ones!

***

“A musician with integrity must be an activist in his or her society, and stand up and say loudly what is wrong in that society and try to fix it. It is not right to make pretty, docile music.” Hanns Eisler

PAPER TIGERS


If this is the twilight of the idols, two of them will be very hard to see in the dark but for their smiles. One's stunning grin is becoming a grimace, the rigor mortis of a zombi (the one we invented, not "28 Days"). The other is too locked in the contrite flinch splashed across tabloids in smeary ink to show his teeth, once so prominent nibbling on blonde canapés.

Tiger Woods deserves the anger of black folks. I'm not sure whether there is any, but a friend reminded us on his Facebook status of Nas's edict, "Pro ball players with white wives/Peep they night lives." He assented with this observation before the baker's dozen of bang biscuits came hot off the presses: 13 women? $60,000 kinky sex? Taste for blondes? There's nothing wrong with sex and lots of it, with different people. Even adultery is rather ho-hum, saddest really because of the children. Here the tragedy is the grand scale of it, the height of his pedestal, and the dull tropes he played out in the course.

Pedestrian and flat is the paper Tiger now so perforated, who used to stare from ads at something just behind, over, or to either side of the viewer. I didn't begrudge him success, because he's phenomenally talented. There's no reason for the fair-minded to revel in schadenfreude; this is the fall of a man who seems more idiot savant than genius.

But why should Obama deserve the anger of "his people," the brown he let down? Blacks and Hispanics think he's doing a great job, says a recent Gallup poll. That's odd, especially considering the figures on black unemployment. Thirty-nine percent of whites still favor him, so does thinking he's crap make me a white guy? That's unfair by half.

He has disappointed nearly the span of his voting base in less than a year. A list of letdowns bores me with its staggering breadth, a complete index of which is beyond the scope of this writing. I didn't want to have any hope for Afghanistan because I'd come to expect disappointment, but I took Obama's stalling as due consideration. A progressive radio host said last night that he's "done with Obama", who has even begun to garner praise from conservatives for his hawky-talky.

The Obama administration has been jobbing off the "green sector jobs" he promised our rust-belt wastelands to China, all while letting the loan applications of domestic manufacturers bog down. Health insurance is still too early to call, but the noises about expanding the rolls of private insurers without a public option's cost controls are not encouraging. Our borrowed bailout money to fill the hole left by housing speculation is yet being blown on commodities trading, with inadequate regulation allowing this market to drive up our food prices. What's next, air and water futures? It's starting to seem that the only thing getting "change"d here is a diaper.

It was silly to be in a major city, a chocolate city, when he won the election. All the giddiness and t-shirts, flags and banners, bumper stickers, calendars and blather when all he'd done was talk and posture. I believed it too, but I didn't buy it. So now I don't have a single Obama calendar to tack to my dartboard, but in a few weeks I'll get one out of the trash.

My father came here from a country where presidents who have promised populist revolution have become totalitarian demagogues. Obama's not doing it in the "banana republic" way, naming himself President for Life and setting up his own paramilitary to spirit people off, torture and kill. We do things here on the d/l, in a suffocating shuffle of paper à la Harry Buttle's fate in "Brazil." But my father might say that Obama is a shame to us, to the race he'll be taken to represent. (I don't know, I don't have the heart to ask.) Growing up, my father told me that my every failure would reflect poorly on my race. Remembering that while mulling over Tiger and Obama, I could see how irrationally livid I was.

By those admittedly old-fashioned lights, Tiger's probably set us back a few decades. Squinty crackers probably don't watch golf, but I bet they're happy to see that this black man, master of a Scottish game customarily played in exclusive venues by largely white folks, has acted out a snore-jerking stereotype with 21st century decadence. We can only hope this will all blow over and not keep rising like a priapic O.J.

I had hoped the Nobel Peace Prize was a clever preemptive strike by Europe that would remind Obama he was elected as an antiwar president: the committee knew he would have to make some decision about the wars before accepting the prize.

How ironic it all looks now, framed under a Norwegian sky as a Russian missile sputters overhead. Obama, too bad the father you didn't have wasn't like mine.

COMMUTING THE SENTENCE

Ital is vital, but "take time to open!"

Some commutes are so ridiculous you'd die laughing if you weren't on the verge of dying proper. It would all be so casual if the work that feeds you didn't depend on punctuality. Good thing my new night job doesn't have "Arbeit Macht Frei" hanging over the timeclock, or you might see me round the proverbial soup kitchen again.

I had to go to a Jamaican restaurant for honest food after a starving day doing my own work. Only the real "(down)home cooking" would do, the type of feast that my ancestors ate so they wouldn't have to dally around the table -- probably a section of floor -- and get beaten for "laziness." Damn tasty, filling, cheap and often vegetarian by the exigencies of economy and history. (Notwithstanding the salvage exemplified by the likes of oxtail and pigs' feet.) Ital is vital.

I had to negotiate something I could reheat later with a typically curt Jamaican counterperson. The wait was customarily long, so I had to dash once the food was packed. While eating a bammy (cassava fritter), carrying a folding scooter and food in a bag (I've never seen a Caribbean dinner that travels well, though the snacks are portable), I tried to get my subway pass out at the station.

In all this fumbling I dropped the bag of dinner with a roots drink (above) in it on the subway station tiles. Roots drinks are notoriously carbonated and have to be bottled in thick glass because they are literally explosive from internal pressure, fermented to 5% alcohol in the bottle (big deal, it's 5 fl. oz.). This brand has to be depressurized for 15 minutes (crack cap, wait, close, repeat) before opening, or promptly upended in a vessel three times its volume. The bottle popped violently and shot foam all over everything – out of the plastic bag, all over my dinner's paper bag, floor, everything except me, praises.

Some IDIOT was yelling that I dropped something. No fucking duh! Everyone stared because it had sounded like a floodlight full of sarin. No time for malarkey, I could hear the train I needed to catch beyond the turnstiles. (It only occurred to me later that I could have had a de Menezes moment there, shot seven times in the head because we live in a >9/11 world.)

I carried the dripping dinner bag, scooter and half-eaten fritter to the platform where I just missed the train. Finished the bammy in time for the next train, then hurried to take the dinner in paper bag wrapped in dripping plastic out, sticking my hand into a lagoon of glass shards marinating in roots drink. Started bleeding. Caught train but barely with everyone staring, and had to throw out the sticky plastic bag that had taken the worst frag assault. Tried to clean off my left hand, flicking glass and blood specks everywhere.

So now I won't be able to steer the scooter very well, have no bag to carry dinner in and the bottom of the inner paper bag is sopping and studded with glass. I have to put it on the scooter to carry it, it's so hazardous and gross. I consider throwing it all out, but we’ve been through so much already.

Get to city, run out because I have 5 mins to make a 10 minute trip on a scooter in the dark with a bleeding hand. And the bag is still a problem, let alone bloody-hand driving. Dunkin' Donuts is hosting a symposium of two customers not discussing anything transactional with the counterperson. I ask a Sikh selling papers in a kiosk if he has a shopping bag, he says a small one, fumbles for a while and comes up with one big enough for a Snapple and a pack of cigarettes. I'd already thought that worst come to worst, I'd go to Pret a Manger because they're usually nicer than any other chain gangers.

They kindly and quickly obliged me with a bag, perhaps guessing the disaster since I was carrying a cactus of sodden brown paper and glass slivers on my scooter like a palanquin, plus I looked like my mom was on fire. I bagged my Jamaican tragedy, belted the bag to my side where it would swing around and threaten my balance while scootering at high speed, and jammed to the office. To save time, I rode against traffic in low light and nearly got hit by bikes twice.

Got to work and clocked in four minutes late.

KAHVE DEFTERI: A journal of Turkish coffee grounds readings, an intermittent Fahrenheit Googolplex project

I've been having my grounds read by a couple of Turkish close friends for a while now, and have had occasional readings in Turkey by folks said to be divinatorially endowed. It occurred to me during my last reading, which was very unusual, to make a series of these on Fahrenheit Googolplex.

Finishing a dinner party with readings in a group can be lengthy, but it's always fun. Sometimes it's just a social gambit. Occasionally it's quite enlightening.

Here are the project specifications.

WATER: Northeastern U.S. seaboard, supplied from one of three sand and gravel aquifers, then filtered through a Doulton ICP silver-impregnated ceramic filter (which, at the time of this writing, admittedly needs a scrub).

CUPS: Güral Porselen, of Turkish manufacture. These are getting harder to find. Thanks to MK for their supply.

COFFEE: Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi (Mister Mehmet's Ground Coffee), the standard for the process.

BREWING METHOD: A cezve (coffee pot) on gas stove. Cezve is stainless steel, of Egyptian manufacture (Al Ahram brand). Capacity 4 cups.

I made four cups for this reading. My friend and I don't muck about with caffeine, she's impervious to it anyway from having drunk tea all day every day while growing up in Istanbul. She read mine, but somehow I got most of the grounds – so no reading for her.

Readings range in scope from epics to haiku. It all depends on what you see in the cup. This time was sparse, but stark. Sometimes there's no mistaking the images channeled into the grounds.

After brewing and drinking, I took the cup with grounds, placed the saucer upside down over the cup, and circled it clockwise while making a wish. Then I turned it upside down away from me and placed it on the table.

I put a ring on top of it, in the small of the cup's underside, to serve as a heatsink. When the cup was cool, we looked inside.

A large clean heart (right), with someone hanging over it. My heart/soul is still and peaceful, free from troubles or haze. Possibly someone is beside the heart holding a large baby in the air. The heart emerges from the depths of the cup and grows bigger. There are two roads, both pretty open, forking to the left of the heart.

On the bottom of the cup is someone on a horse, about to ride up a steep hill. The hill plateaus after a short steep distance, and the path is clear. She supposes the person is me, and that the vista is about to open for me.

The lump of grounds means kismet, which is fate/destiny loosely translated. Apparently all my troubles have fallen out of my heart, becoming a huge lump of kismet on the saucer. This is a sign that good fortune is afoot.

[Some readers turn the puddle of grounds on the saucer and spill a drop off the edge to see whether the wish will come true. That's determined by the progress of the drop, its path, and how quickly it reaches the base of the saucer.] It seems my wish will come true, quickly and without hindrance. As with birthday candles and shooting stars, no telling.