Ignore the man behind the curtain...

Dang.

Now I've been linked from Hey Jenny Slater. (thanx Doug!)

All the traffic sent my way, I'll have to start actually posting...well, stuff.


Look at my history, dammit! I'm just not that productive!


sigh. Oh well, I'll just do it the Lileks way: Quantity, not Quality. But I have hair.

Operation Inigo Montoya

This weekend, looking at the newspapers Memorial Day section, it occurred to me that one of my friends from college, Craig, had been in the Guard; Of course, this means that he is likely serving active duty.

His name was not in the list of the Wisconsin fallen; I am grateful for that.

Our values in the past several years had diverged; he had become increasingly, stridently rightwing, while I, of course, had remained ever the fuzzy thinking librul. Ironically enough, he had remained a blue collar working type while I started a business and became a 'pillar of the community' (or at least a big ol log). The hardest part was his decision to develop an unreasoning hatred for a mutual friend; I would not choose between them and when faced with the potential for encountering this friend at social events, Craig sort of...faded from my view.


But in any case, he was, and remains, a friend, whatever he may think of me or where my decisions have taken me.

Craig, I hope you're well and will be able to come home, along with the rest of your brothers in arms. The best reflection of Memorial Day would be for no more Americans to lose their lives on foreign sands.

Avast mateys!

Let's be clear (ha!).

Clear Channel Communications is evil, and is run by unimaginative, greedy corporate whoremongers who have nothing but contempt for the artists they exploit; As someone else said recently, Money is How The Untalented Keep Score, and CCC eptiomizes that statement. When the revolution comes, these brutish thugs will be the first against the wall. Music in general, and thus our society, is cheaper and more savage with android salesman like this controlling art, and the airwaves must be returned to their rightful owners, the public.

To further their rapacious exploits, they have come up with a further degradation of public perceptions; an anti-corporate 'pirate' radio station actually owned by one of the corporate beasts.

What a cynical admission that their overformatted, monolithic commercial swill is artistically and emotionally bankrupt. This tactic as much as concedes that the typical Clear Channel monopolization of the radio does not provide enough variety and excitement; further, it then attempts to exploit that void by pretending to be something it's not: an actual alternative.

I remember when someone actually . ran a real pirate station in Milwaukee during the early eighties. We listened to it often. I remember during a party, the dj just played the entire side of the first Pretenders album. It worked.

We already have a pretty good alternative station in Milwaukee, in WMSE. But WTPS also filled a void, and its success shows that there is real appetite for stations with diversity and little format. The success of Satellite radio also demonstrates this.

But Clear Channel and its faceless faux alternative Disney-Pirates sanitized crapfest is the furthest thing from this. Pirate radio, or even open format radio, has to be operated by someone who actually cares about the music, and doesn't just see it as a way to suck money from mindless consumers. It takes passion and commitment; the ability to actually hear music and determine what is good, or even just what you honestly like, as opposed to what sells the most or is the least offensive. You can't fake it, and Clear Channel will not be able to buy it or co-opt it. I hope this idea falls flat for these overgrown two bit huslers.

I'll believe their commitment when a Clear Channel station broadcasts Dead Kennedys day, which opens with "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" and closes with "Buy My Snake Oil", and features at least an hour of Jello Biafra's spoken word pieces, along with an interview segment where Jello gets to play his favorite music. Here's Jello's web site for Alternative Tentacles; Go buy some stuff.

Dammit, now jsut because I'm pissed off I'm going to go buy some Dead Kenndys music. Bite my fat hairy white ass, Clear Channel

Friday Random Ten

Yesterday, on my way to work, as I was driving down 3rd Street in downtown Milwaukee, I saw two geese, leading calmly three goslings across the street toward the river. They waited for a break in traffic, then just kind of walked across the street. Other drivers paused to let them past.

It was overall, just an unbelievably charming moment.




So here's the Friday Random Ten, manic phase:

Rush- A passage to Bangkok. written when drug use wasn't considered anti social.
Aimee Mann - That's Just What You Are. A critically underrated artist.
Husker Du - Powerline
Violent Femmes - Confessions (demo)
Alice in Chains - Nothin Song
Todd Rundgren - Time Stood Still
Tom Waits - Big in Japan
The Soft Boys - Strange. Underwater Moonlight is a masterpiece.
The Futureheads - Meantim. Good new band with an early 80's feel.
David Bowie - Suffragette City. A classic whose older stuff is aging very well.

The Last Star Wars, The Last Word...

Haven't seen the movie yet, but I will in the near future. But Shakespeare's Sister has the best summation yet:

star wars




Man, those right wing bloggers are a tightly wound bunch, aren't they? I mean, they attack libruls for being easily offended, 'politically correct' weenies, but talk about imagination...

it's going to come as a quite a shock, but everything isn't always about their personal demons. They've spent so many years crying about every slight, real or imagined, that now that they've managed to control 2 of the 3 arms of government, have the media so cowed that telling the truth is rationale for dismissal, they have become able to see bias in virtually any event, however remote it may be.

Gotta take your entertainment where you can get it these days. It's Friday; the really heinous news comes out now.

another week, another FRT

Lots of new stuff on the HD this week. Let's see how much of it comes up, eh?

Wind Up - Jethro Tull
Tomorrow's (just Another Day) Madness
The Pinnacle - Kansas
Zero - Smashing Pumpkins
Hide In Your Shell - Supertramp

The Apologist - R.E.M.
Bring On The Change - Midnight Oil
Frogs - Alice in Chains
Mystery Dance - Elvis Costello
Strutton Ground - Steve Hackett

...and one to grow on (cuz this is the only new song to come up)

Love is Not enough - Nine INch Nails

A friend sent me an email...

Happy ROTS Eve!!


This review kind of sums it all up for me; careful, there are spoilers:


http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=20157


meh. eye candy for he terminally adolescent.

Not that I ain't goin, of course.

It’s where all the traps are sprung, all the cards are laid on the table, where everybody dies, all is lost and evil rules the galaxy.


Kind of reminds me of the last election, you know?

Obi Wan never takes Anakin out for drinks and just levels with him. Sits him down and explains fascist totalitarianism. He doesn’t explain why sacrificing the most marginal freedoms to create a false sense of security enables those taking on those additional powers to create a greater evil than that which they fear. Hell, nobody really explains to Anakin why Democracy is better than Absolute Rule.


Again, it seems to be the root of much of the trouble we ourselves are facing. The key, the direction to take.



So, it sounds like there are two really good Star Wars films. The first one, which sets it all up, and the one before the first one, which resolves it all; the one Lucas has spent twenty five years (not to mention wasting two other prequels on foreshadowing) trying to get together. ESB was unfinished, unresolved. Clerks summed up ROTJ best: bunch of fuckin muppets. TPM went overboard on cute; too much cute in young anakin, and too much Jarjar. AOTC had its moments (Anakin's rage at seeing his mother die; Lucas' restraint in not showing the subsequent carnage; but in the end, Lucas couldn't pull off a love story, which needed to go here.


Cool and all, but hey man, in twenty five years, couldn't we have done better? Or is it that all the hopes and expectations set up conditions that are impossible to satisfy? A New Hope was a sleeper hit, nobody expected it to do that well except among the scifi crowd; Lucas was just working with his own expectations and a budget. Like architects who do their best work when young and on strict budgets, once the clientele expands and budgets go up, the work becomes unfocused (I'm looking at you, Frank Gehry and You, Richard Meier).


Give me Narnia. Hell, give me Firefly. Give me a series of Hitchhiker's movies.

Give me free passes for Revenge of the Sith. C'Mon.


Thanks, KE, I'm cross posting this on my blog. Architecture, politics, and Star Wars. All I'd have to do is somehow include music and I've covered the bases.

BTW, your buddy Gilbertson was totally off base slamming Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren. The Joe Todd show was fun, and both performers made the most of their persona and material. By definition, Rundgren was going to be more eclectic; look at the range of his work. But I do agree that the encores where they brought Ethel back out to join in were the best. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps' has always been about my favorite Beatles song, and the traded vocals, the violin solos- it totally rocked.

There. Now it covers it.

Late Friday, 'Stay out of my face or I'll Kill You' edition of the Friday Random Ten

They Might Be Giants - Jessica
Weezer - No One Else
The Loud Family - Some Grand Vision of Motives and Irony
Robyn Hitchcock - Spoken Interlude
REM - " "
Waco Brothers - Red Brick Wall
Luna - Kalamazoo
Marillion - Going Under
Soundgarden - Like Suicide
eels - After The Operation

"The shit hits the fan" Friday Random Ten, late and cranky

Moby - Very
Brave Combo - Swing it Baby, Swing
Steve Hackett - Comin Home to the Blues
Robyn Hitchcock - If You Were A Priest
Elvis Costello - Man Out Of Time
Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Let's Face It
Elvis Costello - Pump It Up (live)
Pop Will Eat Itself - Medicin MAn Speak With Forked Tongue
The A's - A Woman's Got The Power
Black 47 - Desperate


Apparently my iPod like Elvis better than the Mekons. Damn Thing.

Time for a little Fisking

Our friend Nick over at the Conservative Librarian...oops. Libertarian Librarian, I mean... has jumped on his favorite hobby horse, media bias. I often comment over there, but have been criticized, on separate occasions, for A) not having any supporting references, and B) loading up a comment with references.

So I just thought I'd parse a recent post of his, over here, just for shits an giggles.


Of Deans and the MSM
As promised, I just did a search for editorials on Howard Dean's comments regarding Terri Schiavo in the exact same source I searched for editorials on the Martinez memo. It's been over two weeks since Dean made his comments, so anybody want to hazard a guess as to how many editorials there have been reprimanding Dean? Anybody?

Zero. None. Nada. Zilch.

Nope, no bias here. Interestingly, I did find this article about Dean and his somewhat unusual approach to reaching out to voters in Republican states.

Well, the linked article is about Dean referring to the GOP as 'brain dead'. Nick's snarky comment above presumes that voters in supposedly red states are more or less uniformly Republican. My feeling is that the Democratic or Independent voters in these states would just as soon change the perception of the area being monolithically Republican. The comment also presupposes that there was the intention to aim this at voters in the mythical Red States, or even that the comment was aimed at voters at all.

But let's face it: the die hard Republicans in these states aren't going to change their attitudes about Dean or Democrats. Further, it's not Dean's job to reach out to Republicans, any more than it's Ken Mehlman's job to reach out to Democrats. when was the Last time Ken-Buddy came to Milwaukee?

And finally, it seems to be both sides of the coin to be complaining in one paragraph that a comment by Dean did not get the negative attention it deserved, while in the next paragraph point out another comment being covered by the mainstream media.

In other Dean news-- John W. Dean, the self-same White House legal counsel during Watergate, was part of a panel at last month's L.A. Times Festival of Books, which was hosted at UCLA. I mention this because I saw the panel he was on while watching C-Span last week. He was dreadful. Now in his '60s, Dean made horrible jokes on a wide variety of topics, all received with much enthusiasm by the majority of the audience.

But that's beside the point. Here's the panel for "Lies, Deceit & Cover-ups" (which, oddly, was called "Politics, Science and Society" on C-Span): Moderator Mr. Larry Beinhart, Mr. Eric Alterman, Mr. John W. Dean, Ms. Maureen Dowd, Dr. Michael Shermer, and Mr. Jon Wiener. Anyone see a trend here? Alterman has written two explicitly pro-liberal/anti-Bush books, and arguably three others; Dean has become a Democrat, and has penned Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush; Dowd is a columnsist for the NY Times, and very rarely misses an opportunity to rip on Bush, Cheney or, particularly, Rumsfeld and also recently published Bushworld: Enter At Your Own Risk; Shermer is odd man out-- the founder of Skeptic magazine, he appeared to have no political agenda; and Wiener (no, I'm not making that up) who wrote Historians in Trouble which I have not read but from the blurb provided seems to have a bit of an agenda as well-- and not one favorable to Bush.

All of which is fine, I guess, that's who the L.A. Times wanted on the panely, that's fine. Maybe they asked people like Christopher Hitchens or Cal Thomas and they declined. But the thing that really made me cringe was Eric Alterman (who, btw, was pompous, unfunny, condescending and generally a prissy little sob) claiming there was a right-ward bias in the mainstream media-- which, of course, was met by huge applause from the UCLA audience and the rest of the panel members. And made me hit myself in the forehead and say "Doh!" loudly to no one, as I didn't have anyone there joining me in my nerddom.

I just kept thinking, "Right-wing bias?! Look at your very own stinkin' panely you turd!" It's sponsored by the LA Times, one of the largest newspapers in the country, and it consists almost entirely of liberal commentators-- doesn't that tell you anythign at all?

So a panel of a paper in a predominantly 'blue' city in a 'blue' state, put together for a discussion of a subject that is admittedly less than admiring of Brave Leader (although I confess I missed the edict requiring all references to our esteemed leadership to be admiring and obsequieous) for an audience that would likely be made up largely of people who, astonishing as it may sound, DID NOT vote for Bush in the last election (gasp!). Sounds to me like the paper has a pretty good idea of its readership, and is attempting to provide a forum that responds to its customers' preferences. This must be the exception to the Holy Free Market that proves the rule. When it comes to Newspapers, the free market is... well, it must be broken, because it doesn't provide the result that the Right wants.

And one example of a somewhat left tilt, in the make-up of this panel, does not necessarily invalidate the proposition that overall, the MSM demonstrates more deference to the Republicans. when the allegation of bias is made, it is usually in the form of an anecdote or two, and the shouting of Media Bias! Media Bias! But as has been noted before, data is not the plural of anecdote, and I haven't seen any articles documenting concerted, directed, and intentional skewing of the reporting of news.

We have argued before about the editorial pages, but to me, this is pointless, since the INTENTION of the editorial section is to take a point of view; there is no obligation to present Left/Right, or a supposed 'balance' to the editorial articles.

One last comment, and you'll have to take my word for this, but Beinhart, the moderator, was so heavyhanded in his handling of questions it made me want to smack him. One guy has the guts to get up in front of what is clearly a pro-Democrat/anti-Bush audience and try to ask Alterman about a potentially anti-semitic comment he made and while Alterman is jumping down his throat (very, very defensive he was) the guys kinda loses his place in the question. Beinhart says something to the effect of, "Sorry sir, but since you don't seem to have a question I'm going to ask you to sit down." Five minutes later when a former Woodstock hippie Boomer (I'm sorry, but he SO just looked the stereotype) got up and rambled on for about two minutes on Bush's deceits and no WMD's and 1500 dead without asking a question, Beinhart just nodded and let him babble on. The guy NEVER actually asked a question-- just blathered anti-Bush rhetoric for two or three minutes.

I don't know if this really needs an answer. I did not see the program in question, and have no idea if Nick is presenting these occurrences fairly or accurately. Not to say, of course, that he's not. But as I said, I don't know. Did he watch the whole show? How were other questioners answered? It is apparent from Nick's comment that he pre-judged the second questioner; the first one was argumentative and 'lost his place' in his question, while the second 'rambled on' It sounds as if Nick's judgement would have allowed the first to continue with his question, while he would have disregarded the second. Unfortunately, Nick was not the moderator, and Larry Beinhart was- Beinhart had to make that decision and probably feels there was some justification for doing so.

I guess it wouldn't do to compare this to recent Bush appearances, where the audience is prescreened, and attendees who do not have the requisite approvals, or are wearing non-supportive t-shirts (or even arrived in a car with an anti-war bumper sticker) are denied attendance or even arrested. And this is for the President, who is ostensibly the President even for people who did not vote for him and may even (shocking!) disagree with some of his policies; theoretically, a citizen of this country should have the opportunity to attend a public event featuring his or her Head of State.

No, that Wouldn't Do At All.

Worker's Day

Happy May Day. It's not particularly acceptable, but celebrating worker's solidarity seems especially appropriate under this adminaistration, that, to borrow the words of one blogger, seems to define 'ownership society' as a society in which the corporations own the workers.

So, I'm celebrating by ... umm.. working. Have oodles of stuff to do, three unit townhouse to refine, redesign a mixed use building, redesign some elevations.. there's no way to get it all done.

So until then, here's the May Day Random Baker's Dozen, full goose bozo, main database edition:

Rush - Test For Echo
jet - Sgt. Major
Mekons - Gin & It
Elvis Costello - Lovable
The Jam - Going Underground
Rancid - As Wicked

Rush - Freewill
Black Sabbath - Tomorrow's Dream
Elvis Costello - Baby Plays Around
Utopia - Love with a Thinker
Peter Gabriel - Kiss That Frog
Oysterhead - Mr. Oysterhead

Elvis Costello - Invasion Hit parade


Well. That was a nice little kick off to the day.