|
cb's closing may have sounded sad to people who live in the storied history of the clubs past but there was actually very little of that energy left when it closed.. tonic is/was a club that went to huge lengths to present new and exciting music to audiences hungry for such a vibe. either way(meaning, whichever club you loved), another sad blow to nyc's increasing lack of important club spaces/meeting grounds for the various subsets of underground music.
http://www.timeoutny.com/newyork/tonyblog/?p=1874
Tonic, 1998–2007
Posted in Music by Mike Wolf on March 28th, 2007
Ah, fuck. That’s about the only thing that can be said to the news that Tonic, one of the city’s most popular small clubs—to musicians and fans alike—will be closing next month, with the last night of music being lucky Friday the 13th. The well-liked owners, Melissa Caruso Scott and John Scott, have yet to issue an official press release describing their reasons for closing, but one can only assume that the enormous, appalling tower of condos that got thrown up literally next door is part of it. (It all brings to mind DeNiro in Brazil, gliding in on a wire after striking a blow against the powers that be, smiling and assuring us that “We’re all in it together.” But I digress—and anyway, I’m not advocating that sort of behavior, am I?)
Expect the days leading up to April 13 to be filled with special shows of one sort or another. For the moment, Melissa and John emit a vague optimism about carrying on Tonic’s mission; in the meantime, they’ll continue to put on shows at the nearby Abrons Art Center, as they have for months now. And there’s no small amount of good news to report, as well: Melissa very recently gave birth to her and John’s first child, a healthy boy who is graced with the sophisticated and regal name of Addison Wyatt Caruso Scott. I could say something hackneyed about endings and beginnings, but for the sake of us all, nah.Current Music: bbc world service |
|
Some favorite recordings purchased in 2006:
1.volcano the bear-classic erasmus fusion
2.burial-burial
3.god-Anti-Sex/Anti-Wiretapping
4.supersilent-7(did not come out this year but still one of my faves)
5.pelt-skullfucker
6.hototogisu-many recordings/matthew bower in general /
skullflower-tribulation...
7.clipse-hell hath no fury
8.the khan jamal creative arts ensemble-drumdance to the
motherland(reissue)
9. keith rowe/toshimaru nakamura-between
10.hzl-ayes
11.ornette coleman-sound grammer
12.dave burrell-momentum
13.henry grimes trio-live at the kerave jazz fest(again, not from this
year but whatever)
14.Baczkowski/padmabha-Tongue rust and lead moth
15.sabu toyozumi/exiasJ-sons scapegoat///axis another revolable
thing parts one and two-new direction unit reissues//
16.om-conferance of the birds
17.comets on fire/howlin rain recordings
18.dave smolen-feed lines
19.espers-II
20.ted dockstader-arial two and three
21.flahertycorsano-the beloved music////flahertycorsanoyeah-a rock in
the snow/slow blind avalanche
22.Marzen karbaj(trumpet)/christine sehnaoui(alto sax)/sharif sehnaoui(guitar)/ingar zach(percussion)-Rouba 3i5(again, last year) |
|
I live my life with all the poise of the songs on black flags first four years compilation and because of it my relationships tend to end in a pool of train-wrecked frustration. As much as I try to change I keep derailing each of them at much the same point in each one of their developments. I know my faults and also are very aware how they trip me up with each attempted set of steps. I see an almost mirror image in many of my mothers actions and at times I think that we both have many of the same problems in dealing with the world outside of our eyes. We may also share some of the same almost debilitating qualities that seem to affect the ways in which we both interact with people.
Diane and I met on the Internet in the summer of 2005 and after several lively exchanges we decided to meet outside of the very limited confines of the World Wide Web. She met me at work just as a summer thunderstorm was rolling through and we proceeded to talk and 'hang out' in the flesh for the first time. First impressions are always important and me being the over judgmental person that I am I can't say that I was particularly blown away in those first awkward hours. I seemed to have trouble focusing in on a common mood and thread to our conversations yet I got the idea that she was telling me things that are not normally told by her upon first meetings and I was more then flattered with her honesty.. At the end of the day I was not even sure if we would still be talking after that night because I was not exactly sure what she was feeling about our first meeting either. I did actually have a great time that day but it was hard for me to see that clearly at the time.
Our communication did continue after that night and from the time of our second meeting had and almost a blur like effect over my life as it probably did with hers in many respects. It would be very hard for me to put into words our attraction to one another that seemed to overtake both of us after that second encounter so I am not even going to make an attempt. All that want to share is that we kept each other content and it seemed like a very natural relationship.
I’m not sure why beautiful things must come crashing down around me but that is what has ended up happening over the last few months. It was more withering and less crash in this case but at the end of the night you still end up sleeping alone so either, or. During the summer our emotional interactions melted down to nothing and there was zilch that I could do about it. My attempts at showing love were promptly pushed away with little or no response as to why. I am hardly perfect and I do have demons like anyone but I am also very affectionate and do know how to show that love with a greater amount of grace then my aforementioned poise. I guess it is hard to come to grips with a situation when the two of us are still in the process of figuring it out ourselves but Perhaps the clouds that were graying the path of our first meeting might have been trying to tell us something that we both did not bother listening to. |
|
so,
nofun fest or at least the friday i attended was good. friday seemed to have everything that i was interested in seeing. for me the rest of the weekend looked spotty at best(everything but barbetomagus and noneck) but i hear that everyone who attended all three days had as much of a blast as i had the night i was there. i walked in as jessica rylin was getting ready and her set was great in just about every way. creative, cute, unique and definitely deserving of more expsure then she is currently getting. dilloway presented one of the most outstanding performances of the night while members of wolf eyes and spencer yah offered frenzied shoving from the side of the stage. at one point dilloway seemed to wave them away but in the energy of the moment who really knows if that was actually the case. the sound was a bubbling buildup into a skree sheering lava flow of circuit manipulation.. all in all it was way to short of a set. lee ranaldo+vampire bell presented an intense improvised collaboration throughout the length of the set. corsano is always an incredibly explosive percussionist to behold and this night was no exception providing the turbine power for the two guitarists to improvise a roller coaster of loud and soft interplay. the soft was never quite as soft as the previous sentence may lead you to imagine it to be but for lack of any appropriate terminology it serves it's purpose.. Zbigniew Karkowski and Carlos Giffoni each provided an individual set before launching into a full on collaborative effort. carlos used some hand built box with nobs(yup, nobs, how about that) that he controlled with a considerable amount of poise and the same could be said for karkowsi with his wall of laptop distortions. togther they provided a relatively heavy yet rich range of sound that i couldn't have been happier with.. someone was hurling insults at karkowski about his laptop at one point with a responce of upping his electronic assault about ten notches just about melting the drunkin idiot doing the yelling. i was standing on a piller on the stage during this set getting a good vantage point of everything. i had the same spot during Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori getting to experience their surprisingly violent set in a very personal manner. zeena parkins custom built harp provided the driving force of the set with her teeth grinding attack of every square inch of the instrument itself. this included scraping various metal objects on the side of the magnetic pick ups that seemed to line each side of the harp while also using a brush against these same pickups creating a very punky type of stabbing distortion that rained hell the senses when put through her floor of effects. amongst ms. parkins blur of sound and movement iku mori dished out an ample supply of rhythmic pummeling from her powerbook that seeemed to be somewhat heavier then the few releases of her music that i have heard in the past.. while watching her i was wondering what she thought of this event seeing her former bands definite influence on the weekend as a whole? i left at this point missing both solmania and smegma becasue it was already almost one am and we had a two hour trip home. besides the obvious pain of missing smegma i had no clue solmania was the one and only marcia bassetts... fuck, fuck and FUCK again for not seeing smegma. but, oh well, i just purchased a terrastock ticket so hopefully that event will make me happy again after my night of nofun.Current Music: burns and allen/old time radio/xm |
|
I was excited to see the steelers win the superbowl a few days ago. I did wish I was drinking with the friends that I left behind in western pa the night that they won.. as I type this I am listening to the songs that signal home have on their myspace page which are all quite good. I fear not many people will ever hear these because their isolation in that part of the state.. I hope this is not the case because judging by the three songs on that page they deserve to be recognized outside of their various western pa shows.
I recently was awarded a car from my aunt and uncle for all my hard work on, well, nothing. I was given the car because my aunt has always wanted to give me one ever since I was the tender age of sixteen. thing is, I never ended up getting behind the wheel of a car until the even tenderer age of twenty-seven. It's a 1995 Buick Roadmaster and it’s insides are as spacious as a small hotel room. it's a shame that the current state of the world does not look all that kindly at cars with fuel tanks that are equaly as spacious.
Dear diary, is this all there is?Current Music: liars-Drum's Not Dead |
| » music i liked in 2005 |
|---|
i must be missing something...
not all were released in 2005 but i did buy all of the music listed below this year.
1. yabby you-jesus dread/72-77 /OR/ brian eno-another day on earth
2. electroputas-3
3. john coltrane-one down, one up live at the half note
3. the david s ware quartets-live in the world
4. electric masada and milford graves with john zorn- both recordings are from zorns 50th birthday celebrations that took place every night at tonic through the entire month of sepetember/2003
5. fursaxa-lepidoptera (and) pelt-s/t vhf#90-------i put both together because i liked them equally
6. vibracathedral orchestra-pontiac lady 3cdr tour recordings set on vhf
7. tibeten buddhist rites from the monasteries of bhutan-volume one
8. baczkowski-corsano-flaherty-the dim bulb
9. excepter-throne/self destruction
10. no neck blues band-qvaris
11. michio kurihara-sunset notes
12. circle-forest
13. pharaoh overlord-4
14. The Psychic Paramount-Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural EP
15. oneida- the wedding
16. various releases by burning star core, dead machines, double leopards, hototogisu and the yellow swans(and all of their other monkiers)
Dec. 6th, 2005 @ 07:25 pm
|
| » ben watson on simon reynolds post punk book, "rip it up and start again" |
|---|
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=18378
They hid punk’s risk and violence behind a genteel screen, betraying its confrontational ethic with a liberal language of justification.
Ben Watson
Philosophers are talking more about music than they did in the past. This is partly to do with the rise of Adorno’s star in the philosophical firmament and the fact that over half of his writings are devoted to music. But it is also because a generation that imbibed punk in its formative years is now in a position to choose the cultural objects of its intellectual scrutiny. So when a book appears called Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–1984, it raises the temperature of intellectual debate.* This was the period when fascism loomed as an electoral reality in England, and the Left made anti-racism an inescapable feature of mainstream politics. Music was crucial to the process.
The material basis for music’s cultural relevance is its industrial production and commercial distribution, initiated at the close of the nineteenth century and indelibly associated with the political upheavals of the 1960s. Mass production makes discussions of music turn ineluctably towards politics and social theory. Irony and sophistry flake off. To talk about a musical experience, you need to put yourself in the picture. Discussants wax autobiographical, they posit determinate social identities. Class issues – long hounded out of academia – become graphic and pressing. It was not for nothing that black America coined the tag ‘soul music’. In a secularized, commercialized society, music is the locus of the soul; social being becomes unavoidable, specific and poignant.
In philosophy, things began with Nietzsche on Wagner (first for, then against) and were stoked by Adorno’s polemics against classical harmony in favour of twelve-tone. Today debates turn around Noise, and the possible demise of music as system: as usual, the ‘death’ of something proclaims a new burst of life. Punk was the last time music and philosophy crossed paths in a memorable way, as pop was infected by a situationist critique of the social-democratic consensus. Guy Debord’s admiration for the antisocial sullenness of the London proletariat suddenly became a cultural phenomenon in itself. However, punk was buried by those who came to praise it. Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming told its story in the light of eventual commercial success, abolishing its sense of terminal crisis and reducing it to yet another rags-to-riches showbiz fable. Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces sidestepped punk’s challenge to representation by ignoring its class politics – Dada, the situationists and punk were all glossed as terminal romanticism. For anyone who had seen the Sex Pistols, attended the F-Club in Leeds, or had fights with fascists at Rock Against Racism gigs – or simply walked down the street wearing clothes that were an invitation to get beaten up – these books were a drear disappointment. They hid punk’s risk and violence behind a genteel screen, betraying its confrontational ethic with a liberal language of justification.
So it is hardly surprising that Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up has been flying off the shelves. With 126 fresh interviews with the protagonists, pictures researched by Jon Savage, and 550 dense pages written by a blogger ‘too young’ to have witnessed the Pistols, it promises to register what things felt like for the groundlings – those excluded from the scene-setting events in London, ‘too late’ but fully participating in punk as a mass phenomenon nonetheless. Those who cite 1976–77 as the ‘real’ moment of punk are those for whom it was a springboard to TV celebrity. Genuine punks – ‘losers’ from the spectacular point of view – actually lived punk between 1978 and 1984.
The morbidity of positivism
In telling the story of these years, Reynolds steps into a troubled zone, strafed with political and philosophical brickbats. A mild version of deconstruction – a kind of radicalism-with-compromise – is the name of his game. Green Gartside of Scritti Politti tells Reynolds that when he met Jacques Derrida, he ‘told me what I was doing was part of the same project of undoing and unsettling that he’s engaged in’. For Reynolds, society is a stable, reasonable entity ‘unsettled’ by a few dashing highwaymen like Gartside and Derrida. Unversed in Adorno, Reynolds is unaware that the crisis of Western metaphysics has social roots: society cannot get beyond its own hidebound concepts. Commentators on mass music ignore Adorno’s analysis at their peril.
Adorno emphasized psychic liberation, mimesis, mad love and musical freedom. His focus on the musical object meant he could see through the ideological packaging that surrounds the consumption of music. Like the ‘conspicuous’ in consumption, it is not completely discarded, but it stops being the whole deal. Like a manufacturer testing a sample, Adorno honed in on music’s appeal to the unconscious, revealing the sedimented historical content behind personal taste. For Pierre Bourdieu, such insights confirm the cynic’s conviction that all culture is a prop for power. For Adorno, in contrast, cravings for musical freedom are glimpses of a new social order undistorted by domination. Despite his pessimism about formal politics, Adorno understood that capitalism is creating the preconditions for freedoms undreamt of in antiquity. Hence his depressive mania: a new world is possible, yet baulked.
Writers committed to particular genres, such as free jazz (Philippe Carles, Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz Black Power, Paris, 1971), funk (Ricky Vincent, Funk, New York, 1996), rock (Joe Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, Los Angeles, 1994), country (Nick Tosches, Country, London, 1989) or rai (Bouziane Daoudi, Hadj Miliani, L’aventure du raï: Paris, 1996) are duty-bound to defend generic integrity against commodification, and so make aesthetic distinctions. However, pop is not a musical genre: it is what sells. Hence writing on pop cries out for categories like capital, labour and commodity, since they are the determining forces in this ‘genre’. Adorno’s warnings about the consumption of false images of freedom are highly pertinent here: the listening ear needs to be rigorous about objective actualities of form.
In his acknowledgements, Simon Reynolds offers ‘a fervent salute to the journalists and editors of the weekly rock papers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, his ‘prime research resource’. However, he’s wrong to call 1978–84 ‘the golden age for British music journalism’. It was certainly better than what passes for music journalism today. (How can an industry which couldn’t even generate a hit denouncing the war in Iraq provide an object for serious criticism?) But the real golden age was the underground press of 1966–69; although the pre-punk NME (1975–77), with its relentless negativity about corporate label fads and ploys, was pretty hilarious too. Punk was its bruised and bloody offspring. That said, 1978 to 1984, when the NME vied with Sounds to cover the struggle against the National Front, was certainly compulsive reading. So much so, in fact, that anyone who read those weeklies then will yawn their way through Reynolds’s book: fad follows fad with a remorseless lack of logic. The conscientious page-turner has no way of avoiding the imbecilities of Kevin Rowland, Martin Fry or Lydia Lunch. Despite the 126 extra interviews, the NME sets the template, and the book reads as a breathless précis. Relief comes on page 517, when Reynolds loses faith in chart pop, and begins to make his own judgements. But it has been a long haul.
The author’s ‘subjective’ viewpoint should not just be there to provide moral asides once a story has been told (like Robert McNamara looking glum about genocide in Vietnam); it is an essential moment in the unfolding of any objective account. What was Reynolds doing during this period? Which gigs did he attend? How did he earn a living? Did he meet anyone at gigs? Was he ever scared? How did punk and post-punk challenge his sense of identity, his view of the British class system? Without information about the storyteller, we can’t get critical purchase on their story.
Reynolds has some political opinions, of course. We can plot them. He’s a liberal, so the market is a force of nature. He thinks Thatcherism was a response to unions that were ‘too strong’. He talks of interventionist governments ‘propping up ailing industries to preserve jobs’. He also mentions 1970s ‘race riots’. Now, the Daily Telegraph may have called them that, but everyone involved at street level recognized them as anti-police riots that brought whites, blacks and Asians together. A waft of confidence and good humour swept through the riot cities like some exhilarating drug.
The clichés come thick and fast: Tony Wilson’s Factory Records used situationist ideas, but Guy Debord wouldn’t have approved. Bob Last’s Fast Product anticipated a new kind of left-wing sensibility, a ‘“designer socialism” purged of its puritanical austerity and pleasure-fear’. Following the ‘mods versus rockers’ binary (half an idea baked into academic orthodoxy by Dick Hebdige and Simon Frith), Reynolds conceives pop as a natural homeostatic system, working ‘through a kind of oscillating, internal pendulum, swinging back and forth between two extremes. Some kind of return to rock values (if not inevitably to guitar music) was bound to happen.’ Postmodernism provides Reynolds with the sophistry to avoid musics outside his ken: hip-hop is dismissed as ‘fantasies of rebellion and street knowledge’. In the first 500 pages the only pre-punk band mentioned is the Beatles, and this definition of pop music as victorious commercial product shapes the book. Reynolds would doubtless be aggrieved to be called a racist – he’s appreciative of two-tone and the Specials, and even has the nous to realize Live Aid was collusive with Thatcherite anti-statism. But attention to sales figures rather than musical form inevitably underplays the contribution of blues, funk and reggae. He quotes Luc Sante on Blood Ulmer, Luther Thomas, Oliver Lake and Joe Bowie, but he has no inkling that No Wave Harmolodics was a Hendrix-scale leap forward in how rock can be played, a revolution forced underground by a music industry in retrenchment. (We had our own exponents, from Nottingham, called Pinski Zoo, but they didn’t chart, so they don’t count as ‘post-punk’.)
The black hole in pop opened up by the Sex Pistols led more adventurous punks to explore dub reggae, Free Improvisation and revolutionary politics. Reynolds, though, remains faithful to the commercial farce. This positivism deprives him of musical objectivity, of critical stance: all he can do is detail once again the careers of those whose names sold music papers. He’s aware that things got worse from The Pop Group through to ABC and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, a sorry decline into image, commercial scam and unit-shifting. However, lacking an understanding of how capitalism prioritizes product over musical event, Reynolds can only remark on a lack of ‘passion’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘substance’. Deprived of Adorno’s notion that truth might be at variance with society as currently constituted, Reynolds can’t function as a critic. His exclusive fixation on music that makes a return on capital (‘pop’) deprives him of any sense of the struggle involved in making music. There is no sign of the broken lives and bleak desperation caused by the brutal way the music industry siphons money away from working musicians and small venues. Real people are elsewhere; what we have is Narcissus in his bedroom, stacking his albums.
Walter Benjamin diagnosed morbidity as a symptom of commodity fixation and it is intriguing how often ‘marble slabs’ come up in Reynolds’s descriptions of beauty in music (Joy Division, Young Marble Giants and Scritti Politti). Christopher Gray’s Leaving the Twentieth Century (a pioneering translation of situationist texts issued in 1974) was apparently ‘the radical-chic fetish object of its era’. This description derives from Marcus’s glamorization of the book in Lipstick Traces (and the photo of a distressed cover in The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid). But anyone who read Leaving the Twentieth Century at the time felt viciously alienated, not just from consumer objects, but from non-revolutionary contemporaries, music-scene small talk, academic protocol and pop-biz machinations. Debord’s polemics threw the reader into a storm of radical politics quite beyond Reynolds’s feeble radar. It was something you read and tried to put into action, but rarely mentioned (its Lukácsian terminology was usually incomprehensible to anyone with the nerve to carry out its proposals). This action-not-words spell cast by the situationists was only broken in the late 1980s, with the publication of Lipstick Traces and the advent of Stewart Home. Action is not a word in Reynolds’s vocabulary.
Thermidor as lukewarm shower
Reynolds detests the organized Left. Rock Against Racism is only mentioned in order to berate its ‘puritan’ dogmatism and to defend the ‘unaligned’ individual (in this case, the ridiculous Howard Devoto). In fact, it was the Left’s attention to punk that created his ‘golden age’ of music journalism. When Gavin Martin wrote sourly about the huge 1981 Leeds Carnival Against Racism in NME, the next week’s letters page carried nothing but indignant rebuttals. Reynolds opines that a single quote from Jerry Dammers ‘did more for anti-racism than a thousand Anti-Nazi League speeches’, but it was activists in the ANL who originally arrived at that conclusion! That’s why we headlined the Specials at the Leeds Carnival. It was precisely because the ANL was not centred around political speeches, but around gigs and street action, that it attracted support, and eventually smashed the National Front.
Musicians and grassroots promoters make gigs happen, escalate community, amplify socialist intelligence; moneymen and obsequious journalists manufacture stars, sell crap records and screw everything up. Reynolds is keen that we see things from this ‘other side’, appreciate the ambitions of entrepreneurs like Paul Morley and Trevor Horn, and break with the Left’s ‘guilt-racked puritanism’. This way we can all get a piece of the pie. But, as he admits at the end of Rip It Up, all he’s left with at the end is an overblown and vacuous product like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, a boy-band prototype. Without attention to form, it is impossible to appreciate what is decimated by the commercial ratio: the delirious madness of a musical event, the beauty of unpredictability, the one-off situation. With his orthodox cultural studies agnosticism about musical form, Reynolds can only moralize retrospectively about the fame game. Critical spike crumbles to chatshow falafel.
By the end, as often in counter-revolutions, the ‘theoreticians’ mended the breach (Bob Last, Green Gartside, Trevor Horn, Tony Wilson) and successfully turned post-punk into a viable consumer option. The abysmal reign of New Order, Simple Minds and U2 beckoned. Reynolds notices that in formal terms, post-punk tunes by Wire, Josef K and Joy Division are similar to tunes by Altered Images, but he fails to draw the conclusion that it is the same paltry pabulum tweezed for different niche markets. In 1985, two journalists from the NME with ears alert enough to hear the straitened parameters of its ‘alternative’ – Richard Cook and Graham Lock – tried to introduce post-punk consumers to Free Improvisation. However, Derek Bailey was hardly chart fodder, so they left to join the jazz magazine Wire. The critique of capitalism and class society – so strikingly made by the Sex Pistols – was no longer deemed saleable. Instead it festered underground, until in the United States the grassroots networks built by Bad Brains and other Washington DC hardcore bands exploded at the Seattle protest against the World Trade Organization in 1999. That is a different story of course, but, like Free Improvisation and Harmolodics, simply to mention it reveals the pinched horizons of Reynolds’s tale. Never trust a music writer who calls the Sons of the Pioneers ‘anodyne’.
Reynolds’s obsession with chart placings (abstract knowledge) rather than live gigs and personal response to records (concrete knowledge) explains the failure of Rip It Up. With no negative dialectic, the particular is never given its due, much less used as a critical lever on the general. The writer attempts to speak ‘objectively’ for the mass consumer, but this putative entity is abstract and dominated. However bellettrist it may sound, properly objective cultural criticism needs to start by registering subjective (even disgraceful) responses. When music is treated as social fact rather than potential truth, the past will never make its ‘tiger’s leap’ into the present. This is writing in which nothing ever happens.
Convinced that there is nothing relevant outside the text of the recorded product, Reynolds cannot explain the forces acting on the records he examines. In fact, he cannot interpret the records at all, and – paradoxically for someone who rarely acknowledges quirky, unofficial responses – emerges with something as arbitrary and subjective as ‘taste’. This is because he remains obedient to the priorities and perspectives of the capitalist pop industry, allowing the commodity to dictate what constitutes musical culture. In Rip It Up, there is no appeal to the tribunal of live performance. But this is an essential element in decoding records. You only had to witness the gigs to know the Specials were a real collective – combined, conflictual and uneven – and that Dexy’s Midnight Runners were a contrived charade. Without unrepentant insistence on the subjectivity of musical experience (Adorno hearing the opening of Mahler’s First as ‘the unpleasant whistling of an old steam engine’, for example), pop writing won’t achieve objectivity. It will just be witless and toothless.
Oct. 7th, 2005 @ 04:22 pm
|
| » dear mr. bush |
|---|
god just told me to tell you to commit suicide.. get ta steppin...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/06/bush.shtml
This press release is embargoed until 2230 hours on Thursday 6 October. Before that time it is only available through the link which you have been sent.
President George W. Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.
In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.
Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"
Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."
The series charts the attempts to bring peace to the Middle East, from Bill Clinton's peace talks in 1999/2000 to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last August.
Norma Percy, series producer of The 50 Years War (1998) returns, with producers Mark Anderson and Dan Edge, to tell the inside story of another seven years of crisis.
Presidents and Prime Ministers, their generals and ministers tell what happened behind closed doors as peace talks failed and the intifada exploded.
Oct. 6th, 2005 @ 05:31 pm
|
| » driving and music listening |
|---|
i drive a car. if you know me it may sound odd, but i drive one all the time these days. until i was 27 i never drove a car and it took me another year until i actually drove a car to and from work. the trip is only fourty or so minutes each way but it allows me to absorb a good amount of music. this is bound to sound very trivial to most but give me a break.
last night i watched the movie titled american splendor based on the comic of the same name. very good..
today i listened to the following(in the car):
david s ware-live in the world-disc two
charles gayle-consecration
marissa nadler-the saga of the flower may
pelt-untitled
tomorrow i am going to listen to embryo and pharoaoh overlord. just a heads up.. hehehardyhaha!
go see the band make a rising on tour now in a town near and dear to you..
www.tonewplanet.com
from a their recent tour kick off at their house/dianeschrader took the photo
Oct. 4th, 2005 @ 10:18 pm
|
| » louis armstrong, 1957 |
|---|
"The way they are treating my people in the South, the Government can go to hell."
Sep. 30th, 2005 @ 07:57 pm
|
| » mr jack rose |
|---|
Dr Ragtime-Alap/Flirtin' with The Undertaker 78 (Life is Hard) ed. 6 2005
EDITION OF SIX and it's a 78! must be beautiful..
Sep. 18th, 2005 @ 10:44 pm
|
| » (dr).mick(michael)flowers |
|---|
i saw sunburned hand, magik markers and one surprise appearance by the good (dr.not really a doc but sbhotm where calling him that) Mick flowers of the vibracathedral orchestra.. michael flowers set up shortly after violent students(who I missed) and played something called a japanjo, if I am not mistaken. he played one sickeningly short, yet incredibly intense improvisation that I could have listened to all night. His concentration was strongly infused with the powerful curtain of unmovable texture that he was showering on those gazing upon him.. the fruit of his labors where generously met with hoots and hollers by the onlookers and in most respects this was easily the performance of the night. It’s maddening to learn that the vibracathedral orchestra were asked to be on this tour but mr. Flowers was the only member who could make it out. the last time that i saw sunburned i was too high and had to leave the room because something about the band that night scared me. hah... the singer is one real deal motherfucker and in no way does he take on the jam bandish persona that some tend to paint the whole band as being akin to. Come on, he said fuck hippies in the wire article so he’s not down with that stylistic characterization either.. in the heat of performance his style of street preaching is strangely reminiscent of the singer from the sf band oxbow. i took some pictures using dianes camera and there are some truly odd positioning of the singer, mannequin legs and a random wheelchair that happened to be populating the warehouse space. the singer still scared me in that he had an attitude about him that he could and might physically hurt someone at any given moment. this energy was transmitted through the sheer physicality of his presence and wasn't the contrived style of youthful sweat and vigor given off by many young rock bands. The music seemed punkier and closer to the edge of collapse even more then I expect from a band as shambolic as the sunburned hand of the man. Wild bursts of thrashing, yet billowing soul where transmitted from their instruments through two long almost-compositions.
magik markers where just ok but still fit the night quite nicely. their set was feedback wrangling done to it's fullest. the kid next to me was very drunk and screaming his head off. he was talking about how he wanted to see blood on the ceiling before they started so i gave him a few good shoves when mm was pouring on their assault of static guitar hubris. sadly, no one else wanted to move but Mr. drunky pants still loved wildly crashing to and fro. i've seen videos of people moving around during mm sets so it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility... (can you tell that i would have liked some movement?)... The sweat of humid warhouse air and sweet sounds of frustration and paranoia of the current state of the union seemed to fuel the evening beautufully.
sunburned video tour diary-http://www.ecstaticpeace.com/sunmark.html
Sep. 16th, 2005 @ 04:50 pm
|
| » thefinnsonfrankfordavenue/philly |
|---|
when will bunny be putting out cd?
images by diane schrader
Sep. 9th, 2005 @ 12:10 pm
|
| » from philly city paper web site |
|---|
Most famous landmarks: The crumbling ruins of the old Ortlieb's brewery, though the statue of Don Quixote at Front and Girard (a gift from Ciudad Réal) is ripe for discovery.
since i have always wondered the story behind this statue i googled it.. not much of a story but it is more then i knew before i looked. ciudad real..
the statue:
Aug. 24th, 2005 @ 07:57 pm
|
| » kemiallisetystavat |
|---|
oivay, what a show..
fursaxa with:
September 3rd: Philadelphia @ 2037 Frankford Ave. 7pm with The Skaters, Davenport, Islaja, Lau Nau, Kuupuu, Pekko Käppi, Tomutonttu
Aug. 24th, 2005 @ 01:43 pm
|
| » i have another confession my friend |
|---|
the new pelt record on vhf is beautifuli though i am still not sold on the new fursaxa full length that i purchased at the same time. the most enjoyable experience i had seeing tara burke was when four bardo ponders backed her and at least two of them play on this full length which i would think is a very good omen for what i have yet to listen to.. i would imagine that i am going to be easily drawn into the more then gracious spirit it surely holds within. i bought the new foo fighters full length(oddly) as well and the first two tracks i listened to seem to be quite good. every time i turn on mtv i end up leaving it on because their song titled best of you is on so i decided to just purchase it. eleven dollars for a double cd set is more then fair i guess.. i actually have a thing for buying pop music at target and using my target card to do so. kind of odd but i have to admit to really liking that store. who hates target? the answer is not many people you talk to and i would imagine it has something with the more then pleasent design of not only the store but also many of the products they sell... what does this have to do with it leading me to buying pop musc? who knows(target knows how to market to ME!).. ok. i'll stop writing about target.. promise
music i bought recently
pelt-untitled
fursaxa-lepidopetra
foofighters-in your honor
the revolutionaries-earthquake dub-hotpot
glennbrown and friends-rhythm master volume one-hot pot
tk webb-kck
marissa nadler-the saga of the mayflower
re-visiting "father" and the source family(dvd about father yod)
target
Aug. 10th, 2005 @ 04:09 pm
|
| » autechre'amber VS. autechre'untilted |
|---|
I am currently listening to them both through since they are back to back on my itunes and I must say that amber does not hurt my head (well, of course) when playing through. Even though I still like it, by the middle of untilted I am more prone to want to take a brake and listen to the rest later.. that is not something that ever crosses my mind when listening to amber. Perhaps I am more of an autechre light weight then I thought. untilted has a few moments that start to be remisent of amber(though, i guess this can be said about every autechre release in one way or another) but unlilted still shows how their sound has developed in gigantic ways. their center of gravity has just shifted so dramatically by 2005 and just needs to be stared at more intently then amber which again, could be written about every release since chiastic slide.
Aug. 4th, 2005 @ 01:52 pm
|
| » deadcscrolls? |
|---|
Body:
D!SC PRESENTS
WHO LIKES ART? WHO LIKES MUSIC?
3rd Annual mini-fest
@ The Hangout in Edinboro, PA
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27
doors at noon. music begins shortly after.
FREE
Art on display in lobby. Possible independent film being shown. General legitimate antics welcome.
More information to come.
ART
List of artists to be announced
MUSIC
rock.hip-hop.jazz.noise.hardcore.experimental.folk.punk
(listing is not in order)
Who Is Ryder
(indierock from Edinboro)
Tusk Lord/Droopy Septum
(Pittsburgh and Edinboro collaborative drone)
Burning Star Core
(Avant jams from Cincinnati. New collab with Comets on Fire soon and releases on Hospital, RRR, and Cenotaph.)
Air Guitar Magazine
(Pittsburgh horns, bass, and drum death mariachi)
Unsung
(Pittsburgh spoken wordflow)
Funlarious
(fun.)
Andi Wondersound
(Northwest, PA solo acoustic guitar folk)
Van Damage
(Hardcore punk on tour with Hank Jones)
Caution! Cadaver
(Erie/Girard raw punk)
King Bowman
(Psychadelic power sludge rock)
Hank Jones
(Local fast hardcore punk champs on Undecided Records)
Carlos Giffoni
(The man behind NYC's No Fun Fest performs solo)
Origen
(Pittsburgh based raw hip-hop word play)
Mike Tamburo
(acoustic guitar and homemade instruments, new album on Music Fellowship)
DeadCScrolls
(Experimental group from Philadelphia)
What Secrets
(Pittsburgh/Edinboro noise rock destruction)
Witness/DJ Atarax
(Philadelphia MC and Beat team return for more hiphop fun)
Telefonics
(Erie poprock with a raw edge)
Adorehaze
(Girard/Syracuse based soundscapes that will blow you away)
Jul. 27th, 2005 @ 02:16 pm
|
| » double leopards/skaters east coast tour |
|---|
Thu 07/28 @ The Apollo Grill, Eastworks Building - Easthampton, MA
with The Skaters, Duck, College Girls Gone Wild
Fri 07/29 @ Pa's Lounge - Somerville, MA
with The Skaters, Jason Lescalleet, Kate Village/Donna Parker duo
www.paslounge.com
Sat 07/30 @ The Grow Room - Providence, RI
with The Skaters,
Sun 07/31 @ 2011 S. Juniper St. - Philadelphia, PA
with The Skaters, Newton, Unchained
www.lifeactionrevival.org/events.html
Mon 08/01 @ Jeff the Pigeon - Allentown, PA
with The Skaters,
www.whitedenim.com/jeffthepigeon/
Tue 08/02 @ ??? - Brooklyn, NY
collaboration with The Skaters, home recording session
Wed 08/03 @ ??? - Brooklyn, NY
with The Skaters, Mouthus
Thu 08/04 @ ??? - Manhattan, NY
with The Skaters,
Fri 08/05 @ 611 Florida - Washington DC
with The Skaters, Daniel Martin-McCormick, Insect Factory, Earthen Sea
Sat 08/06 @ Tarantula Hill - Baltimore, MD
with The Skaters, Rotten Milk and Safety Pin
heresee.com/tarantulalink.htm
Mon 08/08 @ Tonic - Manhattan, NY
Double Leopards / Skaters collaboration,
Jul. 18th, 2005 @ 05:34 pm
|
| » so sad |
|---|
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0507150236jul15,1,1457621.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
Chain-reaction crash kills 2 people and injures 4
Published July 15, 2005
SKOKIE -- Two people died and four were injured Thursday afternoon in a three-car crash in Skokie, police said.
Two cars going east were stopped at a red light at Dempster Street and Niles Center Road about 12:20 p.m. when the driver of a third car struck the rear of the second vehicle and pushed it into the other car, said Sgt. Scott Anderson.
Anderson said police are withholding the names of the people killed until their families are notified. He said the injured victims were taken to hospitals and their conditions were not available.
"We're trying to determine what happened," Anderson said.
http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8803
Local indie music blog The Perfect Face For Radio reports the following:
"Yesterday around lunch time Doug Meis, the drummer for Exo and the Dials; John Glick, the guitarist for the Returnables; and Michael Dahlquist, the drummer for Silkworm all died in a car accident in Skokie. They were coming back to work from lunch and were hit by someone speeding while talking on a cell phone (which is now illegal in Chicago)."
http://www.theperfectfaceforradio.com/home.html
Jul. 15th, 2005 @ 05:40 pm
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bloodandfire77's journal