almost done with this

But...re: the Episcopal House of Bishop's half-a-loaf response to the Anglican Communion ultimatum. I understand where the HOB is coming from, and it's probably true that no other path was possible from their perspective. But still, if the Rabbinical Assembly can manage to leave it up to the congregation without quite so much pandering to the bigots in their midst, surely the Episcopal Church can do the same.

Jeffords Schori had this to say: "Not everyone is 100 percent happy with every word in this document, but we believe we have found a place that all of us can stand together -- at the foot of the cross."

In her defense, that is a good place to be if you owe Jesus an apology.

Retract, dude! Retract.

Guess I underestimated the Episcopal House of Bishops when I wrote about this last time. I was (justifiably, I think) disappointed with Bishop Kathleen Jefferts Schori for her statements recommending that Episcopalians acquiesce to the ultimatum set by the Anglican Communion (in brief: if you don't stop ordaining gay priests and performing gay marriages by September 30th, 2007, you can't fully participate in the Church). In reading my post again, the condemnations of Bishop Schori seem a little harsh. I reread her statement and I understand why she gave it, since the decision regarding a response to the Anglican primates isn't entirely hers, and she was trying to reconcile all kinds of factions in her church.

But still: what you want from a progressive leader at a moment like that is affirmation, not equivocation. i.e. "Gay and lesbian Christians are welcome in our church, and that's our interpretation of Jesus's teachings. We will do everything we can to make sure they remain welcome, and though we recognize this constitutes a minority opinion amongst the Anglican Communion, we will try to persuade the primates that we can preserve the integrity of the church without taking the drastic measures they've suggested." Bam, simple as that.

Regardless, the good news is that it looks like the Episcopal House of Bishops is not going to respond to the primates' request, even following the House of Bishops' September 20th meeting in New Orleans. It would be nice for the HoB meeting to produce a statement asserting the rights of Episcopal parishes to ordain gay priests and marry gay couples, but the truth is that the existence of those rights is more important than asserting them. If declining to respond allows the Episcopal church to continue its work and remain within the Anglican Communion (at least until the next ultimatum), then that's probably better for all concerned -- especially if, as one would hope, avoiding a schism would bring the Anglican Communion as a whole closer to tolerating gay congregants.

Anyway. Episcopal House of Bishops: more badass than I thought.

(title ref)

...ain't no place for a poor boy like me

I'm in sunny, shiny, happy, plastic, recirculated, overblown, incomprehensible, unsustainable Las Vegas working on the hotel/casino contract fights here. Lucky for me, I love my job and any place is a good place to beat up on big companies.

But man. The food situation is a mess, and every day I feel socially irresponsible just by waking up.

I miss my home.

Blogging (as you've probably already seen) suspended till I get back.

(title help)

labor & boycotting Israel

Following efforts by British unions to boycott Israeli goods and imports, the Jewish newspaper Forward ran an editorial about the U.S. labor movement 's "angry rise in defense of the Jewish state."

I'm kind of conflicted here. Not because I support the boycott -- the ubiquitous amnesiac comparisons to South African anti-apartheid boycotts drive me crazy, and the strategy is flawed if not outright inhumane. No, I'm conflicted because on one hand, the editorial reminds readers (both Jewish and not) of how crucial a role Jews play in the labor movement, and how crucial a role unions play in creating the just and decent society envisioned in the Torah. On the other hand, the piece slides a little too effortlessly between generalizations about supporting Israel and generalizations about what constitute progressive values.

Here's what I liked about it:

It points out that left-wing doesn't necessarily mean anti-Israel, and that there's no reason for people who support Israeli sovereignty to make that assumption in dealing with the American left. These distinctions need to be made more often, because the kind of moral absolutism that informs leftist ideology encourages them (us?) to assume a consensus about who is and is not an "oppressor" or a "victim." I've certainly encountered the expectation that people in the labor movement should "support Palestine" and be angry at some amorphous combination of Zionism and Israel (it's never quite clear which). And I can't blame them for assuming we all agree on the Middle East, since most of the coalitions on the left rely on the same kinds of pre-established consensus: HMOs are bad, the Iraq war is a bloody, greedy mistake, corporations are anti-union, rich neighborhoods hate homeless people, etc. By the way, "supporting Palestine" among leftists usually means "opposing Israel," and, I'm equally disappointed to say, vice versa. So it's good to have the balancing viewpoint highlighted by the Forward, though the labor movement remains divided on this issue. Or, divided to the extent that anyone considers it during the normal course of his/her campaign work, which, I have to say, I hope for the sake of the near-50 million people living without health insurance is an extremely rare occurrence.

I loved the description of Jews in the labor movement, harkening back to the early days of the the Forward and recalling just how many Jews lead America's unions. It's a good reminder that Jews in America are not uniformly wealthy, well-educated bankers, jewelers, economists, and professors -- we also "work for a living" and try to help others do the same. And obviously, it's rare for a major newspaper to refer to unions as "the single largest force for social justice and progressive values within American society." So that was nice to read.

Now what I didn't like so much:

Though the article stayed fairly clear of ideological issues in the Middle East conflict, it did present to the reader an subconscious (yet perhaps deliberate) conclusion, using a twist on the transitive property. If American labor is "pro-Israel," and American labor holds a truly progressive worldview, then true progressives should support Israel. After all, unions are the single largest force for social justice and progressive values in American society. If those progressive folks support Israel, you should too. Maybe that's a stretch, maybe not, but the editorial's narrative leads in that direction, and as I read it I wondered which of the articles subsidiary conclusions the Forward cares about the most, and what their aim was in writing an editorial that attempts to connect/unify pro-Israel and pro-union sentiments.

Personally, I don't believe that a truly progressive worldview -- one focused on the preservation of human rights, equality of opportunity, and a fair distribution of wealth throughout society -- would ever produce a pro/anti-type judgment on Middle East politics. In fact, the parts of the Jewish Labor Committee letter that appealed most to me were the paragraphs explaining why this kind of boycott doesn't work, and why the more humanitarian and rational course is to pro-actively support those organizations and leaders in both societies that are working towards peace and solidarity. Given the political volatility and addiction to violence that characterize discourse and action in the region, I'm increasingly of the opinion that a surge of progressive activity in the labor/social movements of both Israel and Palestine will be necessary to achieve any sustainable, enduring peace. And I wish the Forward had highlighted that aspect of the JLC statement a little more. As it was, the editorial kind of claimed the American labor movement for the pro-Israelites, which was neither accurate (I know 'cause I work in it), true to the JLC statement itself, or productive to the Jewish community's understanding of unions.

As for the deep connection between Jews and the labor movement, it always gratifies me to see that history preserved and (when appropriate) exalted. But, as the editorial rightly observes, that connection has frayed and somewhat disappeared over time. Now, I'm no expert on how the Jewish community makes decisions, or why it has evolved in the ways it has. I don't know enough Jewish history or have enough experience dealing with the most powerful Jewish institutions. But it doesn't seem to me that perceiving anti-Israel sentiment amongst unions would really explain why most Jews -- along with most Americans -- have little use for the labor movement.

The real reason is that most American Jews have embraced the American versions of capitalism, government, international trade, immigration, and neo-liberal economics. Our community has done well through those means, and with the exception of that progressive Jewish minority, we haven't done much to challenge them. So I'm very glad to see the Forward arguing that "guaranteeing general welfare" and "dispensing equal justice" are/should be core Jewish values and points of connection with the labor movement, but most synagogues shrink from active political participation in the community, let alone the kind of courageously progressive stands that we need and expect from progressive organizations. Of course, the same could be said for the moribund sections of the labor movement. But it's worth pointing out that American unions haven't just "declined" due to their own inaction or obsolescence. They've been abandoned by the American people, Jews included.

we can bring it back

Last night I saw Sonic Youth perform the entirety of Daydream Nation. I almost didn't even get there. Having ridden BART across the bay up to Berkeley, and walked from Downtown across the entire campus to the Greek Theater, the last bit running because I was late, I arrived at the venue and there was no show. The way the theater is positioned from the North, you can't really see anything till you arrive, so it probably looked pretty funny to passersby when I jogged determinedly up to a completely deserted complex, then stopped and stared in horror and, I have to admit, some tiny degree of relief. I wasn't sure I could sit through all of Daydream Nation -- as cathartic and revelatory as some of it can be, the album still contains periods of prolonged boredom punctuated by Lee Ranaldo pretending that melody's gone out of style. What happened was, I'd bought tickets for the following night's show, at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.

So I called Camille, and -- brief note: this is why I got married -- she tolerated a few minutes of whining, followed by a few minutes of fake, forced commentary like "Nevermind, it's not that big a deal" to cover my brokenheartedness, before finally getting on Craigslist and persuading me to walk over to the Berkeley Community Theater, where the show was actually taking place. It's actually about a block from the BART station, so not a huge sacrifice. Anyway, I bought a scalped ticket for $5 above face, displaying a phenomenal lack of haggling ability when, having gotten the guy to agree to face value (don't like to pay less, refuse to pay more), I realized I didn't have change and just gave him two twenties instead of insisting. I was so relieved. The only time I've been any good at haggling was when I was in Senegal, where it's just basic practice, but it didn't stick. Although I got pretty good at eating fishbones and unidentified beef chunks there too, so I guess I left a lot of skills behind.

The show was awesome. I actually have very little to say about it. a Kim and Kim and Kim and Kim was hot despite looking (as always) slightly reanimated. I hadn't realized how much of a "Hip Dad" vibe Lee Ranaldo puts out, but that was also entertaining. Thurston Moore is ageless and godlike, as Sleater-Kinney recognized awhile ago. The album felt more bombastic live, in part because the Berkeley Community Theater doesn't have the best sound system for a waves-of-noise band like Sonic Youth. Kind of the same problem with the Roots when we saw them there in 1999. "Teen Age Riot," "The Sprawl," "Total Trash," and "Silver Rocket" were incredible. Hearing Daydream Nation from start to finish reminded me how much of what I love in music these days came in some part from the bracing novelty of that album. I'm very glad I got a chance to see them do this somewhat unique tour.

Re: The Bridge is Over (10 Responses)

Slate says Youtube is killing the hiphop beef, and endangering the genre as a whole. While I like Hua Hsu's observation that beefing over Youtube is just plain lame, the analysis (such as it is) deserves some more careful attention. Hsu's arguing that, instead of putting creative energy and effort into dis tracks, like they used to, hiphop artists just release crappy videos with no thought given to care or quality. Well, the conclusion certainly rings true, but there are a few flaws here:

1) Dis tracks are, on average, not very good. They don't tend to be well-crafted, incisive commentaries on their target. The beef between Nas and Jay-Z produced two really good tracks, maybe not even that depending on your tolerance for homophobia and for sampling the Doors. The rest were pretty "LAAAaaaaaaaame," and that particular beef occurred between two fairly gifted lyricists. What do you expect from writers like 50 Cent or Cam'ron? The fact that Youtube beefs involve weak, self-centered, poorly-conceived video comebacks should surprise no-one who's bought a mixtape or listened to Hot 97.

2) Beef isn't at the heart of hiphop, and the end of highly-publicized beefs on record will have no effect on the quality or the future of the music. People seem to confuse beefs with battling -- a legitimately crucial element to hiphop. We can trot out Shan/KRS, LL Cool J/Everyone, Biggie/Pac, but the truth is that the best hiphop doesn't come from beefs. Entertaining songs, album hype, identity politics? Sure. But at the core, hiphop is about projecting yourself, not critiquing someone else (unless you're applying your worldview to them (cf The Coup or "Pussy Galore"). Ask someone to tell you about The Chronic, they aren't going to mention the Eazy-E disses, because those moments are the least interesting and most forgettable on the album. Did beefing with Wrecks 'n' Effect put A Tribe Called Quest at the top of their game? How about Eminem or Tupac? Dis tracks usually end up the least memorable parts of an MC's catalogue, even the good ones. Obviously there are exceptions, but treating hiphop beefs as anything more than manufactured hype betrays the real nature of the genre.

3) The examples in this article are terrible. Were we really expecting a masterpiece from Fiddy? Or Cam'ron? Or Puff Daddy? We're worried because these guys didn't put any effort into releasing a quality product? Mainstream hiphop tends towards cookie-cutter, homogenously dance-able crap that leaves absolutely no taste in your mouth. Youtube is not the problem here.

How can you tell if a multinational media conglomerate has been using your computer?

So, Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur has stirred up quite a bit of cyberspace dust recently, dividing the (fairly small) world of people who care about the cultural future of the web into the reactionaries (Keen et al), the evangelists (Tim O'Reilly et al), and everyone in the middle (me et al) who just want to watch the Pride of Arizona Marching Band perform "Fitter Happier" and remind Alex Trebek that he's sitting on a goldmine.

I can't decide what I'm more sick of: the webvangelists who can't stop telling us how Web 2.0 will revolutionize every aspect of human thought and culture, or the weblitists who've deluded themselves into thinking that Youtube is to blame for the collapsing standards of Western cultural discourse.

Keen has a disturbing tendency to red-bait, and a fundamentally skewed concept of the purpose of culture and its attendant industries. But I have to admit to sharing some of his panic at the explosion of Web 2.0, albeit for different reasons. Keen views the combination of narcissism, amateurism, and an infinite multiplicity of messages as a culturally corrosive force, quite akin to communism, in his framing. Those things don't bother me so much, since people were amateur narcissists long before Google, and using market strategies to discourage a culture of self-obsession seems bizarre and way off the mark.

What scares me is not a cultural collapse, or a cultural revolution, but a cultural grey-out. (check out Bruno Nettl's The Study of Ethnomusicology for the origin of the term)

Why? Because, as a recent Bear Stearns report confirms, the long tail is growing and user-generated content (UGC) is here to stay. Which means there's money in it. Which means it will aggregate and consolidate. Which means it will blend, desaturate, and flatten out. Don't believe me? Turn on the radio, or watch ABC for a day, or strike up a conversation about politics with someone at a bar. Or, for that matter, get on MySpace. Grey-out, be it rhetorical, aesthetic, ethical, or whatever, has become the norm in mainstream media and discourse, for all the reasons we're familiar with. It tends to follow market activity and, where a desire to consume can be monetized, it bleaches out all but the most palatable and deliverable hues.

There's no doubt that UGC exposes us to fresh and wonderful ways of looking at the world -- made fresh and wonderful primarily by their lack of resemblance to the stifling similarity of mainstream culture. It marks an incredible (if somewhat narcissistic and/or voyeuristic) sea change in our culture. But Bear Stearns knows what they're talking about, and when they anticipate the emergence of new "aggregation vehicles" to deliver this new form of content, they're also anticipating a structuralization and consolidation of UGC into consumable product for wider and wider swaths of the buying population. We might see Youtube as a friendly "aggregation vehicle" right now, with a vast library and a friendly tagging system to sort it, but how's eBay treating us these days? What about Starbucks? That's where the world of UGC is headed, facilitated in large part by the technology and the applied ideology of Web 2.0. Here I'm making a distinction between the anti-corporate, democratic, localized, user-focused ideals professed by Web 2.0 proponents and the reality of Web 2.0's existence in the marketplace -- MySpace (aka Murdoch), Youtube (aka Google), Flickr (aka Yahoo!), and Second Life (aka...well, Second Life. It corporatized itself).

Plus, though corporations play their crucial rule in grey-out, they are not the only actors, nor the most important. The bulk of the responsibility falls on us. I'm afraid that, to some degree, I support Andrew Keen's assessment of human beings as cultural agents. We're great at it, but also we totally suck. When our agency as consumers intersects with our agency as cultural practitioners on a massive scale, the former tends to win out. This, incidentally, explains why for me the struggle is to activate people as economic agents, where their consumption, labor, and values can clash together to a productive end. Ukelele videos and second-life avatars may teach us about ourselves by opening new paradigms of human culture and interaction, but ultimately Web 2.0 is permeated and controlled by consumption. The cost of the product happens to be (more or less) free at the moment, but the basic transaction remains the same. Folks who like to make money are attracted to transactions. They especially love short, repetitive, autonomic, pleasant and convenient transactions, because they get the most bang per buck. UGC fits that mold perfectly.

Is the greyout of Web 2.0 any more worrisome or destructive than the grey-out of FM radio? Not really. But the infuriating paradox in this case is that Web 2.0 is designed to connect you with your special niche in the long tail, giving you respite from the blandness of the rest of the curve. In the old days of Web 1.0 and bulletin boards, the simple effort of finding one's special spot on the tail transformed the action from one of consumption to one of identity formation. The people who made their way to the pre-net equivalent of melodicas.com weren't just melodica consumers, they were melodica people. They occupied their niche, protected it, strengthened it, grew it. The rich culture of thought and activity that surrounded each of these niches contributed to an overall cultural diversity that could give America both the Muppets and 2 Live Crew. When finding your niche becomes an easy, repetitive, temporarily-satisfying task, you become a consumer and markets get interested.

And your niche starts going grey.

(oh, and some help with the title.)

lolpolitics

As usual, I'm about five months behind the bandwagon, but before this hyper-meme explodes beyond all recognition I thought I'd throw my effort in. No real way to explain the lol___ phenomenon, so you'll just have to see it for yourself. When you know that I cut that link list down to four from about, 20, you'll get a better sense of what I did last night while hopped up on Sudafed 12-hour.

Here's mine.

Sort of helps our image?

The LA Times reported earlier this week on gang members entering the building trades to gain a secure economic future. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill human interest story, as they go, but a great primer for anyone trying to understand how some unions allowed their industry power to evaporate, and how they've responded.

There's some important subtext here as well. On the positive side, the story offers excellent evidence of how the fight to win and maintain high labor standards isn't about greed -- it's about opportunity, and those opportunities can create real change in peoples' lives. I wish the story had been a little more upfront about the fact that the non-union contractors who were eating up the jobs were also paying low wages with no benefits & protections. So the building trades' efforts to regain some of that share of the workforce, while perhaps motivated by self-interest, does drive the standard up and make the jobs available to gang members and undocumented workers good ones...which in turn can help strengthen and stabilize communities.

On the negative side, the article glosses over the fact that non-union contractors and the existence of a poor, available workforce were not shocking surprises to the building trades or anyone associated with the LA construction industry. The switch from 80% union density to 20% was not some magical, overnight occurrence impossible to predict or combat. It happened because the building trades were unable or unwilling to organize the workforce and the employers that flooded the industry. The article suggests that racial issues and insularity may have played a part, but I think complacency is probably more to blame than anything else. What's remarkable is the degree to which some unions will tolerate having their industry power and density stripped from them, as long as what's left of their piece of the pie still feeds their existing membership fairly well. When they get down to around 20% density (or perhaps much sooner) they start to see a real erosion of standards and loss of guaranteed security for their own membership.

If you're paying monthly dues to an organization and have authorized it as your exclusive bargaining agent, you'd hope for a little more foresight. I'm happy to say that this erosion hasn't taken place to the same degree in every sector -- due to a combination of circumstance, foresight, and outright resistance. Others have responded aggressively and are making small gains. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a union that hasn't struggled with density problems in some form.

baseball? world bank?

What will Richard Levin's next career be? I always hoped he'd end up the baseball commissioner, under the rationale that a PC neo-liberal economist with no real sympathy or sensitivity to the damage done by market "failures" couldn't do too much damage in the MLB. Head of the World Bank is exactly the kind of position where Mr. Levin's impractical and dehumanized economic views would produce terrible outcomes while appearing (as at Yale) to be progressive in the economic sense.

I respect Levin as a theorist, in so far as his work (what I've read of it) takes a considered and methodical approach to navigating the intersections of political philosophy and economic reality. But his concept of what we're doing on this planet leaves a lot to be desired, which is why his version of democracy -- and, for that matter, his interpretation of what actually constitutes market economics -- differs so significantly from people like me. Being a such a careful thinker, I don't believe he ignores the pervasive and destructive influence of capital and the complicity of the state in ceding control. I think he accepts, perhaps welcomes the situation we're in, and constructs his ideas about markets and society with our current situation as a given.

Anyway, that doesn't make him much different than any of his many, many compatriots in the Academy or the international development community, but nevertheless I'm hoping that, to score PR points, Bush may appoint someone less loyal with more of a humanitarian record. Or, as I said before, I'd pretty much settle for someone with actual development experience. A lot to ask, though.

Updates

A few additions to the sidebar:

Joe Mathlete Explains Todays Marmaduke: Pretty self-explanatory. Hilariously funny and sarcastic, though.

The Fart Party: Written and drawn by Julia Wertz, also known as the cute lady who works at Cafe Abir, our old coffeeshop. The Fart Party is like what you dream a minicomic will be.

Classical Convert: Totally entertaining diary/web resource of a guy about my age who discovered "classical" music a few years ago and is evangelizing like crazy. It gives a terrific look into how and why people from our generation can connect with a whole range of music not easily available or legible to us. I enjoy it particularly for its lack of concern about how one is "supposed" to approach the Western classical cannon. He treats Beethoven and Berg like college radio treats new bands, which ends up refreshing and insightful.

Malcolm Gladwell: I was pretty hesitant to put this up here, what with Gladwell having delivered a keynote speech on the other side of the San Francisco Hilton picket line last year, but the truth is he's a brilliant, accessible writer and I read pretty much all his stuff, so...

Wired editor Chris Anderson's Long Tail Blog, which elaborates on the subject of his book. I haven't read the book, but I did read his early article and I read the blog, so...you know. Reading this blog is extremely reassuring for people with phobias about the consolidation of culture industries. It's not so reassuring for people with phobias about cultural greyout. I have both, so it's a mixed bag, but fascinating.

Edge.org, homepage of the Edge Foundation, which is dedicated to blowing your mind. Not good if you're feeling particularly politically sensitive, since with few exceptions these folks are above all that. And the influence of Richard Dawkins also makes it a fairly hostile environment for religious thought, though not for spiritual ideas. I arrived at this site via their World Question Center, which is endlessly enlightening, frustrating, and entertaining in equal measure.

Five (Easy) Pieces part 5

Parmegiani - La Creation du Monde

Don't buy this. I don't even know why I'm recommending it, except to bring a close to this preposterous exercise. Okay, maybe you should buy it. There's absolutely no other way to hear it, and people should hear it, because it's unlike anything humans ever really experience. It's sort of an amoeba's-eye view of geological time, from the first intercellular communications through World War III. Maybe not. If you want to read my actual, considered opinion on this utterly remarkable piece, you can. Recording available online from my beloved Aquarius Records here.

Five (Easy) Pieces part 4

Steve Reich. Really any of his pieces will do, you almost can't go wrong here if you like rhythm, timbre, harmony -- basically if you enjoy anything related to the process of hearing sounds you will like his work. Some of Reich's work is more formalist, like the tape pieces and the counterpoint compositions, and some is pretty sprawling (You Are Variations, City Life, Desert Music). Music for 18 Musicians or Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ both offer good starting places. Then you can look back towards the instrumental phase pieces or forward to Different Trains, which has my vote as the greatest composition after WWII.

If all you've heard of "minimalism" is Phillip Glass, you might feel overwhelmed by its inhumanity, its clinical disregard for physiology and sense. Steve Reich will disabuse you of that right away.

This is the recording you want of Music for 18 Musicians, and here's a great recording of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ.

For Different Trains, Kronos recorded the undisputed benchmark.

Five (Easy) Pieces part 3

John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano

These pieces for "prepared piano" contrast starkly with his one work for "unprepared piano," in which the piano's just sitting there peacefully in a room until the performer lunges in from behind and dropkicks it. People who have only a casual acquaintance with John Cage couldn't really be blamed for believing that last sentence. Prepared piano refers augmenting, dampening, or otherwise messing with the strings inside to produce different timbres and attacks. I think the best un-theoretical way to describe it is that Cage builds his own alternate piano universe, possessing a rare and strange cosmos of sounds, melody, harmony, and rhythm. Not at all to be listened to on the regular, but not to be missed...one of those records that is sometimes the only thing. I usually put it on when I need to hear something but I can't stand the thought of all the emotional and theoretical baggage that comes with, say, TV on the Radio or Orchestra Baobab. I like (but don't own) this version. I do own this version, also very satisfying. Okay, "satisfying" might not be the word. What's that thing where after you experience something you feel kind of hollow and young and slightly hopeless? It's like that. People forget that music (and art) don't always have to make you feel good, or better, or sad, or guilty. That's like always drinking water, milk, or soda. There's more stuff out there to experience, some of it pretty complex.

ribot = badass

New York's remarkable experimental music venue, Tonic, closed its doors on Friday. Just the most recent in a long, sad list of music venues that don't book Fall Out Boy or charge $50/ticket to close due to skyrocketing rent. Everyone's not going to go to Avery Fisher to hear exciting new performers, and every exciting new performer isn't going to play there. So when the Tonics and CBGBs of the world get squeezed out by condo towers, and when the music itself is improvised/collaborated on/composed specifically for events at the venue, that music quite literally disappears.

Marc Ribot kept playing till the cops shut the place down, and got arrested because he is, in addition to being a truly gifted and bizarre guitarist, a straight badass motherfucker.

Hmm? What's that? What did I do for the world of music today?

Oh. While I was riding the BART to work, I composed a song called "Get Me A Donut," which, as should be patently obvious, has no verses.

Five (Easy) Pieces part 2

(Sorry for the retroactive title edit -- took me a while to land on the correct title)

Osvaldo Golijov -- Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind: There's like an unwritten rule for composers that states: If you're going to write a clarinet quintet, you have to write it such that any prospective reviewer cannot avoid using the word "lyrical." So this piece, for clarinet and string quartet, fits the mold pretty well. It's actually for B-flat, A, C, and Bass Clarinet with string quartet, so there's all kinds of weeping, keening, shrieking, and squawking from the different sizes of black wooden tube. It makes a great fit for the subject matter, a meditation on the writings and the mystical posture of Isaac the Blind, a 12th-century French Kabbalist rabbi who was, among other things, blind and batshit insane. The piece draws on Jewish prayer melodies, klezmer tunes, and cantorial vocal style. It completely mesmerizes, even on recording. Kronos Quartet recorded it with my idol David Krakauer, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet also recorded it with Todd Palmer -- also a fantastic recording.

Five (Easy) Pieces

aka "Five Pieces of New Music You Might Actually Like and Listen To Voluntarily."

Modern music doesn't suck. Contemporary composers are actually trying very hard to connect with an audience that has in large part abandoned the "classical" arena for popular forms. In some cases, all that's required is the same flexibility and open ears you need to appreciate TV on the Radio or Mogwai or whoever. You get my point, maybe. In that spirit, here goes:

Frederick Rzewski--Coming Together/Attica: These two pieces function together as Rzewski's commentary on Attica prison riots and their aftermath. I first heard Coming Together in high school, and it knocked me out of my chair. Rzewski sets an excerpt from a letter by Attica prisoner Sam Melville, who died during the riots. The poetic force comes mainly from Rzewski's "squaring" process, which gradually aggregates the text sentence by sentence, starting from the beginning, culminating with the full text, then "washing away" the words sentence by sentence from the start. The internal, circular connections between the different sentiments, and the ways that different ideas and emotions ground various sections of the piece, make it anything but repetitive. Attica, meanwhile, offers the other side of the coin, with a single sentence from released inmate Richard X Clark. When asked how it felt to put Attica behind him, he simply said "Attica is in front of me." Surprisingly, Rzewski's sets this fairly bleak pronouncement against a surging, cautiously hopeful melodic sequence that sort of devastates with its beauty and ultimate lack of hope. That's not a very lucid description. Here's an excellent early recording of both pieces, with some other stuff as well. Here's the Eighth Blackbird take on Coming Together.

Popularity Contest (vol. 2)

Just to keep us all up to date, the Association for Dressings and Sauces announced their Dressing of the Year for 2006.

One of the biggest differences between me now and me two years ago is my healthy, growing obsession with cooking and food. This choice, like their last few (not that I'm following...), makes no sense to anyone who's not in the dressing industry. "Asiago Peppercorn...for that delicious, nostalgic taste that brings you back to your college dorm salad bar." No thanks.

Here are my recommendations, based on comparative sampling:

Mendocino Mustard: Camille hates mustard. It's like:
Me: Camille, quick word association, okay? "Karl Rove."
Camille: [no hesitation] Mustard.

But she eats this brand. She actually requests it, all embarassed-like. Mendocino Mustard is the shit. Suggested on a Rudy's hamburger bun with olive oil mayo, green lettuce, a Quorn fake chicken patty, and Morningstar Farms fakon. It gives a powerfully convincing feel of Jack in the Box except with really tasty hot & sweet mustard. My favorite customer quote from their site: "A refrigerator without Mendocino Mustard is not a refrigerator." That's some pretty powerful negation. Like, this mustard challenges refrigerator identity politics. Close second favorite: "I've never wanted to get up in the middle of the night and stick my finger in a mustard jar until now."

Pain is Good Hot Sauce: Despite the name, this hot sauce is actually easier to eat than normal hot sauce due to the richness of flavor. It's hot, but not punishingly hot, and there's this other flavor of sweet and tangy that totally toasts my nibbles.* Also the packaging is recyclable and the design is so killer that it wards off some of the "packaged food pangs" I sometimes get when filling up my cart. They've got a Keebler-esque production team made up of Bubba, Mo, GeeGee, Blondie, Juanita, and Buckwheat (seriously). Original Juan, which produces the Pain is Good line, also makes a line called Old Fart Baked Beans. For a host reasons, both legitimate and not, Camille will never, ever, EVER buy or allow me to buy a product with the word "fart" in its name.

Daddy Sam's BBQ: This website is ridiculous. I apologize for linking to it. The sauce is great though -- it's thoroughly replaced Sweet Baby Ray's as my go-to sauce for tater tots, poached egg sandwiches, and chili.

What about salad dressing, you ask? Fuck store-bought salad dressing. If I need corn syrup, sodium benzoate and dehydrated onions I know where to find them. I dress myself; I dress my salad. Okay, getting kind of sassy. Obviously I didn't get much sleep last night.


*This is slang is so new I only just now noticed the stripes. Trying it out.

that settles...something

It's hard to make heads or tails out of the recent decision by the California Nurses Association to affiliate with the AFL-CIO. It doesn't help that this news isn't getting a whole lot of attention, even though it could have fairly profound consequences for both healthcare organizing and healthcare policy going forward. Not having a cohesive opinion on this, I'll just throw out some stuff to consider.

- The CNA has historically prided itself on its independence, touting its ability to rise above labor politics, bureaucracy, etc. to advocate aggressively on behalf of nurses and patients. The independence also allowed the union to maintain a sometimes-criticized purity in terms of its membership -- only nurses. Ask a PCA or an animal care tech. how nurses view other folks "lower" down the hospital chain and you'll get an idea what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that purity's necessarily good or bad, nor is it unique to the CNA among AFL affiliates, but nurses will have to know that most of their per capita dues are going outside the profession and outside the hospital.

- Will this limit their remarkable political effectiveness? Being subsumed by the bureaucracy (and sluggishness) of AFL-CIO politics could weaken and slow down anyone. If done smartly, the added AFL-CIO resources could make the CNA an even bigger player in both statewide and national politics. We'll see.

- Is this going to help or hurt their national organizing ambitions? I think their independence and RN focus generally helped them organize in other states, but I don't know much about their campaigns. I don't totally see why someone would want to join the AFL-CIO right now, since -- apart from the newly-joined CNA -- very few of the affiliated unions are actually growing or attempting to do so in a strategic manner. In my admittedly biased view, the most dynamic and promising national organizing campaigns are being conducted by Change to Win affiliates: Justice for Janitors, Hotel Workers Rising, the Teamsters Port Campaign, Walmart, etc. And many of the natural allies for those campaigns are represented by (or in bargaining relationships with) SEIU in the healthcare industry. CNA and SIEU may still have some animus left over despite their partnership, but joint organizing within the same federation would certainly solve a lot more raiding problems than getting on opposite sides.

- Is the AFL-CIO's position on healthcare reform enough of a reason to affiliate? I actually think this makes some good sense. The AFL will strengthen its position by adding thousands of union nurses and experienced healthcare advocates, and the CNA will probably get more influence in what happens nationally than they previously had.

Is this getting boring for anyone else? It's boring me. I'm out.

a legitimate improvement to national security

I'm speaking here, of course, about Congress's decision to grant organizing rights to 45,000 airport screeners. Can we all agree that, of the hundreds of millions of working Americans, these people should be on the list of Top Ten Professions Who We Really Need Be Happy On The Job? I'm going to skip over the obvious reasons for this, and I'll refrain from ranting about Mitch McConnell's remarks, because what did we expect?, and same goes for Richard Burr's comically inept and insulting attempt at a soundbite, but I will say this:

Why is it so damn hard for our elected officials to just say "Collective bargaining is good. It improves operations, increases retention, and protects workers." Meanwhile, all the reassurances about what the union won't be able to do (strike, bargain for pay, etc.) don't do anything to make me feel safer. A weak union doesn't protect anyone.

I know this is well-trod ground. I think it's worth a reminder that, as with many jobs, DHS employees make sacrifices and enter into obligations as part of their work. No union has the authority or the power to curtail the TSA from doing what it needs to do in an emergency, and plenty of collective bargaining agreements contain whole sections devoted to those exceptional circumstances. Similarly, all the TSA needs to do to avoid an emergency labor problem is employ enough people and treat them well enough to ensure proper staffing, training, etc.

To my mind, this debate exposes the equally well-trod ground of how inadequate the labor standards are for DHS employees, and the shameful hypocrisy of Congress and the Bush Administration in trying to get national security on the cheap, at the expense of our safety as well as the lives of the people charged with protecting us.

Okay, enough of that.