is this for real?

The New York State chapter of the National Organization for Women has posted a rather hyperbolic and certainly outlandish press release on their website condemning Senator Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama:

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, and the Family and Medical Leave Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). "They" are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women's money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future.

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation- to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who “know what’s best for us.

http://www.nownys.com/pr_2008/pr_012808.html

I have a hard time believing this is legit.

First, if a political endorsement is "the ultimate betrayal" of women, I have some very serious problems with NOW-NY's grasp of history. Groundless hyperbole doesn't serve anyone, people. Also, with the litany of complaints leveled against Kennedy in that opening paragraph, one is moved to wonder how NOW-NY could even be surprised about this so-called "betrayal".

Secondly, I find it offensive that NOW-NY is somehow conflating support of Hillary Clinton's presidential bid with generalized support for women. Hillary Clinton represents all women? Is this simply because she is a woman? I doubt anyone can make a credible argument that support for a particular male candidate somehow expresses support for Men In General. But here we are, being told in no uncertain terms that not supporting Hillary is the "abandonment" of women.

Thirdly, NOW-NY clumsily calls out all the left groups who aren't supporting Hillary and declares it's because they're all simply sexist. I say "clumsily" because the sentence actually reads "He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton". Who is Hillary Clinton. Perhaps NOW-NY is not aware that Hillary Clinton is not terribly popular among the activist left because of her politics. Hillary is a pro-corporate American hegemonist (like, granted, pretty much all the presidential candidates). It's insane to expect the left wing to be happy about Hillary Clinton simply because she's a woman. And, also, isn't singling out gender as the trump-card ur-characteristic the exact kind of sexism that NOW theoretically fights against?

Finally, the last paragraph doesn't even parse properly, and this is one of the reasons I'm suspicious that the press release is a fake. What I think is being said here is that Kennedy's endorsement is demonstrative of the second-class status of women in American politics. But what is all this inane crap about women having an "obligation" to "...elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman..."? An obligation? Really? Would NOW-NY feel "obliged" to elect Ann Coulter if she were running, simply because she's a woman? Somehow I doubt it.

What all of this makes me wonder is how NOW-NY feels about black politicians, male and female, who may endorse Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Are they also handing down the "ultimate betrayal" of women? Or do they magically get a free pass because of their skin color?

Come on, NOW-New York State. You can't really stand behind this, can you?

a national new year's resolution: impeachment by the Ides

The single most important issue in the 2008 campaign for the presidency is that of executive power. I am not intending hyperbole, here. The current executive administration has aggrandized a whole raft of illegal, anticonstitutional powers to itself which must be officially and legally repudiated before they're passed on to the next president.

The Boston Globe submitted a questionnaire on this issue to the current slate of candidates in both parties, and here are the answers they submitted. For the most part, especially on the Democratic side, the candidates reject the blatantly anticonstitutional and tyrannical behavior of the current executive administration. Mitt Romney provides some horrifying answers and has, as of now, alerted us to the fact that a Romney administration would alter the presidency even further and twist it ever closer to outright monarchy.

It's a good thing that these questions have been presented to the candidates, but a soundbite answer during campaign season is hardly enough to ensure the continuation of our nominally republican form of government. Two things are required: a detailed and extensive list of the current administration's violations of the Constitution and a definitive declaration that these assumed powers are now and forever unacceptable.

The best way I can think of to achieve these goals is the impeachment of (ideally) both the president and the vice president. Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein summarizes the various reasons why impeachment is both necessary and proper in this article from October of 2006, which I strongly suggest you read. Short of impeachment, I can think of nothing that will create the necessary legal precedent to outlaw the egregious expansion of executive authority we've seen in the last eight years, and which Dick Cheney has spent most of his political career attempting to achieve.

The stumbling block now is political will in Congress. Despite the garish obviousness of the executive branch's anticonstitutional behavior, there is no serious impeachment movement in Congress. It may be unpleasant, but it is the Constitutional duty of the Congress to check the power of the executive branch even if that means accusing a sitting administration of high crimes and misdemeanors and setting it on trial before the Senate. That this has not happened is especially baffling given the nearly unprecedented lack of approval the American public has shown for both the president and the vice president.

As such, I suggest that Congress choose March 15th, the Ides of March, to begin impeachment proceedings against both George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. Thankfully we have no need of daggers to rid ourselves of tyrants anymore (one hopes); the papercut suits us much better. Impeachment by the Ides! Start printing the posters now.

DDDP - Day 48, pgs. 459-678 FINIS

Well, that took longer than I expected. I only averaged 15.29 pages/day given my occasional brief hiatuses. Hiati? Breaks.

So.

During a mild griping session about Demons recently, I was gently reminded that a novel is not a film. This remark, while somewhat insulting (literary criticism majors... what else could one expect?), is nevertheless true and criticism of Demons must be relevant to the idiom. However, basic tenets of storytelling have applied since at least Aristotle's time and never mind that there are scores of people who've built academic and artistic careers around flaunting every one of these rules.

But was Dostoevsky's aim with Demons to be a storyteller? In short, did he intend to entertain? I can't think that he did, at least in the overall sense. Portions of the book are, in fact, entertaining. I quite enjoyed the Pyotr Stepanovich character's manipulations, rabble-rousing and general skulduggery. The high school age kids in the political club made me laugh a couple of times with their rhetoric and head-butting. Fedka the Convict was well-written and perhaps the most distinctive character of them all. The latter portion of Book III is actually paced quite briskly and the scenes of mayhem are vivid and engaging. I found Kirillov's suicide, and the scene immediately preceeding, quite riveting.

The characters feel flat because they aren't characters; they're Dostoevsky's embodiment of various ideas he wishes to explore. This can work, if the ideas are themselves interesting. But here is the great flaw in the novel: they aren't. What we're given are caricatures of extremist (and, in the case of Pyotr Stepanovich, entirely hypocritical) thought. Extremism tends to parody itself, of course, so perhaps Fyodor can't be entirely blamed for that. But one of my cardinal rules of fiction is that that which is true is not automatically interesting, hence the craft required to produce a novel/film/poem/etc. which really grabs an audience.

The ideas are uninteresting because they're facile and clichéd. I'm saying this with the benefit (or detriment, I suppose) of exposure to over 140 years of post-Demons writing in which many of these same themes and ideas have been explored, so I am, of course, both jaded and biased. But what really galls me is that Dostoevsky knew people like those he skewers here. He was part of leftist political groups. He was sent to Siberia for political crimes! And while he succeeds admirably in poking fun at and satirizing his former comrades his desire to point out the evil of their ideas devolves them all into shadow puppets. Why couldn't we have an honest look at real people who maybe believe certain things along these lines? Why couldn't we live with them and discover why they felt this way, how they can be easily corrupted by power-seeking megalomaniacs? No, instead, let's have a ponderous thesis on how the abandonment of God creates misery.

Another stumbling block is nothing lesser or greater than time itself. Dostoevsky spends a huge amount of Demons parodizing the works of his contemporaries and even with all the footnotes the value of this is simply lost on those many of us who aren't deeply familiar with nineteenth century Russian literature. Perhaps Dostoevsky's original audience could be expected to point at a passage and exclaim "OH SNAP, TURGENEV!" (or whatever the equivalent may have been), but it's all lost on me.

In summary, Demons is not a bad book. There's quite a lot of beautiful writing in it, for one thing. But it's deeply flawed to my eye. I would be very interested in hearing the perspective of an academic who holds this book up to be a great example of literature and hear what they think is so important about it. I, in my ignorance, can't simply claim there's nothing to it... but I am moved to ask what "it" may be.

intertubes championship online edition 4: mystical crystal arena

I've recently returned from a Thanksgiving holiday excursion to Annandale, VA, where production work continued on the Everything, Kansas documentary. The footage looks pretty great and our hosts were excellent interview subjects so my pleasure with the progress of the project continues to grow.

Seize Them! is scheduled to start recording drums for our upcoming EP this weekend. We'll be traveling out to Rene's stepfather's house in wildest New Jersey and transforming the drum room there into a recording studio. We hope to get three to five drum tracks laid down and then we'll take it from there. Exciting! I can't wait to have some decent-sounding recordings.

To support this project I bought myself an inexpensive large-diaphragm condenser microphone (the MXL V63M) primarily for vocal recording, but it's also useful for guitars both acoustic and electric. I've really only tested it to make sure it survived shipping, but I hope to actually record something with it in the next day or two. My fantasy is to start a Demo-A-Day project in which I come up with at least one part of a new song every day... this is not likely to happen, but we'll see. Last night I wrote a pretty fun soul-style bassline that may become something bigger.

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R.U. Sirius is proposing the creation of an Open Source political party organized around antiauthoritarian lines. Looks fairly interesting and I'll be curious to see how it develops. Will they address the obsolescence of the nation-state?

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The WGA strike is still on, and more power to them. Their demands are entirely reasonable (how shocking that a content creator should be paid when a parent company uses that content to sell advertising!), though it's a little ironic to me that the state of labor unions in this country has collapsed so completely that the only unions left with any real power are those populated by sports stars and creative brainworkers. Here's hoping, however, that my below-the-line friends out there aren't losing too much work over this.

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If you're interested in one of the most ridiculous "linking policies" I've ever seen, head on over to the relevant page on the Vancouver 2010 Olympics site. I'm pretty sure absolutely zero of this is even vaguely legally enforceable, and my favorite part I will excerpt here (thereby violating their rule about not reposting any material they don't provide as part of their RSS feed! OH NOES!): "The posting or creation of any link to the VANOC Website signifies that you have read this Linking Policy and agree to abide by the terms and conditions contained herein." Wow! So any of us can "agree" to a laughably overbroad policy without even knowing what that policy is! Nice try, VANOC intellectual property lawyers. Next time why not stick with a nice, simple instruction that VANOC trademarks are not to be used without permission? Easier to not look like a total idiot that way.

DDDP - Day 29, pgs. 257-458 + 682-714

Finally made my way to the end of Part 2. The extra pages noted in the title comprise the Appendix which was, according to the foreword, originally intended to be the last chapter of Part 2. Having read it, I'm fairly amazed that it wasn't kept in the original printing.

Part 2 is a large step up from Part 1 in sheer entertainment value, though some may consider that to be damning with faint praise. The game is afoot, as it were, with plots and manipulations forming. The focus shifts to Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky and Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin (the fact that I could type those names without referring to the text is indicative of how frequently they come up within it), and theirs is an interesting relationship that seems to be half antagonism and half comradeship. Stepan himself has receded almost entirely to the background following a brief scene with Varvara Petrovna and she, too, has been silent for some time now.

The highlight for me, personally, was chapter 7, titled "With Our People", in which Nikolai and Pyotr attend a meeting of the local revolutionaries. From my limited experience with left-leaning activist groups it was spot on in lampooning the general sense of passion and lefter-than-thou sniping which prevails. That Dostoevsky was prescient of murderous "socialist" tyrants like Stalin, Mao and others with his character of Shigalyov was interesting to me. The revelation which follows soon after that Pyotr is in no way a socialist but rather a bloodthirsty seeker after power leads me to believe that ol' Fyodor had probably encountered a few people just like him in his day. While Demons is supposedly a condemnation of revolutionary thought, it so far seems that what he is damning is the tendency for authoritarians to adopt any guise or superficial ideology necessary in order to conquer their fellow men.

Especially intriguing to me was the mention of Proudhon by the unnamed lame teacher present at the gathering who suggests that the "despotic and fantastic pre-resolutions of the problem" ('the problem' being what to do with the hopelessly irredeemable masses... Shigalyov suggests slavery while others suggest wholesale slaughter) that Shigalyov suggests are shared by Proudhon. Proudhon was one of the early anarchist writers and the theorist who split the International Working Men's Association between his ideas and those of Karl Marx primarily over the problem of the source of revolution. Marx expected a revolution of the working class to be led by the intelligentsia, academics, and other middle-to-upper-class (and maybe beyond) socialists while Proudhon believed firmly that only the working class could lead itself in rebellion (unless I'm conflating my memories of his writing with those of Bakunin... they were similar, regardless). He also believed in peaceful revolution, which is what raised my eyebrow relative to his theoretical association with Shigalyov. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, I highly recommend reading Proudhon as he was among the original proponents and theoreticians of anarchism and the basic ideas and concepts have yet, I believe, to be better distilled and described.

Finally, the appendix. The missing last chapter. I said I was amazed that it had been left out of the original printing, and I certainly am. That chapter goes a long way to filling in pretty much every gap there is in the picture of Nikolai Stavrogin's character and I'm curious to see what might be revealed in Part 3 that made the publisher feel it was unnecessary.

Onward.

DDDP - Day 13, pgs. 125-256

No, I didn't read all those pages in one day. 19.6 pages/day isn't a great average but, as we keep telling ourselves, it's not a competition.

The book has gotten MUCH more interesting now that Part 1 is over. Part 2 immediately thrusts us into the plotting and scheming of the two sons, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky. Uneasy alliances seem to be the order of the day, with vague mentions of a "society" that's out to kill those who've left it and undisguised tension between supposed comrades. That people are being used, and using one another, is clear. Precisely to what ends we do not yet know, though the assumption is some sort of radical political upheaval. I'm interested to see how a supposedly socialist overthrow is going to be led by an upperclass serfmaster if it happens at all. Stavrogin's allegiances are merely hinted at thus far, or spoken about in a vague past tense, so it could go in several directions.

An excellent scene, I thought, between Shatov and Stavrogin with a heartbreaking portrayal of Shatov as a man who feels betrayed by his idol and mentor and yet cannot break from his devotion. It managed to be both expository and a character illustration, which is something of an accomplishment.

The main thing I'm curious about is whether and how the entirety of Part 1 will turn out to be necessary to the story. My assumption is that our future understanding of what's happening will turn on our detailed education in the fine complexities of our characters' social structure.

you kids turn that racket down!

photo by Ethan Beigel

We didn't go on until late, my friends. After 12:30AM sometime. I could barely hear my guitar, but the sound was pretty darned good out in the audience. Adam Fanning, the promoter and bartender, had to start asking us to turn down 'round about the time we started up Drinking Song which I found really distracting. Apparently some upstairs neighbor called to complain. I don't envy anyone who lives above a rock club.

One completely new song in the set, The Pixies' "Dig for Fire", and one resurrection of an old tune called Great Unknown. It's all available for download over on seizethem.com

If you're in NYC the weekend before Christmas, come down to R Bar on the Bowery for our show on December 22 at 7PM. Our first weekend gig!

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Sorry for the break in Dostoevsky postings; the band stuff has put a brief crimp in my reading.

Dethpakt - Day 3 (pgs. 80-124)

Finished Part 1, Chapter 3, which was primarily concerned with the social intrigue in Stepan's social circle; matchmaking, paranoia about past indiscretion and future infidelity. A new character, the engineer Alexei Nilych Kirillov, has appeared, and seems to be a potential source of disruption and upheaval. His theories about suicide appear to serve both as illustrative of his nihilism (Nilych... cute, no?) and possible foreshadowing either in literal terms or more metaphorically, in line with his assertion that to fearlessly commit suicide is to become God. Though, of course, he like Stepan claims to be athiest.

It's difficult at this point for me to imagine what relevance a lot of the events of this chapter may have to the story later on. Certainly there is a deepening of mistrust and ulterior motive between the various characters. Seeds are being planted which will surely produce discord among the ranks of either the political club or the town's aristocracy. Stepan is revealed to be even more ridiculous and contemptible than we've previously seen and it's clear that Anonymous Chronicler (though slightly less anonymous now) has no desire, in the future of his retelling, anyway, to present Stepan in any kind of sympathetic light. Stepan is at the mercy of his ego, still wishing to be seen as important, influential and dangerous, and is tortured by both unrequited love (in the form of the domineering Varvara) and inappropriate/impossible ardor (for his former student Praskovya Ivanovna Drozdov). Is it this latter infatuation with Praskovya that drives a wedge between Stepan and the AC? AC has revealed his desire to be "introduced" to Praskovya, even though he realizes an actual pairing with her is impossible.

Anyway, I'm hoping that Dostoevsky will soon move on from putting the pieces on the board and begin the actual game. Then again, we're still in the first act and perhaps the slow build of anticipation is entirely what Fyodor is intending to achieve here.

Dethpakt - Day 1 (pgs. 1-79)

It often takes me a while to adjust to the pace of storytelling in literature of the 19th century (am I falsely implying that I read a lot of it?). My attention wandered quite a bit during most of the first chapter of Part 1. Some of this I blame on my modern reading habits of riding the subway and listening to music, but even when I was holed up in the Quiet Reading Zone of my bedroom I had trouble focusing much until Chapter 2, wherein we get beyond heavily footnoted scene-setting and enter the territory of sparsely-footnoted scene-setting.

Footnotes are a necessary evil, I suppose, when reading fiction from a time and place too distant for casual cultural references to survive the journey. But they still interrupt my rhythm and pull me out of the world Dostoevsky is painstakingly building.

We've spent a good deal of time so far getting to know who Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky is through the eyes of the Anonymous Chronicler (acting as Stepan's confidant and our snoop) and while the inner character of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin is still being revealed (or, rather, her machinations become more layered) we have certainly been drawn a detailed portrait of their relationship to each other. It is also clear, however, that this is going to continue to evolve.

As of now I'm theorizing that the Anonymous Chronicler is remaining as such out of fear of persecution for having been involved with the liberal Skvoreshniki political club, but it's hard to say anything definitive while we're still somewhere in the middle of Act 1. AC certainly has a bemused contempt for Stepan, Varvara and the club members and I'm curious to see how that may have developed.

It's unlikely I'll get to post tomorrow about my further reading due to my attendance at a Rock & Roll performance in the evening-time.

Dostoevsky's "Demons" Dethpakt - The Beginning

My interfriends and I like to fancy ourselves literary types, so on occasion we challenge one another to read a classic, "difficult" work of literature. Last time around, about six months ago, it was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I opted out of that particular dethpakt since I had A: already read the book and B: just begun reading Pynchon's later novel Mason & Dixon. If I recall correctly, the GRDP, as it was known, saw a completion rate under 50%.

"What will we read next?" came the query several days ago. Things were suggested, James Joyce rejected. Then Ellen, our resident Library Scientist, submitted Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Demons for consideration and lo, agreements were made. The pakt begins November 1.

The basic rules are: read the book or die in the attempt, and write about your progress somewhere on the interblog. The idea is to finish within a month, but as there is no system of enforcement beyond ridicule and no prize to be had other than satisfaction and cultural stimulation (and perhaps some feelings of superiority), well, just read the thing. If you want. Or don't. Or DIE.

I'll be posting regular updates on my progress-thus-far and thoughts about the book here in this very space. These and other dethpakters' musings are being aggregated at dethpakt.bangmoney.org for convenience and posterity.

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On my commute today I thought I'd get somewhat acquainted with the book by reading the foreword and translator's note. The edition I'm reading is the Vintage Classics pressing from 1995, translated by husband and wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is widely considered to be the authoritative version.

In the foreword Pevear provides a rough outline of the novel, summarizes the themes involved, draws brief sketches of the main characters and ruminates on the meaning of the title (which had originally been translated as The Possessed... in fact, the Wikipedia entry for Demons is still filed under this title). Pevear explains that the eponymous demons are the "foreign ideas" of liberalism, socialism, nihilism, anarchism, existentialism, etc., that have possessed the revolutionary characters in the novel and driven them to commit terrible deeds against themselves and others. Dostoevsky, Pevear elucidates, was, by the time he wrote this novel, very much committed to the Slavophil way of thinking; that of respect for God (in the guise of the Russian Orthodox Church) and Mother Russia. This, despite (or because of) Dostoevsky's mock-execution and decade-long imprisonment at the will of the Tsar due to revolutionary activity in the 1840s.

Pevear seems himself convinced that these demons are responsible for many of the horrors of the twentieth century, laying, for example, the atrocities of Stalin at the feet of Communist ideology rather than the despotism of Stalin's regime (perhaps the two are inseparable in his mind... one wonders if he blames the current atrocities in Iraq on Capitalism, or the current regime in Washington, D.C.). Whether these are his actual opinions or merely his defense of Dostoevsky is not clear to me at this time. As someone with sympathy to the "radical left" mode of thought I'm curious to see what I think of Dostoevsky's take on the virulence of these particular memes.

Onward, my droogs.

doodily ding dong DETHKLOK

So guess what? Brendon Small (along with Mike Keneally, Bryan Beller & Gene Hoglan) is TAKING DETHKLOK ON TOUR.
Unfortunately for me they're not playing New York. But here's where they are playing:

10/29 Albuquerque (UNM)
10/31 Las Vegas (UNLV)
11/1 Los Angeles (UCLA)
11/2 Berkeley, CA (UC Berkeley)
11/5 Fort Collins, CO (CSU)
11/7 Minneapolis (U Minneapolis)
11/8 Vermillion, SD (USD)
11/11 Boulder, CO (UC Boulder)
11/13 Carbondale, IL
11/14 Madison, WI (UW)
11/17 Lawrence, KS (KU)
11/18 Chicago (Northwestern)

It looks like all of these shows are free (gratis) "students only" gigs at various universities. But here's hoping there's more to come. Further info (a little) on the Adult Swim Presents site and Mike Keneally's website.

the days are just packed

When Halloween falls on a Wednesday, the Saturday beforehand is generally pressed into service as Party Day and, of course, everyone you probably know is hosting something different since all time is quickly becoming a simultaneity. So what's going on down in New York?

Well, first of all, there's a non-Halloween event those of you who are into this "music" thing should check out: the Laura Thomas Band is playing at the slick new venue R Bar on Thursday the 25th at 9PM. In addition to LTB, your $10 buys you the rock stylings of four other bands, and the show kicks off at 7. Lee Sobel of Lo-Fi Entertainment is handling the booking at R Bar these days, so you can be pretty sure you'll have a grand ol' time.

Saturday night hosts two parties in particular that I feel moved to hype at you.

Midnight Kitchen is throwing their benefit for the Surfrider Foundation, the Psycho Beach Blowout, at Southpaw in Brooklyn. The theme is rockabilly surf-horror burlesque, and advance tickets ($15) buy you admission to an unbeatable lineup of entertainment featuring Detroit Cobras, Sasquatch and the Sickabillys, The Tarantinos and modern burlesque legend Angie Pontani! Wear a costume, unless you're too cool for that kind of thing. For my part, I'm providing the video backdrops for the event so you'd better believe I'll be there.

Deli Magazine, Tekserve and the excellent Bella Noir are hosting a Halloween party at The Delancey. They've got four bands lined up, in addition to themselves (Morning Theft, Seasick, Champollion and Femme Generation[all the way from TEH CANADIA]), as well as DJ Nora K. Wear a costume, they've got $3 PBRs all night (free from 11 to midnight), and it's $7 to get in.

WHAT WILL YOU CHOOSE?

get back

Well! I survived the trip to Portland, and it was an excellent time. Thanks to the denizens of the Saluthaus for their extreme hospitality, and ditto to Ariel Marsh and Peter.

Jeff and I shot a bunch of great footage for the documentary, which, it appears, may now have the working title of Everything, Kansas. I'm really happy with how things are shaping up, and the overall themes are really coming out in the interviews. Next up is a trip down to Virginia for Thanksgiving to continue the process.

Seize Them!'s show at The Underscore last week went fairly well... other than poor René being forced to crawl his car into the city for 2.5 hours due to a rainstorm and then the both of us forgetting his cymbal bag at home. Thankfully, the band who played before us was kind enough to lend their cymbals for our show. 50% of the other bands scheduled to play cancelled, and there was very nearly zero audience other than the bartender, the sound guy, two dudes from the earlier band and a couple of our die-hard hangers-on. Tough room. But we played it. The show is available for free download, as usual, from seizethem.com. Click the picture to take you directly to the relevant part of the site:

Next up, Seize Them! rocks The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg on Nov. 7 along with Don Red and The Affected Affections.
Additionally, I've created a profile on ReverbNation for Seize Them!, so you can enjoy even more ST! presence by checking us out here.

I've submitted the paperwork to New York State to create High Water Media, LLC, which will be the business entity overseeing most of my creative output from here on out. A long life to High Water Media! Check in with the blog over there for occasional updates on what High Water is up to.

victory!

According to Steve Hyden of The Onion, our current cover-song-of-choice, CCR's "Ramble Tamble", is The Most Rockin' Song of All Time. Who knew we had such good taste?

Oh right... we did.

You can, of course, hear several versions of it if you download our free shows from seizethem.com.

Greetings, by the way, from lovely Portland, OR, where Jeff and I are continuing work on our documentary film project.

Seize Them! 9.8.07 free download available

Seize Them!'s 9.8.07 show from our house party is now available for free download in .mp3 and FLAC formats from seizethem.com. Share and enjoy.

This show was a lot of fun and I think we rocked it, some sloppiness aside. And I broke my D string about a minute and a half into Ramble Tamble, so the rest of the song has a bit of a noisy vibe which fits in perfectly with the audible shout of "Sonic Youth didn't need to tune!" provided by my friend-in-the-audience Zach.

i do good work

Last week I completed work on Carolyn Sills' (of Boss Tweed fame) video entry for Showtime's Homegrown Humor contest. I give you Little Brooklyn Country Boxes for your enjoyment:


PLEASE go check it out on its page on the Homegrown Humor site, and leave us supportive comments and a high rating. It doesn't make a difference in the actual contest, but it sure feels good.

Supposedly the semifinalists are chosen today. I'm trying to not care too much.

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And guess what? ANOTHER of my travel photos has been picked up by Schmap for one of their travel guides. Budapest, this time, and the photo actually has me in it!

I should mention that this photo was actually taken by my good friend Cristian Villalobos.
And here it is, in situ, on Schmap's site. It's easy to be popular when you work for free!

televisual interWOW

Something like that.
The Emmy Awards were aired last night. I think I was most amused by Fox's "dump sphere"... the awkward cutaway of a black globe hanging above the audience that they used whenever they needed to dump what was being said on stage. Sure, they COULD have used a simple shot of the audience but why not make it incredibly obvious that you're censoring your broadcast? Now we'll never know what joke Ray Romano made about Kelsey Grammer and/or his new show, or what the end of Sally Field's sentence was after she started making an antiwar statement or... I think there was at least one more dump but I can't recall what it was. Anyway, nice one, Fox. Did you stick the intern on the censoring duty or something?

But seriously, folks: congratulations to the winners. First and foremost, congratulations to my friend Glenn Clements for his part in bringing home an Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series Emmy for The Daily Show, and also to my ex-professor Sam Pollard for his Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming award (shared with Geeta Gandbhir and Nancy Novack), and his Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking award, both for When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

I was happy to see 30 Rock take home the award for Outstanding Comedy Series, which it deserved, and I doubt that happens to a series in its first season very often. Al Gore now has an Emmy, too, for his work with Current TV. It's nice to see the Emmys pay some respect to internet-based video entertainment but, honestly, I don't know anyone watching or using Current.

I'm sure it'll shock most of you to know that I'm more interested in the less glamorous awards won by the crews of these programs. Rome, one of my favorite recent programs, won a cinematography award as well as art direction and hair styling. Congrats to David Rogers and Dean Holland for their well-deserved editing award for their work on The Office. I'd congratulate Elena Maganini on her editing win for Dexter, but I haven't gotten around to watching the series yet.

Finally, the last words I ever have to say about Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. I received some snarky comments a while back claiming that Studio 60... MUST be a good show because the pilot episode won some Canadian TV award. I disagreed, of course. That commenter must take some pleasure in the fact that the show was nominated for a few Emmys: Outstanding Casting For A Drama Series, Outstanding Cinematography For A Single-camera Series, Outstanding Directing For A Drama Series, and Outstanding Guest Actor In A Drama Series (twice, and John Goodman won, kudos to him). I can't argue with the cinematography nod, as the level of craft was certainly exceptional there. The directing nod was for the pilot, again. The pilot of that series was undoubtedly its best episode, and congratulations to Thomas Schlamme, but the pilot is not a series and the series was crap. As far as the one award the show did win... well, what does it say about a series that gained its highest recognition for a guest appearance by a respected actor?

Thus endeth my Emmy-related logorrhea.

i'll sleep someday

The good people at Schmap have decided to include another one of my photos in their Schmap Guides. This time it's the Prague Schmap, and they've used this picture of St. Vitus Cathedral:

Here it is, incorporated into the actual guide.

Saturday night we had one of our three-floor parties at the house, and it went quite well. DJ Porkcube opened the festivities with a two-hour-long set of booty-shakers (which you, lucky dog, can download and enjoy), then Mindspray set up in the top-floor apartment and rocked the hip and the hop for a while to the enjoyment of many. Our ex-roommate Josh, who was tragically killed by a hit and run driver a couple of years ago, used to be part of Mindspray so it was cool to have them in the house, as it were, again. Seize Them! also has a song about Josh, so there was an interesting synchronicity there.

Speaking of the band, we rocked it hard. I think we played really well, and I'm bummed that my carefully-set up recording system crapped out on me about thirty seconds into the first song. Worked fine during rehearsal, so I'm doubly annoyed. But the people who could stand to be in the basement while we played seemed to enjoy themselves, and we got a lot of good compliments. We tried out a new song which doesn't have any lyrics yet but certainly will by the time we play The Underscore next month.

No pictures from the party have come into my possession as yet.

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Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron have teamed up for a short film to promote Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The basic thesis, as expressed in the short embedded below, seems to be that there is a parallel between the methods used by interrogators to shock prisoners into childlike states and corporatist exploitation of crisis to gain popular acceptance for Milton Friedman-style capitalist "reforms". You may or may not enjoy the book, but this short is great:

my, the world certainly is full of things!

Producer-in-extraordinary Degoao (also of OUCH fame) hosted a dee-lightful event at The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg last night.

DJ Porkcube started it all off with a set full of frenchy electro beats which, had a critical mass of people been achieved, would certainly have had everybody grooving.

Don Red got up on stage next to treat us with a rare solo acoustic set of old favorites backed by new Donner-produced rhythm tracks (featuring jm). A priceless moment when a girl emerged from the bathroom, having missed Don's intro to the next song, and turned around in surprise to gawp at the stage when the first lyric, "I want to fuck you 'til you die", roared from the PA. Don, as he reminded us, is not afraid to swear in song titles.

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And then there's Ronald Jenkees and his squinty style. There's not much I can say about him that isn't said by the following youtube clip, so I'll leave it at that other than thanking the folks at BoingBoing for pointing him out.

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Hey, guess what! In the late fifties the US Air Force was funding probably-highly-unethical and distasteful research into torture! What a SURPRISE! Anyway, here's a link to a never-reprinted but widely cited book outlining the results of said research titled The Manipulation of Human Behavior. Sorry that it's formatted as an html file for some inexplicable reason, but that's how I received it and that is how I pass it along to you. Enjoy? GET SOME (Torture Manual)

nobody understands the Irish quite like the Japanese

It's been a big couple of weeks here in Infidelia.

Last weekend my creative partner Jeff and I went down to Cary, North Carolina to shoot more footage for our feature documentary project. Our hosts/subjects were Will and Leah Woods, many thanks to them, and we shot about 7.5 hours (times two cameras) of coverage. On the pile it goes with the Tedd and Christa material from February and May. Next up is Columbus Day in Portland, Oregon, and it should be great.

While we were gone the Seize Them! stickers arrived. They look like this:

The good people at High Water Media have already begun strategically placing the Seize Them! sigil all over town. For example:

The stickers will be on sale at shows for $1, but I imagine we'll give away or stick up far more than we'll ever sell.

Speaking of the band, Seize Them! will be rockin' a house party at The Jam Factory (aka home) on September 8. Short notice, but we're hoping people turn up for a good time. Our upstairs neighbor Justin has been working on his VJing skills and said something about employing a distribution amplifier and a bunch of cable to spread his videoicty down to our floor.

For what it's worth (which is, apparently, a good deal to promoters), the band now has 1,502 "friends" on myspace (also 2110 "plays"... you have to listen to 1/4 of a track to have it counted as a "listen"). I've already been exposed to some rad Japanese bands like The Croagh Patrick (Dropkick Murphy's-like Irish rock with japanese lyrics), and Sitha (electro / new-wavey stuff). Invite us over for a tour, y'all!

This Wednesday the 5th the man that is the incredible Degoao is curating a booty-shaker at The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg featuring Don Red and DJ Porkcube. Recommended highly. By me.