Seize Them! EP now on sale in various formats

Dear Internets,
At long last the Seize Them! EP (hereinafter referred to as the ST!EP) is a reality, the proof of which is that you can spend money and have one of your very own.

Those of you who like physical CDs in beautiful, collectible digipak packaging (and with a free sticker!) will want to either head over to the relevant page on the seizethem.com site, or see the sidebar on this blog for a Google Checkout link. If you prefer PayPal, we can accommodate that at the High Water Media webstore.

You hipper and anti-materialistic types might prefer to download your ephemera from the iTunes Music Store (click here: , or, again, use the link in the sidebar), or the Amazon.com MP3 Store.

In all cases the EP costs a mere $5. As Ferris Bueller says, "If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. It is so choice".

BONUS: Seize Them!'s 4.25.08 EP release show at Don Hill's is available for FREE DOWNLOAD from seizethem.com. Listen, and weep that you were not there to witness the glory. Or, if you were, it makes a nice souvenir!

---

Notice to Hillary Clinton (all others please ignore): Get out of the race. Obama has an insurmountable delegate lead unless you resort to antidemocratic massaging of "superdelegates", and Republicans will never vote for you. End the charade. Seriously. Also, your campaign behavior (and Bill's) has been disgusting and reprehensible.

vote for ST! on OurStage.com

I've entered three of our songs into competition at OurStage.com (prizes vary, but the important one is next month's contest for a slot at this year's Bonnaroo festival). The banner above will take you to Hey, Golden, but we've got Shimmery and Cleoporchcat on the site as well.

Take a minute to help us out, if you would be so kind, and we will be eternally grateful.

endings

The self-titled Seize Them! EP is finished. It goes to the pressing plant today. Discs will be in hand by April 24, just in time for our record release show on April 25, and internet e-tailers like the iTunes Music Store, Amazon, Napster, etc., will have it up for sale by early June.

A huge debt of gratitude to our mixing and mastering engineer-cum-producer Don Red for his talent and tireless effort. Thanks, also, to so many other people that the only appropriate place to mention them is in the liner notes. Look for your name.

---

Here's a theory I made up in five seconds after seeing a headline: Katie Couric is positioning herself to become Hillary Clinton's press secretary. You heard it here first, folks.

seriously, folks, we need this guy

This man must be elected president. If you haven't watched Barack Obama's recent speech, start with the first quarter of it below, and go on to the rest of it. Go ahead, seriously:



There are many noteable things here, of course, not the least of which is what Jon Stewart referred to as "talking to Americans as if they were adults". Is it as shocking to the rest of you, after all these years of utter mindlessness in the government, that you can actually watch and be enthralled by half an hour of a political speech?

The promise of an Obama presidency goes beyond the man himself to the, honestly, much more important question of the people Obama will bring into positions of power in the government. People like Samantha Power, who I mentioned in an earlier post. She's obviously on the outs for the moment, but I have no doubt she'd find a place in the Obama administration. Obama will surround himself with the people who have the worldview the United States needs to survive the early 21st century.

---

In music news, Seize Them! has finished recording all the instrument tracks for the upcoming, yet-to-be-named, EP (dropping in April!) and they are awesome. All that's left is vocal recording and a final mix. Very exciting.

I've been fiddling with the idea of a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" in a bluegrass-esque style, and last night I whipped up a proof-of-concept demo just to see if it works. It does. Listen to it here, if you're interested.

leap year rocking

Just a quick note to say that my band, Seize Them!, has posted the recording of our 2.29.08 show at Connolly's Klub 45 in Times Square to our website, seizethem.com. .mp3 and FLAC formats, as usual. Share and enjoy!

We'll be back at Connolly's on Mar. 28th, then at a Jam Solid Productions Battle of the Bands in Garwood, NJ on 4/20, then we have our EP release show at Don Hill's in TriBeCa on 4/25. Lots of live Seize Them! coming up for you to enjoy.

The EP is coming along well. Bass and drums tracking is finished, and this coming weekend will see all the guitar parts recorded. After that it's the keys and the vocals, and then we're into the final mix! Huzzah!

I don't want to have to say 'I told you so'

In my earlier post about the necessity of impeaching the current President and Vice President, I offered as part of my rationale the imperative of repudiating as much of the Bush Doctrine, its associated assaults on the Constitution, and the general MO of the American Empire as possible. The danger inherent in failing to publicly reject the illegal and reprehensible powers that the current Executive has assumed to itself is that future Presidents will have the road open to them to do far worse.

Personally, I am supporting Barack Obama in the current contest (sorry, Ralph... I voted for you twice, but you're all done), in no small part because I believe his election will send a strong message to the rest of the world that the United States, recent evidence aside, is not entirely a nation of insane, jingoistic assholes and that we might actually take the idea of behaving as a modern global civilization somewhat seriously. Obama seems most willing to engage with the world on a constructive level and, more importantly, I think he has a sincere desire for the United States to be a good-faith shepherd of its empire.

That said, my support of him is not wildly enthusiastic because despite the extra plush he'll add to the velvet glove he is still a corporatist hegemonist, albeit a kinder, gentler one.

Clinton... well, none of us have any illusions about Hillary Clinton, now do we? She is, after all, the number one recipient of campaign contributions from the defense industry, even beating out John McCain¹.

Both Clinton and Obama spend a lot of their airtime talking about 'withdrawing' from Iraq, and I've been commenting for nearly as long that as good as that sounds to our absurdity-fatigued ears it's a disingenuous statement at best and a total lie at worst. Both candidates plan to finish the mammoth diplomatic compound known as The Green Zone (a civilian contractor friend of mine who did a six-month stint in Iraq reminded me several times that there are many "green zones"), both candidates intend to leave tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq to train and advise the Iraqi military, "combat Al Qaeda" and "neutralize Iran", both candidates will leave most if not all of the military bases we've constructed there in operation, and that massive diplomatic presence is going to require an equally massive security force.

The latter part is where it gets a bit depressing. We're all aware that the vast majority of diplomatic security for Americans in Iraq is provided by private, armed military contractors like Blackwater and their ilk. My feelings about the danger that extralegal, unaccountable paramilitary forces pose to both human life and democratic governance are well known, so I don't feel the need to go into detail here.

Barack Obama has also taken a public stand that unaccountable private militaries are dangerous and undesirable, for which I laud him. Obama sponsored a bill last year which sought to create a structure for prosecuting State Department contractors who commit crimes in extraterritorial areas of operation, for one thing. However, his actions seem to be drifting away from his rhetoric on this issue and I think this is a point on which he must be taken to task.

A "senior foreign policy adviser" (who is left unnamed in the article, but is almost certainly Samantha Power) told Jeremy Scahill in a recent The Nation interview that Obama "will not 'rule out' using private security companies like Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq" and that, further, "Obama does not plan to sign on to legislation that seeks to ban the use of these forces in US war zones by January 2009"².

Now, it's true that Obama plans to increase funding for actual US Government diplomatic security forces, but the above article goes on to say that actually creating a diplomatic security force of the necessary size and training would literally take years. There are, apparently, only thirty six diplomatic security agents currently in Iraq who are actual US Government employees, as compared to Blackwater's thousand and other firms' hundreds³. If Obama's bill creating a prosecutorial structure for private contractors is not passed, and if Obama continues to refuse to support the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, we'll be left in exactly the same position we are now: with an unaccountable, extralegal Praetorian Guard.

Obama's campaign claims that we really have no good choices here and that this is an inherited problem. That it is an inherited problem is certainly true; that we have no choices is not. The obvious choice, and the one we've been led to believe we're getting, is a total withdrawal from Iraq barring the usual (read: drastically smaller than currently planned) diplomatic corps we have in all nations with whom we have relations. The United States' unwillingness to give up strategic territory that it has seized is what makes it appear that there are no choices. Obama can, and should, do better.

---

1. The Huffington Post: "Defense Industry Embraces Democrats, Hillary By Far The Favorite"
2. The Nation: "Obama's Mercenary Position"
3. Ibid.

terminator? i hardly KNOW her!

I've suddenly become ambivalent about Fox's new series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. This happened more or less at the last minute; when I started watching the fifth episode I had every intention of removing the season pass from my TiVo and turning my back on the show entirely.

Briefly, for those who are unfamiliar with the premise, I will summarize. TSCC relates the continuing adventures of perpetually menaced mother Sarah Connor and her son John, the future savior of mankind. As in the movies which began the franchise, Skynet, the AI master of the world, sends robotic assassins back through time to murder John Connor and thereby remove the primary threat to its future hegemony. The human resistance in the future is able to provide a co-opted Terminator to protect young John, but in a departure from the previous stories this Terminator is significantly technologically superior to Skynet's typical soldiers. With this Terminator's help, Sarah and John attempt to do what they can in the present day (the series branches off from established continuity between T2 and T3 and brings the characters into 2007 from 1999) to thwart Skynet.

The Terminator universe bears returning to because it has, in the words of an associate of mine, every sci-fi trope you could want. Rogue AI, a post-apocalyptic future, robots, a young hero-to-be, time travel, time-traveling robots, hallucinatory alternate realties, etc. etc. However, the only way generic signifiers are made satisfying is by wrapping them around a story which feels true enough to its premises to enfold you in the characters' lives. Battlestar Galactica, for example, succeeds wildly at this (or, at least, seems to... I've come to the series very late and, as of this writing, have seen only the miniseries plus the first seven episodes).

TSCC is struggling with this problem right now. My primary complaints with the show all seem to turn on this issue of presenting drama which feels like it has flowed believably from the initial propositions of the plot. Verisimilitude, if you will.

I have so far been unable to match the characterizations of both John and Sarah Connor that we see on the screen with their, shall we say, idiosyncratic family history. They play their past significant lip service, but it has so far failed to come across as anything more than the typical family drama teenage squabbles, albeit with the survival of humanity at stake rather than, say, going to the prom with a shady date. At first I assumed this was the angle of the series, that the Connors were going to try to be A Real Family Despite The Insanity (John, you have a robotic killing machine for a sister, now!), and I feared excessive schmaltz. It may still be heading in this direction, but I was happy to see, in the fifth episode, that we may be reprieved of this and get an Ensemble Adventure kind of show instead. Those can sometimes evolve into We're All A Family Now shows, but Buffy The Vampire Slayer teaches us that the journey can, at its best, create incredibly compelling serial drama.

Almost everything good about TSCC can be summed up by saying "Summer Glau". Granted, this role isn't a huge departure from her turn on the dear departed series Firefly, but there are good reasons Summer's the go-to actress for this particular niche. The lessons she learned from Joss Whedon are serving her well here. Her presence and, more specifically, her character, are the most absorbing aspects of the series.

"Cameron", as she is known, is the zenith of the Terminator technology we've seen so far. Her AI is vastly more capable of passing as human than previous models, and her mind can conceive slightly more nuanced strategies than pure brute force. If one accepts the Terminators as Skynet's tools for infiltrating human groups while remaining undetected, Cameron represents a highly refined product revision. I've also concocted several plausible reasons for choosing as John's protector a Terminator cloaked in an extremely attractive girlbody approximately John's age, but forgive me if I save those for my lucrative side career in slash fiction.

Summer is succeeding most completely, when the writing allows her to, in drawing the audience into the mystery of life as a hyperintelligent machine. Her uncanny ability to straddle the line between total cipher and mere alien provides hope that a Terminator can be a real, interesting, complex character.

I was curious about the shift I made during episode five from feeling the show was wasting nuggets of good ideas to a spark of hope for the future, so I ran to The Internet to see just who might be writing this thing. In what I assume is no coincidence at all, episode five is the first of those broadcast so far not to be written by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. Who, then, is working on this thing?

The IMDb lists thirteen writers¹ for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in addtion to Cameron and Hurd. Executive Producer Josh Friedman wrote Spielberg's The War of the Worlds and de Palma's The Black Dahlia, Executive Story Editors Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz are responsible for twenty episodes of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, Producer Aaron Miller coordinated post production on fourteen episodes of Firefly, Consulting Producer Natalie Chaidez comes out of NBC's Heroes, producer John Enbom put a bunch of time in on Veronica Mars and, most promisingly, co-Executive Producer Toni Graphia filled that same position on the aforementioned Battlestar Galactica for thirty-three episodes (though she's only credited on three episodes of TSCC so far). The talent pool is here for, potentially, better-than-decent serial sci-fi drama.

I'm going to keep Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on an episode-by-episode probation for now, and I sincerely hope the writing team makes a serious effort to explore what makes the Terminator premise interesting. I also hope they have time... there was a three point ratings dropoff between episodes four and five which was most likely caused by episode four being fairly craptacular, and that #3 position in its timeslot will be challenged now that the writer's strike is over.

---

¹An upcoming episode in the first season is titled "The Demon Hand" which forces me to think it's a reference to Harlan Ellsion's episode of The Outer Limits titled "Demon With A Glass Hand". Ellison was given an "acknowledgement to the works of" credit and some money by The Terminator's production company and distributor to defuse any desire on his part to sue them over similarities between the movie and his script (along with another of his Outer Limits episodes, "Soldier").

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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!

---

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.

---

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.