30 January 2011

Peter Joseph says the Zeitgeist Movement is scientific, rational, and based on things that would work in the real world… then he proposes building cities shaped like perfect circles. So, why are existing cities not laid out like circles?

Because they have adapted to make use of the uneven real world terrain of wherever they were founded.  Joseph’s inability to recognize this about cities is just one example of his preference for designing a future in his head over looking at what’s actually been successful. If this stuff were actually tried, and I don’t think that’s really the goal, it would be a disaster.

Peter Joseph is a 30-something marimba player who’s dabbled in advertising and in finance.  It’s an unadvertised fact that the first Zeitgeist film began as reel footage alongside a percussion performance in NYC.  Joseph’s great error is in letting his aesthetic preferences determine his political positions. I can understand this psychological dynamic and might have taken a Zeitgeist turn myself… i.e. by using the metaphorical imagery of Overwhelm to construct an “Overwhelm” political-propaganda video, rope in activist-minded listeners, etc.  But that would be unfair to both rational philosophical debate and to art itself.

“I Sold My Soul Just to Make a Record, Dipshit, and Then You Bought One”

Today Thom Yorke said, with that glee he sometimes betrays, that it is “only a matter of time — months rather than years — before the music business establishment completely folds.”  He has advised young musicians like myself to release records on their own, rather than through the major labels – lest they rope themselves to a “sinking ship.” [Come hear At Peace At Last at GrantValdes.com!] I don’t know about his timeline, but, morally speaking, Mr. Yorke is right.

I have almost never heard excellent music coming from an artist who was “trying to get signed.”  That’s just my empirical report.  In the age of the dense, stupid, major label monolith, there has grown a vast underclass of what American economists might call “discouraged composers.”  I have heard reels of remarkable, gorgeous, insightful, intricate music by these various unknowns: friends of friends, friends of lovers, lovers.  They are talented – more talented than any A&R rep – and precisely because they are not writing down to a market, they can freely offer up “to the eyes of God” (to quote Charles Murray admiring the anonymous cathedral masons of the Middle Ages.)  I count myself as a discouraged composer, albeit one with the financial resources and self-regard needed to keep writing anyway.

Do you not believe me that these small and perfectly good composers exist?  Seven examples from the last few years:

“Rose Garden” by Ghost Family

“Blurter” by Mouseheart Factor

“Faults of Family” by Alicia Amiri

“Welcome to Repeat” by Headless Body in a Topless Bar

“Very Well” by Discourse on Method

“Goodbye to That One” by Go Slowpoke

“Whitetown” by Kerry Kallberg

I believe that an artist needs to be spiritually and psychologically free in order to produce.  If he leaves that headspace, the muse leaves him.  If enough artists cannot live free, due to political repression, prescription medication, moral decadence, or whatever, a pallor falls over society as a whole.  In the repressive fiefdom of the major labels, at least, artistry has all but shriveled into the shadows.  It is difficult to overstate the contempt with which this squalid industry views its musicians.  Witness the new comedy Get Him to the Greek, in which our hero, a jellyfish henchman of label honcho P. Diddy, escorts a broken and heroin-addled singer to a venue.  That’s the whole depressing plot.  Funny!  I get it!  Artists are lost without handlers to ship them from point A to point B!  Creators can’t create after all!  Don’t worry though, our protagonist is real, he’s one of the good ones, because he name-checks the Pixies, Radiohead, and the Mars Volta, and in the end leaves Los Angeles to move to “East Seattle” – where the “grunge” came from.

Was it acceptable for Michael Jackson to die with several hundred unreleased songs sitting in a vault controlled by a vengeful Sony?

Is it acceptable for Britney Spears, an idol to millions of girls, to glitch out on television like some kind of Project Monarch victim?  Is she free?

Is it acceptable that some overeager-to-please young artists who “sold their souls just to make a record,” to paraphrase Maynard James Keenan, may drown with the major labels’ sinking ship?  Yes, that’d be fine.

“The Opposite of Wiretapping”

or

Seven Drunk Americans Discuss the Government

One: “…You can only have an open dialogue when it’s economic and when you’re doing it in practice.  If you’re just saying to the public, ‘Hey, we’re having an open dialogue ’cause we’re at a barbecue and we’re drinking beer.’ [Adopts Texan accent:] ‘Hello, ‘dem liberals!  Bring ‘em on!  Come on out to the barbecue!’  Blah, blah, blah.   And then they go to their office and they sign away the liberal agenda.  They just say, ‘Fuck you.’  And they just build corporations down the highway, as far as you can see.  And then they make criminals out of regular people.  And then they let illegal aliens come in and work.  But they don’t, you know, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t get benefits, they’re treated like criminals.  A lot of that stuff goes on, behind the scenes, but then it’s the Alamo, and it’s the barbecue, and this kind of culture that drives this underbelly that’s really nasty because they don’t protect the borders.

“If you get pulled over – You were talking about getting pulled over in North Texas?  Never go… I don’t know who told you to go with a bag of weed in that area of Texas!”

Two: “But it was vacuum-sealed, so even if they had dogs, they probably wouldn’t have smelled that shit.”

One: “I got pulled over in Childress, which is North of Dallas, when I was coming back from Portland.  And they just pulled me over because my hair was a little long and I was driving an older car.  And they just pulled me over and had me take everything out of the car and put it back.”

Three: “They can’t legally do that.”

“That’s Why I’ve Got #1 on the Back of My Range”

I’ve discovered that one thing actually becomes harder to do on the internet the further it spreads to every country, town, and iPhone in the world:  Discussing issues of national importance in the exclusive company of one’s countrymen.

Don’t roll your eyes.  The citizenry of my country needs to talk through some sensitive issues right now, and it’s difficult to do it while these Brits, Indians, New Zealanders, Spaniards, Brazilians, and Frenchmen keep crowding around with their own opinions.    Ironically, this point hit home for me while I was reading through comments on articles about Balloon Boy, which is not exactly an “issue of national importance.”  The flint strike came in the form of this man’s derision of the Heene family:

What’s wrong with this picture?  Something about the accent… something about the flag… He’s Australian.  He’s used the Balloon Boy story as an opportunity to belittle an American culture that he probably has no experience of firsthand, and in the process he’s inspired a number of Americans to leave derisive comments about the US as well:

“Dude.. people have been thinking we Americans are assholes and idiots since LONG before this stunt was pulled.. this just helps prove that we think we’re so great.. but in reality, we’re lazy bitchy assholes who think they’re better than everyone else.”

“America is FULL of a bunch of total zeroes. I lost faith in this nation 10 years ago, we are the biggest whiners on the planet and everyone CRIES about everything, if this one is offended if that one, I think we are a joke to the world and should be and I am an American.”

While the Heene parents hardly represent the best the US has to offer, I do believe that the more deeply one understands American culture, the more empathetic one will feel toward them.  Do I mean that they’re role models or that they should be above the law?  No.  But can’t you see  some of your American self in them?  What are Americans, for better and for worse?  We’re inventors. We’re hypomanic.  We’re entrepreneurs.  We don’t look down on someone because he only has a high school education, and we don’t fault him for trying to make money.  We marry immigrants.  We honor a family’s right to live by its own beliefs, however strange, without harassment by the community or the government.  Yes, some of us are charlatans.  We’re a wee bit prone to violence.  We still faintly remember what it took to get ahead in the Wild West – we’re constantly reminded by the immensity of the landscape.  Richard Heene inserted a preamble to his kids’ inflammatory “Not Pussified” music video that mocked

“The modern day teachings of human beings living a superficial lifestyle of consumerism, obesity, and overprotectiveness for themselves and their children (put them in a corner for ‘Time Out’) in an effort to gain as many supporters as possible to believe that they are better than everyone else around them.”

Heene’s preamble should be recognizable as a classically American attack on unearned claims of status (“better than everyone else”), idleness (“obesity”), timidity (“overprotectiveness”), and collectivism (“as many supporters as possible”).   And what if he is a tempestuous, grandiose maniac who fits poorly into the social hierarchy  –like Hunter S. Thompson?  Like Nikola Tesla?  Like Ayn Rand?  Like Alexander Hamilton?  Like John Brown?  Like James Brown? — unleashing the creative potential of such souls is something America does best!  People say he’s raising his sons to be brats.  It’s too soon to tell how they’ll turn out once life inevitably checks their wildness (note that I said “life” – not CPS), but after seeing these kids fearlessly chase down hurricanes, I know one thing:  He’s not raising serfs.

We are a nation that has lost basic self-confidence, one that is apologizing most for what should uniquely define us, and one that is looking to others for affirmation.  No outside force can help us regain this confidence.  A pro-American consensus will probably never emerge on the multinational web, if only because those sites that cater to a multinational audience will tend to become larger, more visible, and more influential than those that don’t.  It takes courage to accept the burden of being unique. Americans didn’t invent this country by global consensus…. Somewhat more specifically, we invented this country as a big “back the hell off” to European aristocrats.

But, pray tell, what does Bono think of all this?  Does he think my vision of the United States lacks the universal appeal of All That You Can’t Leave Behind?  Does he think my country should be “rebooted” like a malfunctioning plaything, like an iPod?  In his guest op-ed yesterday in the New York Times, Bono wrote of how “we” need to “reboot” and “rebrand” America.  His pronouncement was trailed by a singalong chorus of repentant Americans and foreigners who have been dutifully ”observing” our country and are now ready to present their findings.  Paul Hewson can and inevitably will say what he wants.  But when it comes to the internet-wide debate over what’s wrong with the US and how to correct it, we Americans need to become a little more discerning; some people deserve a place at the table, while others do not and should be relegated to the periphery.   I propose a few basic tests:  Does the bloviator in question live here?  Does he pay taxes here?  Does he plan on dying here?  If not, it’s our right – no, our distinctly American pleasure – to tell him to back the hell off.

“Soft Sheets… What’s This About?”

A theme of this blog is how the internet may well be enabling the greatest cultural revolution since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. I’ll start by paying tribute to a very small and seemingly insignificant corner of  the web:  The Captcha space at the bottom of your screen, which asks you to manually type in a short phrase to confirm that you’re not a spamming piece of software.  The understated poetry of Captcha reflects the linguistic abundance of the web as a whole.  Words can now be stacked and arranged in new ways.  Yes, our attention spans are dwindling and we’re losing touch with The Canon (only temporarily, I predict), but we are more surrounded by words than ever, and this is good for the human brain.  Somewhere, a programmer decided to make the most of his Captcha-writing assignment and invent a new, ultra-concise form of poetry.  Observe:  the internet is not full of idiots.