mushinnoshin

Overheard on NPR this morning:

Traffic brought to you by your Toyota Dealers of Middle Tennessee…

Heehee. Indeed. Though the other brands & dealers do share some of the blame as well, don’t they?

A quick pointer to an excellent post by Kevin Carson on a “Contract with America” type proposal for uniting Democrats, Greens, & Libertarians. Via Kn@ppster.

Well, it seems Chris is going to hell. I think I’ll get there first though: waaaaay back when, even before the bands, I performed in some comedy troupes, and we once had an Easter Sunday show — during which I played Jesus, dutifully skipping through the audience in a speedo passing out eggs.

Update: But these guys are gonna get there before any of us…

It’s past one and I need sleep, but I need to post now, while I’m still drunk and my head’s still wired –

I’m a fucking magnet for weirdness (did I mention I’m not a vampire?).

So I’m at NV. I finally dragged myself out to Salvation. The dark, the noise, the smoke, the fire — oh, it fucking brings me back. Nemesis, Squeeze, The Kitchen Club — I’ve seen this scene before, I know it well. And I’m standing there in silence, when in walks a vision. Well I exaggerate, but nonetheless — an attractive woman, and just my type. I watch her ascend the stairs — my blood is thumping, but I file it away.

Flash forward. I’m — well, I’m watching someone else. But out of nowhere — a whisper in my ear.

“You’re very sexy.”

I turn and watch her walk away. The very one from before. This can’t be.

The night rolls on. Confused, I’m not sure what to do — because she’s here with someone else. What did it mean? Just a random act? An invitation? A challenge?

An interjection from the DJ. “In Search of My Rose“. This song and I have History. And out of nowhere you play it. This semi-obscure track from back when I was your age. It must mean SOMETHING.

And so I danced, the only song that got me up this night.

Coming off the floor we speak at last. And it seems she’s married, her chaperone: her husband. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t tell you you’re sexy”. No, I suppose it doesn’t. But it does mean another entry in my Weird Shit Ledger.

I figure it’s about time I dig back into the archives and post a little more music.

I guess it was 93? 94? when I first hooked up with guitarist Jim LeClair. Wait, actually this is easy, hold on a sec — December 5, 1993. It was the day after Frank Zappa died. Jim worked with my old friend the loungraptor at this cheesy yuppie coffee bar called the Nocturnal Cafe. Jim was looking bummed, he tells me Zappa was his hero, we get to talking, turns out he’s a guitarist & he knows some guys that want to start an industrial group. And so it went from there. Jim, myself, guitarist Pau Galgolzy, bassist/vocalist Eric “Pogo” Simons, and drummer Mark Andrew formed a band called “Acid Fist X”.

The first song we wrote was this little ditty known as “Wax”, and what I’ve got for you here is the “Sinthetic Life Mix” — so named because, well — we recorded a demo version, but the master is lost to the ether, so when I started putting together material to go online, all I had was an already too worn cassette copy. Meanwhile I’ve got a stack of video tapes of the band live. So with some intense Cakewalk surgery — and the help of some black magic, thunder, and lightning — I was able to stitch together this Frankenstein monster of a semi-live recording that actually came out better than the sum of its parts.

Enjoy!

Wax (Sinthetic Life Mix)

This was originally going to be one of the bullets below, but I decided it warranted a post of its own. Every week I try to go online to listen to NPR’s “Live in Studio C“. And so I just got through listening to this week’s fantastic performance of original music by harpist Timbre Cierpke, with accompaniment provided by her siblings Tenor & Treble.

So why is this week’s performance particularly post-worthy? Well, because I knew the Cierpke’s way back in high school, and I’m just bubbling over with happiness to see how well they’re doing. I always thought very highly of the whole family (and frankly I was a tad jealous of their extraordinary talents).

I wonder if they would even remember me? I suppose Tenor might, we used to sit together in music theory class. Nice to see he’s gone on to do something constructive with it (while I focused on doing things somewhat more destructive). Treble might remeber me, but I don’t think she ever liked me very much. I seem to remember hearing through the grapevine that she didn’t think too highly of my then declared atheism. She probably never knew that hers was the only opinion on the matter that ever bothered me. Well Treble, if it helps, I did finally embrace a religion, even if it’s not the one Nashvillians are used to : )

Timbre on the other hand probably doesn’t remember me, and I only barely remeber her. (Forgive me, I did kill a lot of brain cells in the interim years.) I think we may have only met a few times. Anyway, I ordered her CD and I’m most looking forward to hearing it, and to seeing her show with Venus Hum at the Exit/In on May 6.

• Thursday was my birthday, and I’ve got to say it’s been one of the best in recent memory. Mostly because we had a fantastic meal at what is IMHO the best restaurant in town, and I was pleased that my initially skeptical family enjoyed it as well. Partly also because it was followed by a relaxing day off. And partly because thanks to Amazon’s wish list feature, I actually got stuff I wanted — so before the weekend is out I will finally get to see Trey Parker’s “Cannibal: The Musical” : )
• Yesterday I bought my ticket to Turandot. Should be an excellent show. On a related note, last night I went to Blair for a wonderful premier performance of music by Nashville composer Michael Kurek. The music was refreshing, and in the program notes the composer illuminates the reason why: he calls himself a neo-traditionalist, and discusses the relative difficulty of writing original melodic tonal pieces, as compared to the atonal sounds of “modernism” — which is a topic on which I find myself in complete agreement. I’ve personally “written” enough atonal modernist avant guarde pieces to know exactly what he means, and long ago came to the same conclusions. Music is speech, and while atonal has its place in moderation — in experiments, in expressing particular angles of an idea — on the whole I find that tonal is to atonal as poetry is to tourettes syndrome.
• I was headed out to yoga this morning and found myself greeted by a flat tire. grrrrr. Goodyear’s coverage got it fixed for free, but I had to miss class.
• I probably oughtta say something about the Bill Hobbs incident, but — eh, I really don’t want to get bogged down in that cesspool of negativity and cross pissing. I’ll just mumble something about karma and move on.
• Anyone got a half million dollars you can loan me? In the course of my house hunting, I stumbled across a beautiful historic mini-mansion for sale, tucked away at the end of a dead-end street right here in the quaint little Woodbine neighborhood in which I currently live and hope to stay. It’s kinda freaky, you would never ever suspect anything like this was here.

I’ve had a post on this subject rolling ’round my head, but I’m feeling a tad lazy, and since the subject came up on the LPTN list, I’ll basically just copy my post there to here:

On Monday 10 April 2006 06:31 pm, terry12622000 wrote:
> Boortz was going on and on about the immigrants being law
> breakers and how this is a country based on the rule of law.

I’ve heard that “rule of law” phrase used a lot by the anti immigrant right wing “libertarians” [sic] lately, I had a feeling that numbnutz Boortz was the one feeding it to ‘em. Perhaps they should look the phrase up to see what it *actually means* before they go around spouting it.

From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law

The rule of law implies that government authority may only be exercised in accordance with written laws, which were adopted through an established procedure. The principle is intended to be a safeguard against arbitrary rulings in individual cases.

In Commonwealth law, the most famous exposition of the concept of rule of law was laid down by Albert Venn Dicey in his Law of the Constitution in 1895:

… every official, from the Prime Minister down to a constable or a collector of taxes, is under the same responsibility for every act done without legal justification as any other citizen. The Reports abound with cases in which officials have been brought before the courts, and made, in their personal capacity, liable to punishment, or to the payment of damages, for acts done in their official character but in excess of their lawful authority. [Appointed government officials and politicians, alike] … and all subordinates, though carrying out the commands of their official superiors, are as responsible for any act which the law does not authorise as is any private and unofficial person.

– Law of the Constitution (London: MacMillan, 9th ed., 1950), 194.

Thus, those who make and enforce the law are themselves bound to adhere to it.

Of course I suppose that definition is a tad inconvenient, since most of the same folks are also Bush apologists, and violating the “rule of law” is pretty much a hallmark of the Bush administration.

Moral of the story I suppose is you really shouldn’t look to talk radio for… well, anything really.

The farthest left you can go, historically at any rate, is anarchism — the total opposition to any institutionalized power, a state of completely voluntary social organization in which people would establish their ways of life in small, consenting groups, and cooperate with others as they see fit.

The above quote from Karl Hess well exemplifies the spirit of a fantastic article up now at Mises.org:

Rothbard’s “Left and Right”: Forty Years Later

Although Rothbard maintained the right-libertairan blind spot regarding land, he remains a favorite on many other issues. (And when a well meaning someone says something silly like “you can’t get more libertarian than CATO”, I think Rothbard is probably a good place to suggest they start.)

The piece has a little something for everyone: libertarians should find it entertaining; liberals should find it instructive. So-called “libertarian republicans” may hopefully find in it the seeds of their impending recovery : )

Here’s a great bit from the article, Long’s take on the uselessness of “capitalism” and “socialism” as terms (a subject on which I’ve commented frequently myself):

Now I think the word “capitalism,” if used with the meaning most people give it, is a package-deal term. By “capitalism” most people mean neither the free market simpliciter nor the prevailing neomercantilist system simpliciter. Rather, what most people mean by “capitalism” is this free-market system that currently prevails in the western world. In short, the term “capitalism” as generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free market. And since the prevailing system is in fact one of government favoritism toward business, the ordinary use of the term carries with it the assumption that the free market is government favoritism toward business.

And similar considerations apply to the term “socialism.” Most people don’t mean by “socialism” anything so precise as state ownership of the means of production; instead they really mean something more like “the opposite of capitalism.” Then if “capitalism” is a package-deal term, so is “socialism” — it conveys opposition to the free market, and opposition to neomercantilism, as though these were one and the same.

And that, I suggest, is the function of these terms: to blur the distinction between the free market and neomercantilism. Such confusion prevails because it works to the advantage of the statist establishment: those who want to defend the free market can more easily be seduced into defending neomercantilism, and those who want to combat neomercantilism can more easily be seduced into combating the free market. Either way, the state remains secure.

Meanwhile there are some nuggets of wisdom for the so-called pragmatists inside the LP, on the false dichotomy of — and wholly invented war between — pragmatists and purists (another subject on which I frequently comment):

One root of this misreading is a failure to distinguish between endorsement of a direction of change and endorsement of the stops along the way. Suppose there’s a serial killer who murders a hundred people a year. And suppose I manage to convince him to cut it down to fifty. (Fifty’s his lucky number, say.) By all means, that’s an improvement to be welcomed, and I would even deserve some praise and gratitude for helping to make the world a little better.

But that doesn’t mean that I should start celebrating this guy’s new fifty-murders-a-year rule as a great libertarian policy, or that I should stop looking for an opportunity to cut it down to zero by bringing the killer to justice. Above all, it doesn’t mean that I should help the killer implement his fifty-murders-a-year policy. By the same principle, if taxation is theft, for example, then although we should welcome any diminution in the government’s rate of theft, we cannot actually participate in the government’s new kinder, gentler, less intense thievery without becoming thieves ourselves.

Long sums up well the article, and the ultimate incompatability between libertarians and the right:

From our present standpoint, then, what lesson should we draw from the past four decades since Rothbard first published “Left and Right”? We’ve seen one “conservative revolution” after another: Reagan, Thatcher, Bush; we’ve seen what happens when conservatives get in power and finally are in a position to scale back the state like they’ve been telling us for years they’d do if those awful liberals didn’t keep blocking them. We’ve seen the purge of libertarian elements from the Right, begun by Buckley and others during the Cold War, reach its apogee during the War on Terror. It’s becoming clear that, in Lew Rockwell’s words, “conservatism has always been messianic, militarist, nationalist, bloodthirsty, imperialist, centralist, redistributionist, and in love with the hangman state.”

Which all dovetails into what so many of us have been trying to preach: our world despartely needs a New New Left that sheds tendencies towards state socialism from one side and state capitalism from the other. For those of us who don’t particularly care to be collateral dammage in the new global war between Christians and Muslims, the matter can’t be more urgent.