White Vans
One frayster's dispatch from Leeds.
This is how a Mixing Desk Fray post is supposed to read:
If emo's central theme is society's unwillingness to let sensitive males be as sensitive as they want to be, then I guess heavy metal's central theme must be society's unwillingness to let dudes like Glenn Danzig and Kerry King kick the crap out of emo dudes whenever they start to cry.
Why don't you dicks ever review real music, like fuckin' Mastodon?
Certainly one of the Fray's better pissing wars during my tenure: (In chronological order) Thrasymachus, "The Truth About Rove" Fray_Editor has little tolerance for petty flame wars, but this ain't the J.V. squad. Grab yourself a beer and a chair from the kitchen table … KA4:50 p.m.
locdog, "two words: preview post"
Thrasymachus, "Four Letters"
locdog, "i'm meeellllllllting meeellllllting ooohhhhh"
Thrasymachus, "Well, Now You've Gone And Done It. . ."
locdog, "thrasymachus head on a pike"
Thrasymachus, "Locdog's Cruccifixion: Stations of the Cross"
Thursday, July 14, 2005
I think the coolest thing about this post is not necessarily the substance, but rather that Cyberjack found someone who thinks that a road trip of "follow[ing] the history and ancient sites relating to the Ute tribes, the Jesuit missions, the Mormon colonies, the French Louisiana Purchase trails, the American pioneer trails, and the La Morada and the Conquistadores" is as fresh as he does. Man, Fray Editor hopes he scores like that … KA4:20 p.m.
Reading the Classics: Music Box Fray, in response to Tony Green's piece on the "canard of classical training" in pop music, is leading the Fray in post/check mark ratio. Green claims that the pimping of pop artists as "classically trained" by their publicists and producers is a load of crap: Here's the problem: Few people outside of music students know what that really means. To wit: extended study and mastery of a complete system of techniques, pedagogy, musical knowledge, and repertoire. For the inquisitive frayster, this begs the question: Since the average consumer of pop music couldn't care less if, say, Alicia Keys carries credentials as a classically-trained artist, then what inherent value does the label carry? According to solomon-grundy, there's a silver lining in the dark cloud of consumer cynicism: I always thought the point of her emphasis on classical training was both as a gimmick (along with her stage name "Keys") but more importantly as a kind of political gesture promoting classical training among the young people who are her fans and who are largely from communities that don't get serious musical education. Here, goaty totes out a host of musicians who blurred the lines, "when a few brave souls from the conservatory tried to break into the Fillmore east and West and bring the muse to the unwashed hippies…" The goat's list includes the likes of: Philip Glass dipped a bit into New Wave rock with a band he produced called Polyrock. Glass played on a few tracks Dusty_Bear imagines that "if Beethoven were alive today, he'd jam with the jazz cats." And SpaceCadet, here, takes a fused, Hegelian hi-low approach that makes a lot of sense. Forget classical training for a sec and check out fatman's "The Politics of Polka" from BOTF. Leeds, Follow: A number of fraysters have made reference to DirectHex's dispatch from Leeds, where British authorities raided the Hyde Park district in search of the London bombers: Last week the bombers came to the places I lived. This week the police came to the places that live. In the solid yellow stare of a July sun blue and white tape sealed off roads and black helmets watched my every move. Noses wrinkled at the car I was driving as if the exhaust was pumping out skunk air. Respond to DH here … KA3:25 p.m.
If you've read interviews with her, she has a very strong political consciousness, and I can't imagine her efforts are unrelated to the well known studies about classical music education and cognitive development advantages. When she fetishizes the piano (one of the most interesting themes in her videos), it's aimed at a really specific audience. She wants young poor kids and kids of color to have a role model they can relate to who makes classical music cool and accessible, because it's ultimately good for them. Right?
…Velvet Underground founding member John Cale came to the US a viola prodigy and studied composition with Copland at Tanglewood. He was one of the participants in John Cage's infamous, all-night, realization of Erik Satie's "Vextations." Cale did an interesting album of classical pieces called "the Academy in Peril" and collaborated with terry Riley on "Church of Anthrax."
I was lying in bed, shuddering from a chest infection, when the red band broke across the screen telling me about the bombs in London. Names that were part of my daily routine, stairs I had shuffled up to get to lectures that were always too early, the wheel rattle of old red and blue carriages and the suffocating heat of too many people pressed too close together. The level crossing I had dragged my bag across to get to the bank now had bits of roof and bits of people across it. I always sat on the top deck , where the Plexiglas at the front curved up and had the top support struts ripped off. My seat wasn't there.
There were always the guilty moments, the heart skip when the tube failed to rumbled on time. When it smacked the sides of the tunnel and sparked. When it ground down some coke can under its wheels. I would stand in the first carriage of the Piccadilly line train waiting to jump off quickly at Russell Square next to the exit but there was always the thought that if "they" wanted to – this would be a readymade mausoleum. So we stared blankly into the walls while letting the peripheral scan those around us. On that day someone got under the vision, and left a rucksack set for 8.50am.
Today, they came in their white vans, jumped out the back and laid down the law over a block square of street. It was stealthy. Bleary eyes met with the high-vis jackets in the dawn and people shuffling out of the front door looking at what was going on. They were searching for "them". Like the guilty moments on the tube, the possibility of this had flitted into our minds every time we walked out of the door.
It was like the possibility of the strip search and the missed flight. The possibility of the wrong name and the wrong face being met with sweaty interviews in closed of rooms while you failed to exist outside the room.
Such is our life now. Wrongness permeated with other wrongness. There is no real innocence except maybe for those who live under the age of reason and those who live beyond it. Those of us who live in the shelters of the west, surrounded by the concrete and civility of our societies can no longer ignore the meat grinder that spins outside our havens. Those of us who would like to carry on as if the currents of life only feature our own needs can no longer live with that luxury as the images of headless children reach out to drag us in to the nonstop whirl of it all.
There are men and some women who made it so. There are men and some women that suspended souls somewhere and denied the whispers of conscience that were built into them. They do this in boardrooms and caves, in mosques, in air conditioned hotel rooms or the backs of Teutonic chariots.
Thus I draw moral equivalence. That taking a life is taking a life. Suspending a life, curtailing the right to live, holding up the right to be as a crime and preventing all of us to be able to strive for safety are morally corrupt. A GPS guided bomb that drops on the sleeping child has the same affect as the rucksack on the backseat. That those who make the policy, those of our race who sit over death toll figures and collateral damage estimates are complicit in setting up the teeth of the Grinder. That there can be no prayer with the smell of blood in the nostrils, there can be no humanity with the thoughts of obliteration of others foremost on your mind. That injustice cannot be cured with more injustice.
When Cain killed Abel the ground betrayed him. When asked the ground will tell its tales. From Srebinica to the wall behind Rami Al Durra, from the splattered front of the BMA to the hulks of metal in Madrid the ground will speak. It will not say Muslim killed Jew because of this or that, it will not say that Arab was massacred here by Christian.
It will say man killed man and I know not why.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
The Fray's dog days of summer leave Fighting Words Fray as one of the few breeding grounds for compelling debate, particularly this week, as Christopher Hitchens retraces the footsteps of his intellectual journey from Srebrenica to Baghdad. BenK and MutatisMutandis initiate a solid thread here based on Ben's familiar premise that moral relativism, in the framework of foreign policy, is untenable: The great irony of liberal relativism is that it finds itself on a bedrock conviction that coexistence with absolutism is intolerable. Fundamentalists, intolerant people, those of absolutist conviction, must be at minimum silenced - preferably, it seems, by shame or some sense of not being 'modern' or being 'offensive' or 'oppressive' or otherwise discouraging 'peace.' Is BenK a Trotskyist? (Insert Fray Editor's smiley emoticon here.) MM replies that… Long-term coexistence of liberal with dictatorial societies is indeed impossible. For the simple reason that the mere existence of freedom and prosperity is a threat to dictatorial regime. Degsme gets in on the convo here, suggesting that even for those who fashion themselves as hard-core humanitarian interventionists, there's a practical limit: liberalism and absolutism can co-exist, as long as absolutism shields itself from liberalism - which over the long haul is impractical. It is in fostering the undermining of the shield that responsible liberalism does its best work in spreading freedom and self-governance (which is different than democracy). MarcEHaag undermines Hitchens' hindsight on Bosnia here, claiming that The Bosnian "example" provides, in retrospect, one very important lesson … The moral of the story international justice institutions, military power (US, especially) and local movements are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each works best when backed by either or both of the others. But EarlyBird interprets it differently: What the Milosevic situation shows us is that Europe loves American militarism when they can use it exactly when and where they see fit, but can't stand it being used for American interests alone or when it bumps up against its own interests. But that does not mean their interests are more moral than America's. Fraywatch has missed our resident liberal pragmatic internationalist. She's back in FWF: In the real world, the US and our allies must make decisions. We have limited resources and cannot solve all the problems in the world by throwing cruise missiles and tank divisions at them. We must prioritize situations, approach some crises with non-military means, and others with a limited military response. In this era of cheap and widely available small arms and explosives, it may never again be possible to seize and occupy any sizeable hostile territory without pulling resources away from every other trouble spot in the world. Such a response must be reserved for an absolute necessity. Catch up with ShriekingViolet here. Who Knew? That Fray regular, Auros-4, is a silver-screen financier. Check out the link to his testimonial in DailyKos via Hollywood Economist Fray. BOTF Notes: BOTF remains a divine place for a moral conundrum. Locdog poses a dandy … KA8:35 a.m.
Here we have a clear example of an opposing, a 'medievalist,' sentiment, as it were: that coexistence with dictators, murderers, evil people, is in fact no tolerable. It is not diversity to be cherished and appreciated. It is not some religious difference of opinion to be set aside under secular rubrics. We cannot 'all get along.' Some evil people deserve to be judged, be deposed, be punished, be executed for their crimes.
The only way in which the two can co-exist is by separation and isolation; the self-imposed isolation if the old DDR or today's North-Korea, of the helpfully externally imposed isolation of Cuba. The Cold War was not a regrettable incident; it was vital for the USSR and its system as a way to survive.
That does not mean, however, that the existence of an autocratic regime de facto justifies war and invasion. Such a regime does not have time on its side; especially personal dictatorships have serious limits on their lifetime. One can afford to wait until the regime collapses or a good opportunity for intervention is offered.
What is curious about Hitchens' moral outrage is that many many more died at the hands of the PRC or the Soviets - and what happened in Central America at the hands of US funded "freedom fighters" is not too removed from the Balkans. While Hitchens could hardly be accused of supporting these tyrannical regimes, I find it hard to believe he ever seriously suggested that the US Invade these nations to end the genocide/torture/atrocities.
It is that kind of conveniently new found outrage that restricts its scope of vision that is the true "moral relativism."
The neocons, on the other hand, would have us believe that invasion is the only way to regime change. The fact that the Butcher of Belgrade, the Snake in the Bosom, Slobodan Milosovic, is no longer in power, sitting instead in the dock in The Hague, awaiting his fate at Carla Del Ponte's hands, serves to debunk the neocons.
Iraq was a Stalinist nightmare, but it was also a well-contained threat. Now, after our wild overreaction, Baathists are still killing civilians in large numbers, terrorists are killing Americans on a daily basis, and Iran and North Korea edge toward nuclear-power status without any fear of a realistic threat of force. Please explain to me, Mr. Hitchens, why we should trust your moral outrage as a barometer for military action?
Until Hitchens and his fellow uber-hawks learn to balance their righteous anger with a dose of sober realism, and come to terms with the disparity between their desire for action and the limitations of all-volunteer armed forces, they will continue to lead us headfirst into easily avoidable tragedies. Let the victims at Srebrenica be our reminder of the dangers of collective inaction in the face of terrible injustice, but also of the dangers of trusting the moral judgment of militant nationalists who seek unconditional support for strong action against the threat of a Muslim insurgency.
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Kevin Arnovitz is the author of Clipperblog and a contributor to NPR, Out, and the New Republic.