Sometimes, when you worry over and over that something will happen, it is kind of a relief when it actually happens.

Thursday, March 27, 2003
10:17 PM
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"A new kind of tribal music flourishes in every large city I know; written / improvised, experimental / traditional, electronic / acoustic, made mostly by younger people in unofficial venues, spontaneously organised, with a sense of urgency, responding to a need for collectively perceived cultural identity, self-forged, free of commercial and academic cliches."

—Frederic Rzewski

1:16 AM
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In case you couldn't tell from Saturday's post, I've been thinking a lot about the persistence of ancient ideas / weltanschauungen through time.

I've been reminded, in particular, of Philip K. Dick's "single timeless template":

"...Rome circa A.D. 70, with Christian participants ranged against the state, virtually a Platonic archetypal form, echoes of which can be found down through the linear ages.

The themes of enslavement and then salvation, or fallen man liberated, are stamped from the original mold of Christian revolutionary against the legions of Roman force. In a sense nothing has happened since A.D. 70. The archetypal crisis is continually reenacted. Each time freedom is fought for it is Christian against Roman; each time human beings are enslaved it is Roman tyranny against the meek and defenseless."

Cosmogony and Cosmology (1978)

I have some issues with Dick's worldview, to be sure, but I always enjoy immersing myself in it.

Notes on Romans from last March.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003
9:00 AM
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From Walter Wink's Engaging the Powers:

"[T]he religion of Babylon—one of the world's oldest, continuously surviving religions—is thriving as never before in every sector of contemporary American life... It, and not Christianity, is the real religion of America...

In the Babylonian myth, creation is an act of violence ... Order is established by means of disorder ... such a myth reflects a highly centralized state in which the king rules as Marduk's representative on earth. Resistance to the king is treason against the gods. Unquestioning obedience is the highest virtue, and order the highest religious value...

Salvation is politics: identifying with the god of order against the god of chaos, and offering oneself up for the holy war required to impose order and rule on the peoples round about. And because chaos threatens repeatedly, in the form of barbarian attacks, an ever-expanding imperial policy is the automatic correlate of Marduk's asecndancy over all the gods.

Do you begin to sense where all this is leading?"

Saturday, March 22, 2003
4:21 PM
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I went to the protest last night. We gathered in Federal Plaza and then moved into the streets, eventually heading up Chicago's Lake Shore Drive.

Traversing a major highway on foot is an odd, exhilirating sensation. Even more exhilirating were the periods where we were marching directly through stopped traffic. Many of the stranded motorists looked irritated, as you might suspect, but others were clearly thrilled to see us; they signaled us by flashing peace signs or holding up anti-war stickers or buttons; many stuck their hands out their windows to clasp hands with the protesters moving by.

Eventually we attempted to move back into the streets of downtown Chicago and that was when the riot police blocked the march. More and more police arrived until we were basically surrounded. Rumors that the police were planning to soon use force began to circulate, and that was when the group I was with began to think "maybe it's time to go home."

The police were letting people disperse down a particular street, and, of course, once enough people had headed down that way the protest sort of spontaneously re-established itself. We stuck around for a while longer but when I saw a cop distributing armloads of those plastic cuffs I once again thought "time to go."

We wandered for a few blocks, passing several squadrons of police, until we found a cab. It took a long time for us to drive out of areas that weren't swarming with emergency vehicles. Hundreds of people ended up arrested.

Friday, March 21, 2003
12:09 PM
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Events are likely to change pretty rapidly over the next few days, so I thought I'd post Friday's Imaginary Year entry a day early.

Chicago-area readers: anti-war protest downtown today at Federal Plaza, 5 pm.

Thursday, March 20, 2003
2:18 PM
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Here Magazine, which I praised last month, is currently collecting stories on the topic of "What does the war look like from where you are?" E-mail them to war@heremagazine.com, and read the collected responses here.

Also: D. Bauler writes in to point out http://dear_raed.blogspot.com, another weblog from the front lines, this one maintained by a Baghdad civilian.

"Wherever you go you see closed shops and it is not just doors-locked closed but sheet-metal-welded-on-the-front closed, windows-removed-and-built-with-bricks closed, doors were being welded shut. There were trucks loaded with all sort of stuff being taken from the shops to wherever their owner had a secure place. Houses which are still being built are having huge walls erected in front of them with no doors, to make sure they don’t get used as barracks I guess."

I'll be reading this one until the electricity goes out, or until the state suspends Internet service.

9:05 AM
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When, at some point in our lives, we meet a real tragedy ... we can react in two ways. Obviously, we can lose hope, let ourselves slip into discouragement, into alcohol, drugs, and unending sadness. Or else we can wake ourselves up, discover in ourselves an energy that was hidden there, and act with more clarity, more force.

—The Dalai Lama, from The Path to Tranquility

This week, keep one eye on the weblog of Kevin Sites, a war correspondent currently in Northern Iraq.

Unrelated: Juliet O'Keefe's Eclogues has been reborn over at Sargasso Sea (dot net).

Wednesday, March 19, 2003
4:24 PM
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"An unexpectedly / depressing millennium, a real letdown after / / the frisky ad campaign."
—Kevin Davies, Lateral Argument

I can't say I'm looking forward to seeing footage of the "Hiroshima effect" that the Pentagon intends to inflict upon Baghdad, probably within the next 48 hours. Be prepared, friends and colleagues, to have a moral weight placed around your neck that will hang there for the remainder of your life.

Tuesday, March 18, 2003
12:14 PM
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From Robert Hass' "Paschal Lamb":

Vic had come to work flushed with excitement at an idea he had had in the middle of the night. He had figured out how to end the war. It was a simple plan. Everyone in the country—in the world, certainly a lot of Swedish and English students would go along—who was opposed to the war would simply cut off the little finger on the left hand and send it to the president. Imagine! They would arrive slowly at first, the act of one or two maniacs, but the news would hit newspapers and the next day there would be a few more. And the day after that more. And on the fourth day there would be thousands. And on the fifth day, clinics would be set up—organized by medical students in Madison, San Francisco, Stockholm, Paris—to deal with the surgical procedure safely and on a massive scale. And on the sixth day, the war would stop. It would stop. The helicopters at Bienhoa would sit on the airfields in silence like squads of disciplined mosquitoes. Peasants, worried and curious because peasants are always worried and curious, would stare up curiously into the unfamiliar quiet of a blue, cirrus-drifted sky. And years later we would know each other by those missing fingers. An aging Japanese businessman minus a little finger on his left hand would notice the similarly mutilated hand of his cab driver in Chicago, and they would exchange a fleeting unspoken nod of fellowship.

And it could happen. All we had to do to make it happen—Vic had said, while the water for tea hissed on the hot plate in David's chilly office and the snow came down thick as cotton batting, was to cut off our little fingers right now, take them down to the department secretary, and have her put them in the mail."

Related: anti-war activists from 34 nations have gone to Iraq to function as human shields. Here's the final report from SF Bay Guardian reporter John Ross, written March 11, the day he was forcibly expelled.

Moving and strange; a profound reminder of what human beings are capable of. Thanks to Eli of Weather Head for the link.

Monday, March 17, 2003
10:19 AM
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So David Means, author of the fine short story collection Assorted Fire Events, stumbled upon the post where I suggested that his title might have been ripped off from Ed Ruscha's book Various Small Fires, and he wrote in to tell me:

Actually, I didn't know about Ruscha's work when I read the title, but someone at my publisher pointed out the connection and showed me that book, which, actually, is amazing. After I wrote that story, I couldn't think of another title. (I like to imagine we were approaching the subject in the same way or something.)

You heard it here first.

Thursday, March 13, 2003
11:22 AM
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Chris and I have been spending a lot of time lately poring over the recordings we made over the past year, trying to make selections for the second Number None CD-R release, due sometime in April. There's a lot of interesting material stored up, and I think the new disc will stand as a pretty dramatic leap forward for us as a band.

During this process of sorting and reassessing (and cleaning stuff off the hard drive) I've also been looking over some noise experiments that I've done on my own, one-offs which are essentially "finished" and can't really be introduced into the Number None collaborative process. I think there's about enough material there to make up a solo disc, so I'll probably finish that up in April as well. This disc will include "In The Lake Of Dreams," the completed version of my dream recordings project. The disc should also include some of my recent experiments with low-input systems, experiments where I introduce a single sample or test-tone into a sonic contraption that feeds back on itself. It's a variation on the no-input experiments of Toshimaru Nakamura or Rafael Toral.

Labels: number_none, personal

Tuesday, March 11, 2003
1:06 PM
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CDs I acquired during the month of February (* denotes 2003 release):

Throbbing Gristle, First Annual Report (previously unreleased early experiments; rough and interesting)

Bauhaus, The Sky's Gone Out (nostalgia)

Beck, Sea Change (better than expected)

Mirah, You Think It's Like This But It's Really Like This (tender, awkward, cutesy, sexy indie-pop songs—utterly enchanting)

The Books, Thought For Food (pretty acoustic guitar submerged under a universe of offbeat samples = my kind of thing)

The Microphones, Mount Eerie* (genuinely odd concept album about life, death, and the afterlife, featuring a cast of thousands from the K Records stable. Afflicted by bouts of both genius and naievete.)

The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs (a breakneck tour of pop genres, and deeply emotionally affecting to boot. Essential.)

Spires That In The Sunset Rise, self-titled* (the long-awaited debut CD-R from this gang of Chicago ladies. Like the house band of some Victorian women's sanitarium. Delirious singsong, howls of venereal madness.)

and Cathy Heard's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret mix CD (from The Normal's "Warm Leatherette" to Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby," and all points inbetween)

Coming soon—actual content, not just lists of junk lying around my apartment.

Thursday, March 06, 2003
3:57 PM
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Books I completed in the month of February:

Speaking With the Angel, edited by Nick Hornby
Lust, by Susan Minot
The October Palace, by Jane Hirshfield
Language, by Jack Spicer
Fifteen False Propositions About God, by Jack Spicer
Assorted Fire Events, by David Means
Dusk, by James Salter
The Book of Ecclesiastes (King James translation, in the stylish Grove Press 'Pocket Canons' edition)

Verdicts? The Hornby and Minot story collections have spots of brilliance but mostly work as breezy reads; at times they border on tepid. Dusk and Assorted Fire Events are the stronger collections here. The two volumes of Jack Spicer's poetry are interesting but they didn't always connect with me—I'm still not sure I have enough of a grasp on Spicer's project, but it warrants further investiagaton. The Hirshfield, on the other hand, is a devastating batch of lyrical, sensual, spiritual poems—her relative accessibility does not in any way dilute her restless intelligence or the startling clarity of her vision.

(I'll leave Ecclesiasties aside for now.)

PS: It appears that the comments are almost working, you can get the comment box to appear and all that, but right now any comment that you might take the time to write will be sucked into a void. Watch this space for more developments.

Tuesday, March 04, 2003
9:19 AM
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If you bought a CD at full price from a retailer inbetween January 1, 1995, and December 22, 2000, you were potentially a victim of price fixing by the music industry.

The music industry (including Capitol Records, Virgin Records America, Time Warner, Atlantic Recording Corporation, Elektra Entertainment Group, Rhino Entertainment Company, Bertelsmann Music Group, BMG Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Tower Records, Musicland Stores Corp., and Trans World Entertainment Corp.) decided to settle, which means that they'll pay out a chunk of cash (likely to be between five and twenty bucks) to anyone who claims to have bought a CD during that five-year span. You can make this claim online. The deadline is Monday evening, so do it now.

Sunday, March 02, 2003
8:55 PM
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