the reality tunnel

So I decided that I would try to make a little podcast radio show. This is the first attempt. The idea is to pick songs that kind of follow the things I’ve been doing and thinking about. The first show is songs that I discovered or thought of from my most recent trip out of town, to Detroit at the beginning of the month, and things I’ve heard in the last few weeks from around Bloomington before I leave town again tomorrow.

Set 1 - Detroit

• Martha Reeves & The Vandellas - Heatwave - Motown Legends Girl Groups Comp (Motown)
• Boxcars - Shadows - Demo CDR (Self-released)
• Violence and Tragedy - Above All - Breaking Ground Mixtape Comp (Detroit Summer Collective)
• The Gibbons - The War On Terrorism Part One - Hope, Inc. (Salinas)
• Blair - Into Darkness - Jet Black White Noise (Self Released?)

Set 2 - Bloomington

• Matt & Kim - Silver Tiles - S/T CDR (that comes in the envelope with stamps, stains and postmarks) (Self-released)
• Shapes & Sizes - Islands Gone Bad - Self-titled? (Self-released?)
• Gal & Lad - Gardener - Demo CDR (Self-released)
• Lemuria - Piranha - Self-titled (Art of the Underground/Standstill)
• Mt. Gigantic - Raechel and her Children - Old Smiler (Friends & Relatives/Harlan)
• Ganglion - Internal Compustion - Of The Deep (Self-released)

To listen, use the links below:

• Download/Stream
• Podcast RSS

The domestic chicken evolved from the Red Jungle Fowl, originally found in south Asia.

hospedaje = hosting (web) in castellano

I made a couple of posts to the blog at pagestoprisoners.org about media that I came across or that Megan e-mailed to me from spring break:

• Powerful Video on Incarcerated Immigrants
• Iowa’s Residency Rules Drive Sex Offenders Underground
• Boot camp death not natural, second autopsy finds

“One of the great liabilities of history is that all to many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world-wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”

“When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missles and misguided men.”

This radio piece is pretty awesome and its pretty interesting to hear someone articulate pretty reasonable ambivalence to someone that me, and most of the folks that I know go kind of gahgah over. 

Transom Shows: Voice of Youth: The Night I Met Cornel West:

19-year-old Laquoia Simmons had a big night a while back: she met and interviewed Professor Cornel West, the famous ‘interpreter of the African-American experience,’ advocate for social justice, philosopher and critic. She reflects on her trip to Sonoma State University, and discusses what it was like to be an ‘at-risk’ young woman meeting a writer who writes so much about the so-called ‘at-risk’ population.

http://www.ailfvideo1.org/2006video/cair2006.ram

I stumbled across this random blog post when I googled for “triffling” because I was curious about the spelling.  My friend once told me, half jokingly, that she thinks everyone is looking for a hustle.  Reading this piece of someone’s life, like a voyeur, I realize that I’m seriously outclassed when it comes to deviousness.  From the blog:

I say “Why do you keep him around, if you know he shady?”

She says “Think about this. If the police busted my house today, Who are they most likely to believe? A girl with no serious record or this dude that just got out of jail and is on probation.

I look at her in awe. She says “Its all part of the game. Even when people think they are winning and getting over, they are not. They see me as a dumb ass and think I dont notice this shit, when everything I do is a part of a plan.

Feature Request

• Books from Nebraska Book Company and MBS should always show up as used when entered into the inventory. (Also, I need to create a query to fix the existing entries.)  The reason why this needs to be done is because currently, the inventory automatically enters all books from distributors as new, but with textbooks this isn’t the case.  This is deceiving for the online inventory.
• Add multiple inventory ecit form.  Essentially this would allow you to change everything that you can in the inventory edit form.
• Add pickup option for shipping in the online store (charge no shipping)

2006-04-10

• On Abbey’s request, display subject instead of section in check-in form..

2006-03-15

• Based on Joe and request added the section of books to be checked in so they can easily be organized as they’re being checked in for shelving.

2006-03-13

• From Erin’s request, made the top sellers queries be for the last 2 months. I renamed them Last Two Month’s Top Book Sellers and Last Two Month’s Top Comic/Zine Sellers.

2006-03-10

• Based on something that Colin mentioned to me, Zines now show up in the inventory report, even if they are priced

2006-03-09

• Added checkbox in check_in_order form to designate order that is a special order.
• Zines and books in the Children’s section no longer show up in the discount fiction/non-fiction inventory report.
• Added two queries named ‘This Month’s Top Book Sellers’ and ‘This Month’s Top Comic/Zine Sellers’ that do what they’re named.
• I returned the book Mastering Microsoft Access 2000 Development (ISBN:0-672-31484-3) to the library. It was actually really helpful.

For Kevey, initially, for some kind of demo liner notes, eventually.

Research

This song is about skateboarding, place, ownership, and memory.

Who owns a place?  Is it the person who holds the deed, title, or monetary investments, or is it those who occupy the place, us it, redefine it, develop an intimate relationship with it and invest their lives in that place?  Certainly, its a question that kids ask themselves as they’re getting kicked out of skate spots, but more fundamentally, and significantly, its a question that’s relevent to communities like the strong working-class communities that once existed near the Victorian Village and Harrison West neighborhoods of Columbus, Ohio; or many communities in New Orleans who have been forced to passively wait while the decision about whether their community will be allowed to be rebuilt is made by others.  When a place or community ceases to exist physically, what role does memory hold in maintaining some sense of ownership of a place?  Who is entitled to hold that memory?

Lightning Strikes 

This song is about being honest in your relationships, romantic or otherwise.  Its about how a big part of that is being honest with yourself about those relationships and allowing yourself to be happy and excited about them even if that makes you feel vulnerable and scared at the same time.  Its about expressing all of these feelings to the people you care about, and how realizing the importance of these things and actually coming to be able to do them can be a long and painful process.

The Human Contradiction

This pair of titles gets their title from some books by Octavia Butler (RIP) poses the human contradiction as being humanity’s intelligence coupled with their hierarchical nature and describes this contradiction as being ultimately destructive.  This made me think of another human contradiction - humanity’s ability to survive great hardship, tragedy, and oppression only to repeat those horrors.  The first song is about wanting to see an end to this cycle, even if it means an end to humanity and the second song is about finding hope even in spite of this contradiction.

This Is Where We’re From   

This song is about how so many punk kids come from bland suburban and exurban communities and ultimately migrate en-masse from those communities to other places.  Its about how coming from a place devoid of culture creates a seperation from one’s personal history.  Its about struggling to find a place in a new community that feels real and the tendency to fetishize the idea of “community” and in particular communities that newcomers might be playing a role in destroying.

Death At An Early Age

This is about the segregation and inequality that still exists in American education.  Its also about how people affected by social problems are often only regarded as victims.

Shut the Fuck Up

This is about those in power saying things that underline how their reality is completely out of touch with that of so many others.  Its about wishing that these people would at least have smarts to be tactful and silent as they fuck up people’s lives, but recognizing that saying horrible things at least reminds us who we can’t trust.
New Song

This song is about finding hope in shared experience.

When my friend Leanne was passing through town last month, we went for a short hike around Lake Griffey.  While we were hiking, she mentioned that she really liked a comic called Potshots and that she was disappointed that her local paper had stopped carrying the comic.  Luckily, the comics are available on the web.  Leanne isn’t super internet-connected, so I offered to compile some of the potshots and send them to her in the mail.  I used wget to download them, but I needed to find a way to print the images many-to-a-page.

I eventually came upon using ImageMagick’s montage command.  This worked pretty well for me:

C:\Documents and Settings\ghing\Desktop\potshots>U:\ImageMagick-6.2.6-Q16\montag
e.exe -tile 2×5 -adjoin *.gif -geometry 300×190 sheet.png

Then I could just view and print the composite images in firefox, provided I made my margins small and zoomed in first.

Potshots is pretty interesting.  The artist who draws them was once called “history’s only full time, professional published eppigramist.” The black and white illustrations with clever phrases definitely have this feeling of antiquity to them.  The sayings have a strange tone as well, that can be heartfealt but also sarcastic.   So, they come off as a weird hybrid of Family Circle and Edward Gorey.