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We broke this on tour.

P/N: 353-22001-000-0

IN: 120 V AC 60 Hz

OUT: 16.8V*2 AC 500mA

Saw that Radiohead is offering a name-your-own-price downloads for its new album.  This might be a better model for Defiance, Ohio audio files since I see a problem with totally free-as-in-beer audio files as being perceived only for promotional purposes or not valued in the same way a physical record is.  I would love to plant the bug in listeners’ heads that while digital downloads lack some of the substance and features of records or discs (artwork, tangible object) the fluidity that they can be transported and shared ought to be viewed as an asset in the same way that artwork would.

I’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary, The War on PBS pretty intently, and it’s so much to take in. Some of the most elequent, descriptive, and thoughtful comments quoted in the film were by a veteran named Eugene Sledge, from Mobile. It turns out that he published his diaries from his time fighting in the Pacific theatre. The book is called With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa.

While it is possible to recognize narratives of heroism and villany in the documentary, more than anything, it makes me think about how immense and terrible war is, that it is incredible to me that after the destruction of WWII, anyone would ever wage war again. It seems so unfathomable, the extent of the horror and destruction, but listening to the stories, memories, and carefully crafted explainations of those interviewed, so obviously worded from a mental dialog revisited over a lifetime, that even those immersed in the belly of the horrors could glean what seems like so much understanding of humanity’s darkest capabilities. Even with this understanding, though, there seemed to be a general sadness in how little this knowledge offered in terms of imagining or crafting a different course for humanity.

Will who plays in Defiance, Ohio with me plays in a newish band called Landlord. It’s Matte and Chris from the Door-Keys with Will and sounds not unlike the Door-Keys, but with Will mixing the sound up. I miss Daun’s vocals, but Will makes the songs a bit more diverse. They went on tour last month and have a nice looking CD-R that Chris put out. Here are two of my favorite songs:

The only channel at Chiara, Bz, Florence and Oona’s house is PBS, which is okay, because It’s made me stoked on TV again, and is a bit nostolgic because it was on all the time at my house as a kid (and for a long time, it was the only station that came in). It is a little annoying because the local station is currently in the midst of a fund drive, complete with really bad music programming (Riverdance, and a retrospective of 70s music, for instance) , but I guess a week of people in suits talking is better than commercials every 10 minutes. As part of the fund drive, they re-aired Bill Moyers’ Selling the War, a look at how the mainstream US press (not only the usual suspects like FOX news, but also outlets like the New York Times that are often regarded as quite liberal) reiterated the Bush administration and neoconservative justifications for the war in Iraq including links to Al-Queda and Iraqi weapons programs. Many of these claims were based on very shaky evidence, but most in the mainstream media propagated this information without further investigation. The Bush administration then referred publicly to these numerous articles, which had originated from sources close to the administration, as evidence of the veracity and popular support for their claims. Watching this documentary was really chilling, not because they criticized the Bush administration’s shaky claims for war, but because they demonstrated how so many in the press dropped the ball on being the watchdog for the truth of the government’s information to the public. This struck home as a second-hand consumer of information, and as someone interested in blogs which are all about propagating the information of others. It makes me realize the responsibility that comes with repeating information, and the need for everyone, though especially those in a place to convey information, to be more knowledgeable and critical of that information. Two bits of information that I thought were especially interesting was how the report followed some journalists with Knight Ridder news service (since bought by the McClatchy Company) who were some of the only newspaper writers delving deeper into the claims of the administration echoed elsewhere in the media. Also, there was a short segment of an interview with the editor of the Washington Post where he talked about how, during the Reagan administration, the Post used to meticulously fact-check the president’s speeches before stopping the practice because the public complained that the reporters were being too critical.

Again, on PBS, I saw the tail end of a documentary about the beginning of affirmitive-action-style racial quotas, designed to increase the number of black afro-brazilians at state universities.  With a greater population of multi-racial people, it’s complicated to determine who qualifies as “black” under the system, and the documentary talked about cases of some trying to get in under the quota system even though they had very little African ancestery, whereas some with considerable African roots and who seemed perceivably “black” didn’t want to try for admission under the quota system because they didn’t want to think of themselves as “black” because of the social stigma, or because, even aknowledging a “black” identity, they still didn’t want to feel like they were getting special treatment because of it. Critics of the plan argue that it is going to create racism, where it currently doesn’t exist, but it seems like these critics are overlooking the fact that racism does exist, and has existed in Brazil, and that this is felt by many people, whether it’s in access to employment or other cultural opportunities, or the way that people look who are selected for advertizing, TV, and other pop-culture iconography.  While a quota system might be flawed, it is unfortunate that criticisms of the system don’t aknowledge people’s needs or their perception of racism.  It’s the same everywhere, I guess.

What I really wanted to write about though, is something that wasn’t the same everywhere.  Towards the end of the documentary, they showed the results of the propsective college students the story was following.  In Brazil, admission to the public university is contingent on a single examination.  The university admissions were released in a public space, on a large board, and the people displaying the results had to run out of the way to escape the onslaught of eager students.  Those that saw, from the results, that they had gotten in, were jubulant, while those that hadn’t seemed genuinely shaken, but determined to get in on the next try.  It was crazy to see, because in the US, it seems that for many getting into university of some sort is taken for granted.

This is a follow-up on the article that I mentioned a while ago about gender, evolution, and how (the author believes) culture exploits men as well as women, that is, culture as a system, uses men and women in identifiable roles to achieve it’s ends.
I think the analysis is interesting, but, taken in the wrong way, can be a dangerous thing.  First, the author takes a standpoint of political agnosticism, but I think it’s irresponsible to assume that there won’t be policy or political directives taken from his research.  Second, the idea that cultural systems work, for the most part, because we’ve survived this far, is, for me, unsatisfying because it ignores the fact that culture doesn’t work for so many people.  I don’t see what is to be gained, from an ethical, or an evolutionary standpoint, to accept the failings of our current system.  The author does, at least, aknowledge that culture has modified itself in some cases to better achieve it’s goals.  Finally, the author seems to feel that men are unfairly beleaugured in our culture as culture uses them as well as women, though in different roles and to different ends.

I realized that most men below the age of 50 have never experienced masculinity as a positive thing, especially given the relentless stream of messages about male misbehavior and ostensible male oppression of women, plus the mass media depiction of men as villains and buffoons. When was the last time you heard a news story that depicted men, collectively, in a positive light?

While criticizing “men”, as a gender, might not be very accurate, or productive, I think the criticisms often leveled at men, are still valid, and if as the author indicates, culture and evolution has put men in more public and oftentimes structurally powerful positions, replacing the word “men” with “those in power” in criticism of social power structures, escapes the author’s concerns about a cultural taboo agains positive attitudes towards men, but finds, to me at least, the criticisms still ringing true.  In the talk that the blog entry follows, the author claimed that culture has put men in a role of more public, broader power, so it seems that, if we, as a culture, find the application of that power troublesome, the criticism would exist at the level of culture, even in the form of a taboo.  Now, to gender that criticism might not be accurate, but in trying to question how we think about gender, we shouldn’t stop criticizing those in power, if deserving of criticism, whether they are men or women.  I guess I find it frustrating that the author would take a positive view of public and structural male power, even aknowledging that it is a realm that culture has given mostly to men, but see criticism as a negative thing, rather than part of that same cultural system.  I also find the author’s assertion that the roles of gender in culture (in his previous talk, to generalize, I would say that he said that men hold roles of power in a more public sphere, while women seek influence and power in a more intimate sphere) are seperate and different but equal, to be unsatisfying.  The problem is, that even if you accept this dichotomy, there are so many examples of public, structural power infringing on power in more intimate relationships.  My knee-jerk reaction is that in the present, and even historically, changes in the role of women (or any other group) within the different spheres of power and a public criticism of the public power structure (seen by the author as the taboo against regarding males positively) come from a perception (I would argue, a reality) that the roles that people play in culture are not only seperate and different, but also unequal.

In writing  a blog entry for a blog that is on the Bloomington paper’s website, that dealt with an issue heavily tied to issues of race and class, I found it really hard to not express the different views at a community forum as being opposite to each other (for instance, expressing a white man’s perspective, and then presenting a black woman’s perspective starting the sentance with “On the other hand,”).  And, while I perceived the two people’s interests and identities to be different, they weren’t neccessarily addressing each others’ points.  It is hard, in writing, to address issues of race and class in a way that aknowledges differences in identity, perspective, and power, but that also doesn’t perpetuate an adversarial relationship across those lines.  Reading “There Goes the Neighborhood”, recently, which takes an academic and ethnogrpahical perspective on this, has helped give me some ideas for writing with more observational language.  Thinking about my blog entry, which is about a debate about a Bloomington neighborhood and school, made me think of the book, about relationships in Chicago neighborhoods between different racial and class identifying communities, and how, consistently, local schools are an intersection of those communities and often a forum for dialog and even collaboration.

Now that I’m back in the states, I’m going to try to write in this more. I thought I’d start by keeping a list of media that I’ve consumed that I’ve thought was good or interesting.

The Spokesman This American Life Episode (act 3) tells the story of Anthony Pico who is 18 grew up in the California foster care system and is now a spokesperson for children in the foster care system. I liked it because it showed that with systems that are broken, things are just complicated and hard, and it can’t be broken down into a few heroic success stories. I continue to enjoy TAL, even though the criticism pointed at the program by this satirical Onion article is pretty spot-on.

The Inside Journal is a newspaper distributed to people in prison. My dad, who now works as an educator in a prison gave me a copy. It calls itself “The Hometown Newspaper of America’s Prisoners” and features articles on prison news, personal testimonies, a series on surviving prison, and a few articles on mental health. After reading through the articles, and seeing a letter to the editor referring to a past article on “curing gayness”, I read the fine print and saw that the paper is actually published by an organization called Prison Felowship International, which seems to be evangelical christian in nature. The tone of the articals reveals this background, but it’s a strange matchup as they published, without comment a letter from a queer inmate that was critical of their “curing gayness” article. The articles seemed to be generally critical of systemic problems with the prison and seemed to advocate for changes in those systems and didn’t seem to blame the prisoners for their situations. It also didn’t seem to suggest religion as a final solution to problems in prisons. A few interesting things that I learned from the paper were that women inmates attempt suicide more often than men, but are unsuccessful more often, so men end up having a higher suicide rate. I also learned about a piece of legislation that I hadn’t heard of before called the Second Chance Act which seems to be a bill to improve services to inmates reentering society to soften this transition and to reduce recidivism. It was killed in the Senate before it went to a vote.

Blog entry on the book “The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). The book’s forward is quoted as

Today New York is on its way to becoming a ‘theme-park city,’ where people can get the illusion of the urban experience without the diversity, spontaneity, and unpredictability that have always been its hallmarks. Like the suburbs New Yorkers so long snubbed, the city is becoming more private, more predictable, and more homogenized.

This is certainly the perception I get when I visited Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood throughout the last few years. The blog entry goes on to further quote contributers to the book and I like this one by Maggie Wrigley because she articulates feelings similar to what I think about Bloomington.

I feel sad and angry that the only newcomers to Manhattan from now on will be those rich enough to buy their way in. No new immigrants will bring their ways and flavors and styles to our neighborhoods. No poor artists or writers or musicians will come here and fight to prove their worth. No struggle, no adventure — just pay to stay.

I watched the movie Foxfire last night after not seeing it for a while when it came back into my consciousness because of tabloid press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic being obsessed with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s relationship issues. The film is based on a Joyce Carol Oats novel and, though often melodramatic, makes me nostalgic for the 90s when music was good and people made high school movies that dealt with tough issues in a not-too-sensational way, and didn’t always have perfectly resolved endings. I didn’t notice it the first time I saw the movie, but it’s very explicitly set in Portland which adds a certain realisim to the themes of teen homelessness and drug abuse.

This map still sticks in my head in a way that feels a little like haunting.

I thought of it again recently when I was talking to Chiara about cities that I felt drawn to.  I realized how tied the map could be to my personal history.  My paternal grandmother was born in New Orleans (giant red dot), my maternal grandfather and me in Cleveland (red dot), my mother in Pittsburgh (red dot), My parents both grew up in Flint which, had the map been made a few decades ago, would have had a nice big red dot, and the changes in Flint could easily be tied to those of Detroit/Wayne County (a big red dot again).

We played at Uncle Festers’ Punrk Rock Night which is like some kind of right of passage for Bloomignton Punk bands, getting out of the comfort of the basement and getting into the murky warmth of the bar.  This would have made me pretty uncomfortable a few years ago, but I kind of appreciate the novelty.   Boogdish played and talked fast and crazy and I dare say I was engaged by it.  Basillica played and to me they sound like Dillinger Escape Plan with violins.  I think it’s pretty good, but unrellenting.  They had this guy who organized the videacy series last year do some projections and they were triggered by a midi unit with triggers connected to the drummer’s kick pedal and snare.  A punk band with lots of metal influences called chapstick played.  After they played I overheard them talking about the migration of people from the city of Detroit to the suburbs, but still claiming Detroit as being part of their identity.  There’s that map again. Crazy.  Punk rock night shows go so late, and neither Rawny or Kevey wanted to play last.  It was between either us or Os to play last, and Benny had to work at 8a, so we decided to just set up together and trade off songs which made things move faster, was really fun, and made for a nice end to a somewhat strange show.  I projected this video that I took while on Defiance, Ohio tour while we played:

Rawny and I also made patches with help from Mike.  The text is from the poem Toward Strength by Kimiko Hahn and the floral print is from the embossing on the cover of an old book I found in Sparky’s basement

Muni Wi-Fi Powers Hope at San Francisco Housing Project –:

SAN FRANCISCO — The Westside Courts is a bleak concrete housing project in the city’s Western Addition where violence is closer than a high-speed net connection, and one resident’s first steps online include plans to create a memorial for the people who’ve died here.

Last month, volunteers turned on a novel broadband network in this 135-unit block, throwing a digital lifeline to Emma Casey and other tenants. Using a refurbished PC she picked up for $100, the 47-year-old mother of two adult children is now going online to help her son find a job, get health information and, she says, pay tribute to neighbors who’ve met with violent or untimely deaths.