Seeing or hearing children in pain or danger is something that has come to cause me physical pain since I’ve become a parent and I’m sure most people feel the same way and have to do something to overcome the feelings of base impotence. Turning your rage on Muslims (or giving power to those who tell you it’s OK to do so) is one of those things you would likely be tempted to do. It’s wrong. It shows an incapacity to understand your own place in the world. It narrates the innocent into guilt by association. And worst of all, it doesn’t even show comprehension of the nature of the attack today, which in Brussels specifically concerns a matter of assimilation of minority communities. Trying to recreate those conditions here does no favor to the living and does not honor the dead. My heart goes out to Brussels, as an American and as a person who has lived in a city targeted by terrorists.
A new study from a prominent journal by an expert of some kind was not paid attention to today because a voice in your head you have not identified as your father’s told you not to believe it.
The study concerned an important matter possibly relating to public health, economics or political strife but was not received due to the insistent reflex inspired by a husky Dad voice buried deep in the cerebral cortex warning you that it was not content he would approve of. This triggering voice first entered your sub-conscious brain when you were a child and continues to influence executive cerebral and limbic systems of your body (as well as the house-cleaning functions performed by your digestive system) and thus will not allow you to receive this important breaking news on a topic of critical importance.
The study was full of useful statistics and percentages that might help you adapt and make contingencies for emergencies, as well as anecdotal evidence relating to something that might affect your financial status or one or two ways you might not use a hammer, but its salient points were masked to you by the persistent social conditioning you received by a certain grey eminence whose early rules set down as an exchange for simple nourishment were indispensable for a helpless young homo sapiens facing a hostile world of animals. This conditioning severely affected your ability to assimilate new information, mainly because of the gruff, stern tone of the hunter gatherer, as well as implied and now subconscious threats that a challenge to him meant risking the loss of family members and peers and their body warmth—things at the time critically important to a child’s survival and well-being.
“We are definitely headed for trouble,” said a credentialed and educated person whose face you could barely be brought to look at as he or she offered countervailing information that challenged the prevailing norms, value systems, semiotics and archetypes laid down in your neural pathways by the patriarchal strongman and lawgiver whom you still in moments of stress and discomfort call “Daddy.” The story mentions several things you could do to address the critical issues raised by this news story, which might have been about gold prices or the flammable liquid in your house but whose message conflicted with your father’s opinions and threatened to upend the folkways and learned behavior that are now an immutable part of your psychological profile—offering you your ego, your identity and cultural belonging and likely your entire concept of self, a sense of belonging your brain feels is vitally necessary on this tiny planet totally alone in the universe and vulnerable to expanding stars, asteroids and heat death. As the spirit of your father says, there is a heavy price to pay by questioning tribe loyalty and listening to the plea of an outsider that you listen to him about this important topic which might be about lead toy paint or STDs or municipal bonds or global warming but which is not, unfortunately, powerful enough to get through your impressively large Dad-filter or appeal to your brain’s otherwise rugged and impressive neuroplastic cells.
“The time to act is now,” said a person of authority, perhaps a politician or priest or business leader, “but there is only so much time we have before it will be impossible to act on this [issue your dad has already made up his mind about] whose dire consequences cannot be minimized, unless it is by the comforting and unrelenting voice that gave you the gift of fear when you were still learning to crawl, the voice whose dissent against which offers perilous pitfalls, sickness and likely a hideous and prolonged death.
Posted in Family, Politics, Satire | Tagged family, Politics, satire | Leave a Comment »
In journalism school, in a class on ethics, we were assigned to read “The Media Monopoly,” a thoroughly depressing screed about the onset of media consolidation with dire, unrelenting bad news that we young journalists were about to enter a field of whoredom owned by a handful of self-interested media conglomerates. These companies were filtering out far-ranging, dissenting voices (it was a prep of sorts for Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent.”) It left a big mark on me. The book’s author Ben Bagdikian has just left us now. RIP. (You can read his obituary here.)
I feel two ways about his book in hindsight. In one sense he was absolutely correct: Most of the big media is owned by the same conglomerates who pollute our water and build war materiel and would indeed like to keep us in the dark. At the same time, the Internet has recreated journalism as cottage industry where even the most extreme voices (communists and global warming deniers alike) are free to put their wares in the marketplace of ideas and have them amplified. That’s given us the multiplicity of voices, but it’s also given us a lot of echo chambers for aspirational opinion havers to confirm their own biases with selective research. To the new voices, pretenses to objectivity are boorish, arcane and disingenuous. The kind of serious investigative, bias-free journalism we used to rely on from professionals becomes harder to find and fund, and must often be paid for by philanthropist billionaires –the patronage of the modern tech Medici. Meanwhile, a lot of old-time professional journalists are simply getting out of the business because there’s no money in it and going into PR.
The Internet age has led us to a kind of anarchy of opposing realities where you can choose your own facts and deny things that are indisputable–global warming, the Sandy Hook massacre or the fact that the Sept. 11 attacks were planned by Muslim extremists. The Internet has given people the confidence to say they trust nothing they read. But it hasn’t confronted them with the consequences of that sentiment: You now have more work to do in scrutinizing what is real by taking multiple viewpoints into account and understanding your own subjective interference in it, including the value system given to your by your peers and parents. Somebody somewhere on the Internet right now will be very happy to let you off the hook for this work by coddling you and your values, and in this you are just as manipulated as you would be by General Electric trying to bury a pollution story.
In this light, the handful of sober conglomerate voices Bagdikian warned us against don’t look all that bad, frankly.
But here we are. Change is change and not to be judged, least of all by me. Powerful money interests have lost a great deal of power over information. It happened quite naturally in a technological upheaval. Power over it has come back to the people, even sweaty, frustrated schizophrenics sitting on their laptops at night. Many people, however, will likely not know what to do with all the conflicting information they have. They will be confused and they will turn to the people they trust, and once again risk becoming tools of somebody else’s will. They will repeat others’ ideas, not innovate on them, and act as if this is some sort of emancipation. The power only to repeat.
So mission accomplished. Patriarchy smashed. Hope you have some idea what you’re in for.
Posted in News, Politics, Society, The Web | Tagged "The Media Monopoly", Ben Bagdikian, journalism | Leave a Comment »
I am pleased to unveil the website for my music project Salon de la Guerre, now up and running at salondelaguerre.com.
Check it out.
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If you buy one album this year … it should really be “Blackstar” by David Bowie. If you buy two albums … then maybe you should add “La vache qui pleure” by Kate and Anna McGarrigle.
But if you buy 23 albums this year, I hope one of them might be my new release, “Clam Fake,” now available on Amazon and iTunes and other places where music is (still sold).
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Clam Fake, Music, Salon De La Guerre | Leave a Comment »
Dear readers, I returned to music in the latter half of 2015 and my seventh (!!!) album is coming out this month. It comprises 12 new songs of rock and pop and a wee bit of jazz. The record is called Clam Fake, and it drops in a week or so on iTunes and Amazon (as well as other sites like CD Baby). By “drops” I mean it will be released or issued. I have not physically dropped anything. That’s just slang to make me look more hip and knowledgeable.
Those of you who are fans might be surprised by some of the new territory I’m staking out. After almost 27 years, for instance, I picked up an alto saxophone, an instrument I had not put my fingerprints on since I was a teenager. My new interest in this instrument was sparked partly because I wanted to see what a sax sounded like next to a trivially tuned guitar orchestra. I was also mildly curious to see what I could still do with a dear woodwind so estranged from me. The saxophone is the only instrument I’ve actually been tutored on, but I learned nothing about music theory or chords from it. I gave it up partly because I wanted to learn songwriting on instruments like the guitar that I had taught myself so that creativity, discovery and technique could grow together. In other words, I wanted to be a punk and not know how to play the instrument I was playing.
But I was pleasantly surprised in one 10 minute jam that I could not only squeeze music from the sax but do it for some 10 uninterrupted minutes of long, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman-inspired improvisation. This jam became the basis of two songs on Clam Fake, one of which is called “Red Clay Moses” (attached here).
The rest of the album relies heavily on guitar, however, and will be more familiar to my fans (such as they are), though I am also very proud to say that I’ve grown as a singer, guitarist and producer, and that Clam Fake is more listenable all the way through than my previous efforts.
You might have noticed my new songs already in the list on the right. The ones at the top are from Clam Fake, and are interspersed with six outtakes (in a hat tip to the nice critic from the Equal Ground who said I should filter more, I have left weaker songs off the album this time, though I am quite pleased to say that I now boast some 95 songs among my intellectual property, all of which are at home here on my blog).
If you like what you hear on this page, you can hear more on my Soundcloud page, and if you like that too, please spread the word!
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Clam Fake, Salon De La Guerre | Leave a Comment »
I’m hurting for Paris right now. Though lots of people are, I think New Yorkers who lived through 9/11 (and maybe those in Madrid and Mumbai) are feeling it perhaps a bit more acutely. There’s something about living in a big city. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t just make you some jaded creep. You live every day as a certain trust exercise with people in very close proximity. You constantly meet people with different accents and languages and backgrounds and amazing life histories if you bother to ask them questions. To negotiate this kind of maze requires humility and respect and reserve. You are all sitting on top of each other in sometimes cramped conditions and you have to make it work, and that requires in many ways boundless optimism. Your body comes to know patience and forbearance and you marvel that something so big and complex can work at all. To be that close to people and to have members of a sick cult betray that trust, violently, is something that made me physically ill after Sept. 11. And I felt it a little bit again tonight after seeing the images from Paris, a beautiful city I once visited and hope to again.Eiffel Tower
Posted in Global Affairs | Tagged 9/11, attacks, Paris | 1 Comment »
- Who knew gold prices would plunge that far?
- Why don’t you try running a country?
- Who needs a job at the Export-Import Bank, anyway?
- I can go to any country in the world, so who cares if I don’t have children?
- I don’t like it when women are called bossy.
- Well as far as I knew he really did have a friend with an EpiPen who was dying!
- Joanna Newsom is a genius!
- My bones are just dense.
- We were working with the best intelligence we had at the time.
- He just has to get drunk and throw things and leave the room angry sometimes, but I love him, OK?
Posted in Life | Tagged Joanna Newsom | Leave a Comment »
–*Lack of mental health care in the United States
–*Confederate flags
–*Marilyn Manson
–*Short skirts
–*Violent videos
–*The Dukes of Hazzard
–*Violent movies
–*Immigrants
–*Young black males
–*Twinkies
–*Barack Obama
–*Low carb diets
–*High fail quotas in our engineering schools
–*Godlessness
–*Unless it’s the god of Islam, in which case we are blaming that God
–*Atheists removing the Ten Commandments from state property
–*The lack of a Second Amendment in the Ten Commandments (after a fact check to make sure there is not a Second Amendment in the Ten Commandments).
–*Them
–*The others
–*The victims
–*Everybody but myself
–*Myself
Posted in Politics, Satire | Tagged Charleston, confederate flags, gun control, mass shooting, South Carolina | Leave a Comment »
Ten theories of quantum physics first introduced on Seinfeld.
You must look at this model!
Are you celebrating heritage or committing mass murder right now? These three college students answered wrong!
Four types of herring you should never talk to on a subway.
Ten ugly children who grew up to be ugly adults.
Why this millennial is not answering your phone call.
Matt Damon is totally rocking this prehensile tail.
You will own this hedgehog
Ten old stars who used to be young.
This schizophrenic millionaire says the earth has already been destroyed.
He knocked down a wall in his basement. You won’t be surprised where the excavators found him.
Ten gay celebrities that came from heterosexual parents.
Why you have to get a reverse mortgage right now (we’ve kidnapped your child).
Ten pictures of celebrities pleading for their lives.
This credit card opens doors for you. I just unlocked somebody’s door with mine.
Cover your ears! Mandrake!
Ten people didn’t know they were bleeding from the eyes, ears, mouth and ass.
Ten poisonous spiders that laid eggs in your ear last night.
The best all time house fires.
This massive sperm fail left a female lawyer’s egg unfructified.
Which of these Nobel Prize winners became shattered post-Nobel Prize award winners?
You’ll never guess what a poorly grounded microphone did to this billionaire.
Posted in The Internet | Tagged Buzzfeed, Clickbait, Confederate flag, Matt Damon, other news | Leave a Comment »
Beauty is Imperfection 