Friday, July 23rd, 2004

What Blogs Are Great For

Discussions like this and this, continued here and here and on a host of other blogs (Gimme a bit to catchup, and thanks to Funk Digital.)

posted by @ 9:01 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, July 22nd, 2004

What Blogs Are Good For

Mind dumps from people with fascinating minds. Today’s example: Jess Harvell on Nas, including gratuitous Polyphonic Spree disses. But leave Jimmy Buffet alone, brah. Best concert I attended in 8th grade.

posted by @ 10:24 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 21st, 2004

The Most Intellectually Honest Republican

is Kevin Phillips, hands down. His book American Dynasty is a must-read, kinda like a bloodier-and-oilier-and-scarier version of Fahrenheit 9/11, and without all the references to Michigan.

Phillips is the star of the new Harper’s cover story, a roundtable on the future of progressive politics with such luminaries as Frances Fox Piven, Eric Foner, Ron Daniels, and a strange golem-like Republican-backed creature named Ralph Nader.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt in which Phillips holds forth on what we like to call Republicans dumb, Democrats dumber:

Daniels: Instead, the word “liberal” is a word that the Democrats distance themselves from. They avoid it as if it were the plague.

Nader: And if you get on the defensive in politics, you remain on the defensive for a long time. (Jeff note: Word to Florida, Ralphie!)

Phillips: The reason, of course, is that Democrats have been anesthetized by campaign contributions. And I should add that they have been anesthetized cheaply. During the last 20 or 25 years, the Republicans have been able to take money for granted, but the Democrats know they need to get it, and so they’ve become willing to soften their language and back away from their convictions. Their neediness cripples them.

Nader: The Democrats could be hammering on the money that Bush raises at these $3 million dinners. They could say, ‘This one is for pharmaceutical money, this one’s for oil.’ They could make an issue about it every time. But the Democrats are caught in the same net.

Phillips: It would be devastating if they could attack the conservatives for having used public money to bail out Wall Street and the corporations. But they can’t. the Republicans have so many weaknesses that the Democrats can’t exploit, because they have taken a second, smaller helping form the same trough. What hands you a political opportunity in the United States is when something goes very wrong for the people who have power. Today the Republicans are in trouble, and the main thing they have to keep them from imploding is that the Democrats are not much better…

And later in the roundtable, he adds this in response to what issues could motivate the electorate:

Phillips: the obvious thing is the mess that the Bush Administration is making in Iraq. The imperial approach has lost us credibility all over the world. If this can’t be used as an indictment against Bush, I don’t know what can. The man is the least competent military leader since James Madison let the British burn Washington. Other issues moderates are concerned about are deficit spending and campaign finance. You’ve got to assemble a new progressive movement with disaffected elements of the existing Republican coalition…

posted by @ 7:24 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 21st, 2004

7th Inning Hero

Props to Carlos Delgado for taking a stand in (the somehow appropriately named) Yankee Stadium.

Here’s yet another good reason to hate Steinbrenner. Yeah, I still hate the player, what.

For the record, none of this was an issue earlier this week here in Oakland where the only song sung during the 7th inning is “Take Me Out To The Ballgame”. As it should be, yo.

posted by @ 6:52 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 21st, 2004

More Year of the Monkey Stuff…

In discussing the making of the police state for the Reep convention next month, Nicholas Turse talks in passing about how security measures in Bloomsburg/Bush’s 2004 New York parallel Daley’s 68 Chicago. Whoa!

posted by @ 4:18 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 21st, 2004

Fix Up Look Sharp

OK, happier now. The novelty has worn off and so the silly headers and their annoying exclamation points are gone.New template also means titling is now an issue. Still no comments section. I don’t wanna hear it, OK? Next project is cleaning and updating the links. OK nuff metablogging for now. You don’t care aboout this stuff. Real soon come.

posted by @ 7:06 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, July 20th, 2004

OLD TO THE NEW?

ah hell. i changed the template and now I gotta figure out how to get my sidebars back. til then no links and lists. rrrrrrrah! (maybe photos tho, soon) a big shout to matty c for encouraging this old-ass late adopter to get on the bandwagon…how’s that for mixing metaphors?

10:16 pm–OK it looks all good…woo-hah.

posted by @ 7:39 pm | 1 Comment

Tuesday, July 20th, 2004

Farai Chideya on what Kerry needs to do:holla at the hip-hop generation.

posted by @ 12:07 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, July 19th, 2004

HOUSE AND POST-PUNK NOSTALGIA

Thanks to the wonderfully generous Matos and Daddino (I owe, I owe, so off to rip I go!), eMusic, and Mick Jones and Pennie Smith, I have been swimming in nostalgia all weekend.

The first two compiled a humongous discog of Simon Reynolds’ Generation Ecstasy. (Matos just boiled it down to a 6-CD box set) I’m not ashamed to admit I can’t get beyond the 80s. All those late 80s house and techno discs make me pine for the crate of records some (very smart or just very lucky) asshole swiped from me as we were dismantling after a gig one night at a club on Durant Avenue. If anyone out there wants to give me back my complete collection of Bonesbreaks records, rare-ass Metroplex records and other-stuff-that-fetches-mad-loot-on-eBay no questions asked, I promise I will not prosecute or otherwise beat the shit out of you.

eMusic has the entire early Gary Numan discography. Forget “I, Robot”! Note to electroclashers: this is why most of you suck.

And thanks to Mick Jones, we now have the rehearsal tapes for the London Calling sessions. Appropo enough, he found these tapes recorded in a garage in a box in his garage They’re called The Vanilla Tapes and they’re being released as part of a 2CD+DVD London Calling set this fall. The DVD includes about an hour of footage of the making-of-the-album, including a Don Letts doc and videos for “London Calling”, “Train In Vain”, “The Clampdown” and the famed “Fridays” appearances. I’ll detail the tapes another time in some review for somebody.

I first heard of the Clash with their “This Is Radio Clash” video and my cousin (who soon after got a college radio show at KTUH and called himself “Tommy Gun”) turning me on to “The Magnificent Seven”, probably in the impressionable summer after eighth grade. I was mesmerized by Futura’s mural and the b-boys and rappers. Then I found out these guys did reggae too. Whoa! I got to London Calling and the US debut and was hooked.

It’s funny because in Honolulu, punk was accessible first mostly to the haole and Local kids who could afford the imports and black leather jackets, so in my private-school setting the context was funny: it signified wealth and brattiness, forget eating canned beans and eggs and recording demos in a dirty, carfume-filled garage.

Not that I was a Marxist then, or even prole for that matter–although summer jobs cleaning restaurant toilets and cooking huge vats of rice (not at the same time) do develop sections of the brain that remain inert in vast swaths of the planet…

Weirdly enough my exposure to good post-punk that didn’t come through sifting through my cousin’s 45s happened via trips to the Hawai’i State Library downtown which, thankfully, stocked all the Rolling Stone 5-Star Records like Gang of Four and Talking Heads. (No Gary Numan that I remember. Critics hated him!) Anyway, that’s what you gotta love about socialism–bureaucrats filling the Library record bins with funky agit-prop.

By the time I was in college, I had complete access to all this stuff at the KALX library-a home away from home for a while-not to mention free tickets to see the bands at The Stone or the Berkeley Square and student loan money to go and buy stuff on the return-it-for-full-credit-if-you-don’t-like-it-or-just-want-to-build-up-your-cassette-collection-plan from Rasputins. But I had already been deep into hip-hop and was reading about house in British music mags.

So on weekends like this, it’s cool to catch up on things I missed.

You live long enough, you learn about shit you should have known the first time.

posted by @ 3:37 pm | 0 Comments

Saturday, July 17th, 2004

The plight of the Young Right. Ah, would that the Young Left had it so bad.

posted by @ 8:28 am | 0 Comments



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