Music

I'm not a musician, but I'm playing at being one.

I'm trying to record music for my fake band, Owl. It's about as hard a I thought it would be, even though the songs are covers and are being selected for their relative ease of performance. I've always been musically inclined, even if I haven't really performed music since I was in middle school, and it's been a long time desire of mine to make something of it.

I had a grad school critique yesterday and I presented a clip I had recorded yesterday in front of my professors and fellow grad students. A professor told me the music was terrible, that it sounded like experimental art music, and was therefore bad. And this excited me.

Not because he's right or because he's wrong, but because music is far more resistant to evaluative ambiguity. You like a song or you don't. It's not like visual art, where criticism tend to involve complicated discussions that skirt the simple but important thumbs up- thumbs down evaluation.

Art is also less distinctly connected to its audience. Most people don't look at art the way they listen to music. Most people don't look at art.

And the fact that I'm a novice at music adds to all of the above. It didn't hurt my pride to hear the music was bad the way it would if that judgment had been applied to my art. It has spurred me to reevaluate my music process, and I think it will help me grow.

Very Nice Line

Atrios lives up to his reputation:

The way to be perceived as strong isn't to let George W. Bush tell you where to point your dick.

As true as it is funny. That is, as I was suggesting earlier, liberals and Democrats have a foolish tendency to see their weaknesses and try to overcome them in ways that only highlight their weakness. Like kowtowing to Bush on foreign policy, expecting to get a cookie from Bush or voters or somebody hor having been such good little boys and girls.

Whatever Bill Clinton's weaknesses, and they were indeed legion, he was better than I think any other contemporary Democratic politician at repositioning without signaling to everyone paying attention that he was repositioning.

It's nice, on the other hand, to see Bush appear to be engaging in the same sort of foolish behavior-at Dkos we find that Bushites apparently leaked Bush's supposed reservation about actually signing the Terri Schiavo bill, this coming alongside a general WH distancing from the whole affair. Does the W stand for "wimp", George?

Moral Conservative

What on earth could that ever mean? And, then, what would it be to be "morally liberal?" I mean, I know the answer. Morally conservative = upright and moral. Morally liberal = libertine and permissive. But morality is a lot more complicated than going to church every Sunday and hating gays. It's an actual part of life, a part of one's mind.

One of the larger blind spots our culture has is that we collectively make an uninterrupted straight line between being moral, being religious, and voting Republican.

Why on earth should we do that? Religious people are just as likely to beat their wives, steal, lie as anyone else, ditto Republicans. And Republicans- these people in Congress are far more corrupt than the supposedly corrupt Democrats they took over from in '94- all in eleven years! If Tom Delay escapes jail it will be because of abusing his power to escape culpability.

What moral conservative means, mostly, is self-righteous conservative blowhard. Don't use it, then.

Being who you are

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a progressive? I mean, other than a liberal who refuses to be called the L word.

What are you like if you're not liberal but are progressive? Are you a radical then, or an anarcho-syndicalist, or a socialist or something? I don't think so, but I'm not sure.

My perception is that a progressive is someone who believes calling himself or herself a progressive means that the anti-liberals won't get to call him/her a communist, traitor, or god-hater. Or maybe just that moderates won't be offended by their icky liberalism.

Either way, I'm convinced that calling yourself a progressive accomplishes not very much, and that it marks you as self-hating, obsequious, and weak.

I dunno.

Anyways, I'm a liberal. Fairly moderate, but a liberal nonetheless.

Terry Crusade

I read someone describe the ongoing drama of Terry Schiavo as a thing of DeLilloesque absurdity, and I think that's about right.

Like every human tragedy/spectacle of the week, it is a perfect showcase for virtuosic foolishness of American culture, in particular its vulturelike press. There is something darkly funny about the pandering, cynicism, and abstraction of human drama on the part of the Randall Terry-and-Tom DeLay contingent here (in the adoption of near total abstraction by some of the world's more literalminded people, etc.), but mostly it's just sad.

I agree with the Christianists that Schiavo is a human being, and that's exactly why it's so sick that she's being treated primarily as a political device to manipulate prolifers. I think the humane thing would be to let this essentially braindead woman, whose cerebral cortex has been replaced with spinal fluid, to die a peaceful and natural death, instead of lingering on for eternity, an occasional football for the Christian Right.

Of all the horrible things about this ongoing spectacle, beyond tortured attempts by prolifers to characterize Schiavo as disabled, worse than televised protests featuring signs characterizing Terry's husband as "Little Hitler," is the repulsively insincere, cynical, and ghoulish involvement of the Republican congress. Beyond being very constitutionally dubious, and embodying the very opposite of the hostility-to-federal-power conservatives are supposed to stand for, it just smacks of opportunism and a pathetic pandering to prolife absolutists.

I can't help thinking, watching these red-faced politicians intone seriously about the moral outrage of letting this woman die, raising their voices in holy righteousness, that it's all an act. These people don't care about Terry Schiavo- they don't care about any of this. It's the satisfaction of play-acting outrage and moral superiority that gives this spectacle its juice. The woman at the center disappears, just a placeholder for their pious rage.

As I said, Sad.

Work Ethic etc.

I really like Mark Kleiman. It's because of folks like him that I'm glad to be a member of the reality-based community; he exemplifies a kind of intellectually-flavored seriousness and humanism.

So I thought it would make sense to link and briefly discuss this post of his concerning the American work ethic.

Simply put, we work too damn hard in this country for- for what?!?

This is a discussion that more people should have. There's the distinct sense in this, among the wealthiest countries on the planet, is working itself to death without really stopping to enjoy the fruits of that labor. If you ask me, one of the primary problems is that people also don't stop to think, and that the pace of modern life in part explains the cultural backwardness of large parts of this country. When people are working stressful, enervating jobs, they don't want to expend that sort of energy on their leisure, hence the unfortunately common practice of decompressing before the crap deluge of television, and the embarrassingly high American tolerance for said crap.

Kleiman also makes a point that I must repost here:

Yes, many people can't fill the leisure they now have with anything they actually enjoy. That's what keeps the networks and cable companies in business. Perhaps that would be less true if we didn't think about our educational system primarily in terms of preparing people for the workforce.

Our economic system (and this isn't and shouldn't be seen as an endorsement of any other system) has a rather incredible tendency to instill economic anxiety to the exclusion to other drives. Any idiot knows that looking at education as primarily a road to wealth is an awful and stupid, and yet that's how we tend to look at it.

I daresay that an economy in which there was a greater measure of economic security, and one where there was a greater perception of security, would allow a culture that wasn't so goddamn cheap.

Television

Overheard on television: "A new way to track your kids, tonight, after 'Wife Swap'."

I think that's just about everything that's wrong with America right there.