Oil And Water

 

 "Nerds!"

    

 Police warn witchcraft shop in rural Pa. that tarot is illegal 

   

 A woman was imprisoned for ‘endangering’ her fetus. She gave birth in a jail shower 

   

 Veterinarians Confront a Human Problem: Anti-Vaxxers 

   

 University students march on campus after TAMPONS removed from the MEN'S bathroom 

   

 Paul McCartney Says Yoko Ono's Presence During Beatles Sessions Was Workplace 'Interference'

Copywrong

 

 Negativland - The Sample Show (Part One) 

   

 Negativland - The Sample Show (Part Two)

 

The Difference Between Real Life And What We're Sold

I'm sorry I haven't met everyone's expectations, but, you know what?

As blacks, and whites, we've had different expectations all along.

Signed, The Victim,...

When I'm Here, I'm Here (But When I'm Gone, I'm Gone)

Copyright Criminals (Or How Creativity Made Outlaws)

 

My friend, ndspinelli, mentioned he was soon going to see the great Clyde Stubblefield (from James Brown's band) and that reminded me I'd never posted this PBS program on the current ins and outs of sampling law - a major obstacle for recording artists today, myself included. 

Along with Mr. Stubblefield, it includes many of the biggest names in music criticism (Greg Tate, Harry Allen) label heads (the sour Steve Albini) lawyers, many of the artists and producers I've featured on TMR (George Clinton, DJ Q-Bert, De La Soul, Public Enemy and The Bomb Squad, Coldcut, Prefuse 73, Negativland, etc.) friends of mine (Shock G) all providing a nice over-view of opinions on how the art of recording is done, post-Sgt. Pepper's. I've used them all. 

Dealing with these issues (and how to get around them) is mostly how I spend my free time:

And I'm not ashamed to say, I've been away from it now for almost a month, and it's killing me,...

ADDED - a nice mash-up by the video editors Eclectic Method:

   

All The Great Sound Jockeys (Swim In Identical Spaces)

You can tell a lot about people by the music they make and/or enjoy.

Starting with whether or not they're really and truly "open minded".

In Jazz's early days, after the customers had gone home, artists held "cutting sessions" to compete and play with some unorthodox ideas they liked.

Nobody else would've understood.

I'm saying the artists studiously avoided the so-called "music lovers" they knew were lacking interest in, or failed to grasp, creation in service to the ears and mind - and not their heart or feet.

Those people in need of a pulse to run daytime.

Denied the best.

That's never changed.

America's got a mighty river of ideas, but forced to flow underground, where the sun-worshiping, self-proclaimed naturists are too scared to venture or swim.

They'll overwhelm you they're all there is.

Their outlook rules the airwaves - always the same - a weak municipal tap, available on demand, easily adjusted for hot and cold, and totally unavailable if you don't pay your bill.

Their art's not a resource or a necessity - but still life and death.

That's their "show" - demanded and paid for BTW - and one more recording artist's explanation for the sorry state of American political life:

When you're listening to those guys, we'll always be all wet,...

Oh Boy: A New Day (Traipsing Around The Blogosphere)

And, to think, you never have to leave home to get it,...

 

Obama, Obami, Oh Mammy, Oh Gawd Damn It!

If you want to make us vomit in our mouths, all you have to say is two words - "Michelle Obama" - and there's a good chance, if you time it right, that'll happen. And her total lack of regard for appearances is one reason why. Whether it was the original "I never felt proud of my country" statement, or her jet-setting in Spain while the economy tanked, this woman has never once considered how she looks to the rest of us, because she's so wrapped up in looking at serving herself.

We couldn't help but think of that as we heard this lovely version of "My Favorite Things" playing under this disgusting display of this horrid woman's unearned extravagance, so we thought, almost a a public service, we should also provide a more appropriate version of the song for the visuals. So, turn down the sound on the video above, and after you start it, set the music on the one below to playing and - voila! - you've got the perfect marriage of mammy, mayhem and madness. You can thank us later:

We'll be here all week.



Hat Tip: iOwnTheWorld

ELEVEN

Miguel Soares, Negativland's Time Zones from migso on Vimeo.

Everybody Knows Gay Politics Make Good Films

"I can,...foresee a furious groundswell led by anti-Proposition 8 activists on behalf of 'Milk,' a film whose politics seem to extend quite a bit further than what it actually shows on screen."

-- Andrew Gumbel, noticing the political phoniness of the Oscars, in The Los Angeles Times.

Barney Was Great (Don't Be Barney)

This clip reminded TMR of a recent conversation waaay too much - except that conversation featured a group of Barneys. Pathetic.

How about you? Are you the village idiot?

Hat Tip: Althouse

2009: Just Dumb Enough To Be Dangerous

The Man Can Do No Wrong (Doing Wrong)

"I say heart disease, lung cancer, wrinkles and emphysema are personal issues. A president should be willing to take one for the team."

-- Amy Goldman Koss, suggesting Barack Obama shouldn't attempt to stop smoking in office, in The Los Angeles Times.

Obama: The NewAge Mole Of Communism

"That is not a mole in my yard. That is not a mole in my yard. That..."

-- Steve Salerno, author of SHAM: How The Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, on his much-missed SHAMblog

"Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle. Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary 'mole,' not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through."

-- Frank Chapman, a Communist Party USA supporter, in a e-mail message to People's Weekly World.org

"In Hawaii was an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis, who was certainly in the orbit of the [Communist Party] – if not a member – and who was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson. Eventually, he befriended another family – a Euro-American family – that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago. In his best selling memoir ‘Dreams of my Father’, the author speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as "Frank" as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American, a people who have been the least anticommunist and the most left-leaning of any constituency in this nation – though you would never know it from reading so-called left journals of opinion. At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, "Living the Blues" and when that day comes, I’m sure a future student will not only examine critically the Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in order to subdue Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside."

-- Gerald Horne, in a speech titled "Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party," on Political Affairs.net - the site of "Marxist Thought Online"

"'It's not pessimism,' Obama said. 'One of the things I am always trying to reject is a false choice between blind optimism and despair and cynicism.'"

-- Jon Meacham, in his essay "The Stories We Tell Ourselves," from Newsweek magazine [underlined emphasis TMR's]

"Bill Clinton cast himself as a champion of the “Third Way,” a grandiose political phrase with disturbing intellectual roots. For Bill, it mostly meant that he could split the difference between any two positions. Any hard choice was a “false choice.” When asked how he’d have voted on the first Persian Gulf War, he said he agreed with the minority but would have voted with the majority. He smoked pot but didn’t inhale. Monica Lewinsky had sex with him, but he could swear under oath he didn’t have sex with her."

-- Jonah Goldberg, conservative columnist and author of Liberal Fascism, writing for the National Review

"Sometimes the Dalai Lama states that non-violence is the most important thing. Sometimes he offers broad justifications for violence — such as national defense against Communist imperialism, or individual self-defense against deadly attack. Sometimes he allows only an extremely narrow justification for violence — namely, saving his own life. To puzzle over the contradictions is to miss the non-binary spirit of Tibetan Buddhism."

- From Dave Kopel's article, The Dali Lama's Army

What is the New Age? In one sense, the New Age is not really new. It arose gradually and almost imperceptibly out of the hippie movement spawned during the turbulent decade of the '60s. Building on the foundation of the '50s' beatniks, who were into Zen and other forms of Eastern spirituality, the hippies eventually grew up to enter the corporate world, often taking with them their mystical spiritual and philosophical worldview. During the '70s the so-called "Human Potential Movement" came to the fore, led by Erhard and EST (and its later incarnation, the Forum, marketed through Transformational Technologies). Erhard has acknowledged that EST was most heavily influenced by Zen, Mind Dynamics, and Scientology. Other influences were the German atheist philosopher Nietzsche, the Indonesian occult movement Subud, and the Hindu gurus Swami Muktananda and Satya Sai Baba.{11} Other similar human potential programs and training firms established about the same time or since are Lifespring (John Hanley), Insight (John- Roger Hinkins: Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness), Actualizations, Krone Training, PSI World, Pecos River Institute, Sportsmind, and the Pacific Institute (Louis Tice).

Underlying all of these programs, to one degree or another, are the following concepts: All of reality is part of one essence. This is the Eastern philosophical view known as monism which teaches that 'all is one.' In other words, there is no ultimate distinction between God and creation, or between one individual and another. The distinctions we see are unreal or illusionary. This means (among other things) that God and man are the same-'If you don't see me God, it's because you don't see yourself as God,' Shirley MacLaine told an attendee at a seminar in the New York Hilton. If man is God, then man has unlimited potential, able to accomplish anything he desires and is able to visualize-an attractive idea, no doubt, to many corporate managers, and illustrated in such immensely popular films as "The Karate Kid" and the "Star Wars" trilogy. Further, if "all is one," then there are not only no distinctions between God and man, there are also no distinctions between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil. In fact, all distinctions are mere illusion. To quote Erhard, 'What is, is, and what isn't, isn't.' Or, as the EST graduation booklet put it, 'Obviously the truth is what's so. Not so obviously, it's also so what.' Thus, the problem of humanity, as MacLaine said above, is that we have forgotten our own divinity. This lapse of memory must be overcome by undergoing what is called a "paradigm shift," a drastic change in the way we view the world around us. As New Age populist Marilyn Ferguson wrote, "A paradigm shift is a distinctly new way of thinking about old problems... A new paradigm involves a principle that was present all along but unknown to us. It includes the old as a partial truth, one aspect of How Things Work, while allowing for things to work in other ways as well. By its larger perspective, it transforms traditional knowledge and the stubborn new observations, reconciling their apparent contradictions..."

-- Lawrence A. Pile, in his essay on cultism, The Siren Call of the Pied Pipers

Goddamnit - that's a fucking mole!

Cowboy Logic, 2.0

A long, long, time ago, I (regrettably) played a part in MP3.com. And once they sold out the artists - pretty much for being artists - I kinda got an inkling things weren't going to go well under our new task-masters, the computer geeks. Well, it looks like I was right.

The partial text, below, is clipped from Cnet News and, if you're a musician, it's all bad news: dying record companies, much less money, and nobody with a clue where to get more:

"Some of you out there can pat yourselves on the back. You've been shouting for years on Web sites, message boards, and blogs that the music industry would one day bow to technology.

That day has most certainly arrived.

But this isn't the time to gloat. The digital music revolution is in its infancy. Nobody knows what works yet.

How this plays out is anybody's guess. In the near term, we're likely to see more job cuts and shrinking revenue in the sector as we transition into what Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey calls Music 2.0. The reality is that recorded music will probably never produce the kind of revenue it once did. Digital technology has degraded the value.

I say long live Music 2.0."

Yea, yea, yippee-kai-ya, motherfucker: I say "kiss my ass". I don't know about anybody else but I think it's time to stop this train and start going the other way: back to basics. Back to record companies. Back to the glory days of music and not just how it's delivered. Record companies, at least, knew what fueled this industry; even if they didn't always have a clue what made a good song "good". Fuck this computer shit.



One of my ex's friends once told me "I see a whole line of fools on television, being famous, and you could be in that line." I looked at her like the idiot she was and screamed, "In case you haven't noticed, that's not the line I'm supposed to be in!" (or words to that effect,..)

Why doesn't anybody seem to get that? That if you sell out everything that's important for survival you won't live? I won't anyway. I'd much rather die fighting, that's for sure.

Fuck it. There's too much bad news out there today. I need a break. A shower. Coffee. I need to get out of here. Find someplace I can think, plot, and plan. Plan for a FUTURE. I don't give a fuck anymore:

I'll change everything about this whole damn world by myself if I have to.