Pt2= SUNN O))) piece. THX Glynnis.
| i-D vs SOMA pt1 | 26 11 2004 | |
| I don't own a record label, on the contrary.
Pt2= SUNN O))) piece. THX Glynnis. | ||
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| SUNN tour update | 26 11 2004 | |
| Support:
Birmingham - Black Galaxy Nottingham - Hototogisu + Opaque + They Live! Newcastle - Atavist + MARZURAAN Glasgow - Sunburned Hand of The Man Belfast - Captain Insano + Killing Spree Dublin - No Support (Early Show) ATP - That night, Pelican, SUNN O))), The Fall, Violent Femmes Manchester - The End + Transmission 0 + Atavist + Esoteric London - Whithouse Bristol - Moss + Geisha MANCHESTER venue changed to Satan's Hollow | ||
| final SUNN dates | 24 11 2004 | |
| We're flying to the old country friday. Looking forward to seeing all of the hordes! Below are the final dates. Please note Thessoloniki was cancelled, as was the Greek L.A.M.F. gig, unfortunately. Athens will slay however, and Cope is joining us there, as well as some of the UK dates possibly. Holy McGrail will join 4-5 dates in UK, Attila Csihar will be present at ATP, Manchester and London, Peter Rehberg will bless us with his grace in London also. Peel Session on the 9th to include Savage Pencil, Anthony Sylvester, Holy McGrail amongst the 3 Americans. I am staying over to record a Southern Session for GINNUNGAGAP "Grimm Willows" LP together with Anthony Sylvester and Alexander Tucker at Southern Studios in London.
Tour merchandise to include the CroMonolithic remix 12", LiveWhite CD set, tour shirts, sweatshirts and posters, Cavedrone tshirts, A flat tshirts, Ginnungagap 12", Lotus Eaters 7", etc. Good times ahead! SUNN O))) Rather Grimm 2004 Mo 29 Nov England Birmingham The Custard Factory Tu 30 Nov England Nottingham Cabaret We 01 Dec England Newcastle The Cluny Th 02 Dec Scotland Glasgow Oran Mor Fr 03 Dec Nr Irleand Belfast The Pavillion Sa 04 Dec Ireland Dublin Whealans (early show) Su 05 Dec Hastings All Tomorrow's Parties Mo 06 Dec England Manchester Roadhouse Tu 07 Dec England London The Scala w/WHITEHOUSE We 08 Dec England Bristol Thekla Fr 10 Dec Greece Athens AN Club | ||
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| Runhild vs SUNN 0803 | 23 11 2004 | |
| Just recieved this amazing photo I needed to share with you all. From a O))) PDX show in the summer of 03. | ||
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| SUNN O))) vs CA 1104 visual evidence | 23 11 2004 | |
| los angeles 11/18
san francisco 11/21 Hail to everyone who came out. Special thanks to our guests & Angela, it's our honor. | ||
| SUNN meets John Wiese! | 19 11 2004 | |
| Great performance in LA's Knitting Factory last night... SF show on Sunday will have a lineup of: Greg Anderson, John Wiese, Gerritt, Nate Carson and myself! Should be cosmic mind... | ||
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| 19 11 2004 | ||
| designed by Wes/Burlesque | ||
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| Overcoming dualism through hallucinogens. | 19 11 2004 | |
| by Dr. Susan Blackmore
New Scientist, 13 November 2004 p 36 (box within cover story "The Intoxication Instinct" by Helen Phillips and Graham Lawton) Note: This is the original version, and was slightly edited for publication. Psychedelic drugs provide some of the best evidence we have that the mind is the brain; that our thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions are created by chemistry. Take a drug, particularly a hallucinogen, and any of these can change, and even our innermost selves can be quite transformed. This means these drugs can be scary, and need to be taken with great care and respect, for they can potentially reveal some of the deepest secrets about our minds and consciousness. A century ago, long before prohibition, the groundwork of a science of intoxication was already being laid down, and the American psychologist, William James, experimented with the anaesthetic, nitrous oxide or “laughing gas”. Our normal rational consciousness, he said, is just one special type of consciousness, while all around it, “parted from it by the filmiest of screens” are other entirely different forms of consciousness, always available if only the requisite stimulus is applied. Other experimenters meticulously described the effects of inhaling ether, chloroform or cannabis, and the strange distortions of time, perception, and sense of humour this induced. More curiously, they also described changes in belief, and even in philosophy. For example, nitrous oxide has the curious capacity to change materialist scientists into idealists. Its discoverer, Sir Humphrey Davy, bravely took the drug himself as an experiment in 1799 and ended up exclaiming that “Nothing exists but thoughts”. Others made similar observations and found their views profoundly shifted by even brief encounters with the other side of that filmy screen. This raises the peculiar question of whether what James’s called “our normal rational consciousness” is necessarily the best for understanding the world. After all, if one’s view of the world can change so dramatically with the aid of a simple molecule like nitrous oxide, how can we be sure that our normal brain chemistry is the one most suited to doing science and philosophy? What if evolution had taken a slightly different turn and we had ended up with brain chemistry less inclined to make us believe in God or the afterlife. Or what if our actual brain chemistry evolved to help us survive and reproduce at the cost of giving us false beliefs about the world? If so, it is possible that mind-altering drugs might in fact give us a better, not worse, insight than we have in our so-called normal state. Take the common experience of losing our separate self, or becoming one with the universe. This may seem, to some, like mystical nonsense, but in fact it fits far better with a scientific understanding of the world than our normal dualist view. Most of us feel, most of the time, that we are some kind of separate self who inhabits our body like a driver in a car or a pilot in a plane. We speak about “my body” and even “my brain” as though “I” were something separate from them both. Throughout history many people have believed in a soul or spirit that can leave the body and even survive after death. Yet science has long known that this cannot be so. There is no observer inside the brain who has our experiences, and no space in the brain from where an inner self can control it. There is just a brain that is made of exactly the same kind of stuff as the world around it. In other words, we really are one with the universe. This means that the psychedelic sense of self may actually be truer than the common dualist view. So although our normal state is better for surviving and reproducing, it may not always be best for understanding who and what we are. Perhaps we could even have sciences carried out in some of these intoxicated states. This was just what psychologist, Charles Tart, suggested in 1972, in the prestigious journal Science. He likened different states of consciousness to different paradigms in science and proposed the creation of “state specific sciences”; new sciences which would be done by scientists working in altered states and communicating their findings to others in those states. These new sciences might only have limited application but this makes the point that our normal state, constrained as it is by the particular chemistry evolution has given us, may not be the only way to try to understand the universe. Since Tart’s pioneering work on mapping altered states, most of the psychedelic drugs have become prohibited and research has largely been stifled. While the cultures that have used these drugs for millennia treat them with great respect, and control them with elaborate rituals and traditions, our culture gives over their control to criminals and tries to deny their amazing mind-revealing capacities. Perhaps one day, when prohibition is finally abandoned, scientists may once again take up the promise offered by those tiny little chemicals that can tell us who and what we are. | ||
| 16 11 2004 | ||
| MEDIC ROCKS WITH DOCS
By ERIKA MARTINEZ November 16, 2004 -- Legendary Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth has stopped "runnin' with the devil" to do God's work - riding ambulances in gritty neighborhoods throughout the city to become a paramedic. The famed rocker has cut his trademark blond mane and dropped his celebrity persona so he can ride unrecognized with ambulance crews in The Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn several nights a week. Several weeks ago, the charismatic crooner saved the life of a Bronx woman who had a heart attack by shocking her back to life with a defibrillator. The Post caught up with Roth last week as the 1980s icon grabbed a slice of pepperoni pizza after sitting for hours in an ambulance waiting for a call. Just three days earlier, he had played to an adoring rock-'n'-roll crowd in Minnesota. Roth, 49, initially expressed reservations about discussing his latest endeavor because he felt publicity "would diminish what I am trying to do here." But the following day, he told The Post more about his new passion. "I have been on over 200 individual rides now," Roth told The Post. "Not once has anyone recognized me, which is perfect for me." "It has been an eye-opening adventure," said Roth, who asked The Post not to disclose which "very colorful neighborhoods" he works in because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself or his colleagues. Linda Reissman, Roth's EMS consultant and tutor, said she didn't know what to expect of her famous pupil at first, but "he has probably turned out to be one of the best students I have ever had." "I am amazed," said Reissman, who is training Roth for Brooklyn-based company Emergency Care Programs Inc. Reissman described Roth as very studious, punctual and hungry for knowledge. "He is very serious," she said. "You would never know you were dealing with a rock-'n'-roll guy, his commitment really is touching. He wants to help people." The singer, who is used to being onstage in a packed arena, sees at least one similarity in his two careers. "I am a member of a team again, and that's what a rock band always was," Roth said. Thanks to Menche for bringing this to our attention. From the New York Post website | ||
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| RIP JHON BALANCE | 15 11 2004 | |
| IT IS WRITTEN in The Book of the Law:
"Every man and every woman is a Star. "It is Our Lady of the Stars that speaketh to thee, O thou that art a star, a member of the Body of Nuith! Listen, for thine ears become dulled to the mean noises of the earth; the infinite silence of the Stars woos thee with subtile musick. Behold her bending down above thee, a flame of blue, all-touching, all-penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, and her lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting the little flowers, and think that all thy grossness shall presently fall from thee as thou leapest to her embrace, caught up into her love as a dewdrop into the kisses of the sunrise...." Love is the law, love under will. The Benediction of the All-Begetter, All-Devourer be upon thee. Threshold House | ||
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| 14 11 2004 | ||
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| RIP BASTARD | another heathen hits the dirt | 14 11 2004 |
| Rapper collapses and dies aged 35
Rap artist ODB (Ol' Dirty Bastard), one of the most colourful characters in the world of hip-hop, has died aged 35. ODB, real name Russell Jones, collapsed and died at the Manhattan recording studio in New York on Saturday. A spokesman for his record company, Gabe Tesoriero, said the rapper, who had complained of chest pains, was dead by the time paramedics reached him. ODB - whose most famous song was Got Your Money - had recently finished a prison sentence for drug possession. ODB was a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan in the early 1990s. He later released several singles which were hits in the US, and worked with a variety of artists including Mariah Carey. Got Your Money, which featured Kelis, was a big hit in the UK. Over the years he was involved in several shootings and was arrested on a variety of charges, including shoplifting, drug offences and threatening a former girlfriend. In 2001 he was jailed for two years for possessing drugs and escaping from a rehab clinic. He had been working on a comeback album, which was nearly finished, when he died. His mother, Cherry Jones, said: "To the public he was known as Old Dirty Bastard, but to me he was known as Rusty. The kindest most generous soul on earth." from BBC.com | ||
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| Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results | 11 11 2004 | |
| Interesting visualization on the bichromatic elctoral obssession abstract the media has been pumping down your throats the past week. | ||
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| 11 11 2004 | ||
| pee-ess-eye (psi)
@ Tonic (107 Norfolk), NYC Thursday, November 18th – 10:00pm $7 Tension landscrape through distant analysis ankle deep in silence of scapegoat dumbdown boom halter becomes the focus uninvited! Please take the time to leave your pal, the tv set, for an abbreviated compendium in that seemingly endless series of discourses on hell. http://www.tonic107.com http://www.evolvingear.com | ||
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| The continuing saga of a legend | 10 11 2004 | |
| Norwegian black metallers GORGOROTH made headlines in major Latin American newspapers after the audience rioted at their show in San Salvador (capital of El Salvador) on Saturday (Nov. 6). According to a posting on the band's web site, "the audience got so ecstatic over the presence of the first black metal act visiting their country that the situation got totally out of control. The security and the police could not handle the people outside the venue so they had to call in the special forces, 'del cuerpo de Proteccion a Personalides Importantes' (PPI). When the PPI reached the venue the masses of people not getting a ticket for the already sold-out show kicked in the entrance door and lots of fighting between the audience began. The audience started to kick in doors and toilets, several injuries occured and major damages to the venue. The PPI decided in the end to use gas on the audience to get the situation under control. When GORGOROTH entered the stage 30 security people had to be on stage preventing the audience to enter it. The fighting [continued] through GORGOROTH's performance and the PPI and the police had to hold the audience inside the venue with firearms to get the band in safety. GORGOROTH [walked away] from the incident without any injuries."
GORGOROTH drew international attention in early February after they were accused of "offending religious feelings" during a concert in Poland. The band were also suspected of breaching the Polish law on protection of animals by displaying the severed and impaled heads of sheep as part of their stage act. | ||
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| ARCHIVE 7 | 06 11 2004 | |
| Cover artwork for the LIVEWHITE tour CDR set (5"+3" CDRs), featuring liveset recording from last summer's North Six date in Brooklyn.
Set is edition of 200 copies, available on sale at the upcoming RATHER GRIMM dates, and afterward direct from the label ARCHIVE via mailorder. | ||
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| 06 11 2004 | ||
| Beta-Lactam Ring Records wrote:
Record release party for the new albums "Angry Eelectric Finger" by Nurse With Wound What: An evening with Nurse With Wound and special guests Colin Potter, irr.app.(ext.), Steven Stapleton and... When: Saturday, Dec. 11th, 2004 - 8PM Where: Doug Fir Lounge 830 E. Burnside, Portland, Oregon. www.dougfirlounge.com Tickets available now from www.ticketswest.com or www.jackpotrecords.com. What: An art exhibit with Steven Stapleton for 75 handpainted covers for the albums "Angry Eelectric Finger". When: Sunday, Dec. 12th, 2004 - 7-9 PM Where: Optic Nerve Arts 1829 NE Alberta, Portland, OR. One night only. Your ticket from the previous night event will get you into the gallery. To properly ring in Nurse With Wound's simultaneous release of 3 new collaborative albums (and one mail-order only LP) with Jim O'Rourke, irr.app.(ext.) & Cyclobe, each titled "Angry Electric Finger", Beta-lactam Ring Records & Jackpot Records are pleased to bring Steven Stapleton back to the luckiest city in the US: Portland, Oregon. The record release party at Doug Fir Lounge will be for one evening only & will also include an exhibition of 75 of Steven Stapleton's paintings the following night. Also in attendance will be Matt Waldron of irr.app.(ext) and Colin Potter of Nurse With Wound and Ora. The albums on CD & vinyl will be available along with other surprises. Performances by colin Potter, irr.app.(ext.) and dj set by Steven Stapleton plus more to be announced. | ||
| 05 11 2004 | ||
| Onward Christian soldiers
The hopefuls in the Democrat camp really believed victory in the US election was within their grasp. How did they get it so wrong? They failed to appreciate, says Simon Schama, that their country is now in fact two nations that loathe and fear each other - Godly and Worldly America Friday November 5, 2004 The Guardian In the wee small hours of November 3 2004, a new country appeared on the map of the modern world: the DSA, the Divided States of America. Oh yes, I know, the obligatory pieties about "healing" have begun; not least from the lips of the noble Loser. This is music to the ears of the Victor of course, who wants nothing better than for us all to Come Together, a position otherwise known as unconditional surrender. Please, fellow curmudgeons and last ditchers, can someone on the losing side just for once not roll over and fall into a warm bath of patriotic platitudes at such moments, but toot the flute of battle instead; yell and holler and snarl just a wee bit? I don't want to heal the wound, I want to scratch the damned thing until it hurts and bleeds - and then maybe we'll have what it takes to get up from the mat. Do we think the far-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, in the ashy dawn of his annihilation in 1964, wanted to share? Don't think so. He wanted to win; sometime. And now, by God, he has. "We are one nation," the newborn star of Democrats, Senator-elect Barack Obama, exclaimed, even as every salient fact of political life belied him. Well might he invoke Lincoln, for not since the Civil war has the fault line between its two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable. Even territorially (with the exception of Florida, its peninsular finger pointing expectantly at tottering Cuba), the two Americas are topographically coherent and almost contiguous. One of those Americas is a perimeter, lying on the oceans or athwart the fuzzy boundary with the Canadian lakes, and is necessarily porous and outward-looking. The other America, whether montagnard or prairie, is solidly continental and landlocked, its tap roots of obstinate self-belief buried deep beneath the bluegrass and the high corn. It is time we called those two Americas something other than Republican and Democrat, for their mutual alienation and unforgiving contempt is closer to Sunni and Shia, or (in Indian terms) Muslim and Hindu. How about, then, Godly America and Worldly America? Worldly America, which of course John Kerry won by a massive landslide, faces, well, the world on its Pacific and Atlantic coasts and freely engages, commercially and culturally, with Asia and Europe in the easy understanding that those continents are a dynamic synthesis of ancient cultures and modern social and economic practices. This truism is unthreatening to Worldly America, not least because so many of its people, in the crowded cities, are themselves products of the old-new ways of Korea, Japan, Ireland or Italy. In Worldly America - in San Francisco, Chicago, San Diego, New York - the foreigner is not an anxiety, but rather a necessity. Its America is polycultural, not Pollyanna. Godly America, on the other hand, rock-ribbed in Dick Cheney's Wyoming, stretched out just as far as it pleases in Dubya's deeply drilled Texas, turns its back on that dangerous, promiscuous, impure world and proclaims to high heaven the indestructible endurance of the American Difference. If Worldly America is, beyond anything else, a city, a street, and a port, Godly America is, at its heart (the organ whose bidding invariably determines its votes over the cooler instructions of the head), a church, a farm and a barracks; places that are walled, fenced and consecrated. Worldly America is about finding civil ways to share crowded space, from a metro-bus to the planet; Godly America is about making over space in its image. One America makes room, the other America muscles in. Worldly America is pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical. In California it passed Proposition 71, funding embryonic stem cell research beyond the restrictions imposed by Bush's federal policy. Godly America is mythic, messianic, conversionary, given to acts of public witness, hence the need - in Utah and Montana and a handful of other states - to poll the voters on amendments to their state constitution defining marriage as a union between the opposite sexes. But then Worldly America is said to feed the carnal vanities; Godly America banishes and punishes them. From time to time Godly America will descend on the fleshpots of Worldly America, from Gotham (it had its citadel-like Convention there after all) to Californication, will shop for T-shirts, take a sniff at the local pagans and then return to base-camp more convinced than ever that a time of Redemption and Repentance must be at hand. But if the stiff-necked transgressors cannot be persuaded, they can be cowed and conquered. No wonder so many of us got the election so fabulously wrong even into the early hours of Tuesday evening, when the exit polls were apparently giving John Kerry a two- or three-point lead in both Florida and Ohio. For most of us purblind writers spend our days in Worldly America and think that Godly America is some sort of quaint anachronism, doomed to atrophy and disappear as the hypermodernity of the cyber age overtakes it, in whatever fastness of Kentucky or Montana it might still circle its wagons. The shock for the Worldlies is to discover that Godly America is its modernity; that so far from it withering before the advance of the blog and the zipdrive, it is actually empowered by them. The tenacity with which Godly America insists the theory of evolution is just that - a theory - with no more validity than Creationism, or that Iraqis did, in fact, bring down the twin towers, is not in any way challenged by the digital pathways of the information age. In fact, such articles of faith are expedited and reinforced by them. Holy bloggers bloviate, Pentecostalists ornament their website with a nimbus of trembling electronic radiance and, for all I know, you can download Pastor John Ashcroft singing the Praises of the Lord right to your Godpod. Nor, it transpires, is the exercise of the franchise a sure-fire way for the Democrats to prevail. The received wisdom in these Worldly parts (subscribed to by yours truly; mea culpa) was that a massively higher turn out would necessarily favour Kerry. P Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign was credited with getting out young voters en masse who ignored the polls in 2000. We saw a lot of Springsteen and Bon Jovi and ecstatic upturned faces. Who could possibly match their mobilisation, we thought? Answer: Jehovah and his Faithful Servant St Karl the Rove. The biggest story of all in 2004 is the astounding success of the Republicans in shipping millions of white evangelicals to the polls who had also stayed at home four years earlier. We thought we were fired up with righteous indignation - against the deceits of the propaganda campaign for the Iraq war, against the gross inequities of the tax cuts - but our fire was just hot air compared to the jihad launched by the Godlies against the infamy of a tax rollback, of merely presuming to diss the Dear Leader in a time of war. And the battalions of Christian soldiers made the telling difference in the few critical places where Godly and Worldly America do actually rub shoulders (or at least share a state), Ohio above all. By the lights of the psephology manuals, Ohio ought to have been a natural for the Democrats: ageing industrial cities such as Akron and Dayton, with big concentrations of minorities, suffering prolonged economic pain from out sourced industries. Cleveland and Cincinnati are classic cities of the Worldly plain: half-decayed, incompletely revived; great art museums, a rock'n'roll hall of fame, a terrific symphony orchestra. But drive a bit and you're in deep Zion, where the Holsteins graze by billboards urging the sinful to return to the bosom of the Almighty, the church of Friday night high school football shouts its hosannas at the touchdowns, and Support Our Troops signs grow as thick as the rutabaga. At first sight there's not much distance between this world and western Pennsylvania, but were the state line to be marked in 20ft-high electrified fences the frontier between the two Americas couldn't be sharper. The voters of the "Buckeye State" cities did care about their jobs; they did listen when Kerry told them the rich had done disproportionately nicely from Bush's tax cut. But they were also listening when their preachers (both black and white) fulminated against the uncleanliness of Sodom and the murder of the unborn. In the end, those whose most serious anxieties were the state of the economy and the Mess-o-potamia were outvoted by those who told exit pollers their greatest concern in 2004 was "moral values". Faith-driven politics may even have had a hand in delivering Florida to Bush by a surprising margin, since it seems possible that Jewish voters there who voted for "my son the vice-president" Joe Lieberman (not to mention Hadassah, oy what nachas) in 2000, actually switched sides as a result of the president's support for Ariel Sharon. It wasn't that the Kerry campaign didn't notice the confessional effect. It was just that they didn't know what to do about it. Making the candidate over as some sort of altar boy (notwithstanding directives from Rome instructing the faithful on the abhorrence of his position on abortion) would have been about as persuasive as kitting him out with gun, camouflage and dead Canada geese; a laboriously transparent exercise in damning insincerity. In Godly America the politics of impassioned conviction inevitably trumped the politics of logical argument. On CNN a fuming James Carville wondered out loud how a candidate declared by the voting public to have decisively won at least two of the three televised debates could have still been defeated. But the "victory" in those debates was one of body language rather than reasoned discourse. It registered more deeply with the public that the president looked hunched and peevish than that he had been called by Kerry on the irrelevance of the war in Iraq to the threat of terror. And since the insight was one of appearance not essence, it could just as easily be replaced by countless photo-ops of the president restored to soundbite affability. The charge that Bush and his second war had actually made America less, not more safe, and had created, not flushed out, nests of terror, simply failed to register with the majority of those who put that issue at the top of their concerns. Why? Because, the president had "acted", meaning he had killed at least some Middle Eastern bad dudes in response to 9/11. That they might be the wrong ones, in the wrong place - as Kerry said over and over - was simply too complicated a truth to master. Forget the quiz in political geography, the electorate was saying (for the popular commitment to altruistic democratic reconstruction on the Tigris is, whatever the White House orthodoxy, less than Wolfowitzian), it's all sand and towelheads anyway, right? Just smash "them" (as one ardent Bush supporter put it on talk radio the other morning) "like a ripe cantaloupe". Who them? Who gives a shit? Just make the testosterone tingle all the way to the polls. Thus it was that the war veteran found himself demonised as vacillating compromiser, the Osama Candidate, while a pair of draft-dodgers who had sacrificed more than eleven hundred young men and women to a quixotic levantine makeover, and one which I prophesy will be ignominiously wound up by next summer (the isolationists in the administration having routed the neocons), got off scot free, lionised as the Fathers of Our Troops. Well, the autumn leaves have, just this week, fallen from the trees up here in the Hudson Valley and the scales from the eyes of us deluded worldlies. If there is to be any sort of serious political future for the Democrats, they have to do far more than merely trade on the shortcomings of the incumbents - and there will be opportunities galore in the witching years ahead (a military mire, a fiscal China syndrome and, hullo, right before inauguration, a visit from al-Qaida). The real challenge is to voice an alternative social gospel to the political liturgy of the Godlies; one that redefines patriotism as an American community, not just a collection of wealth-seeking individuals; one that refuses to play a zero-sum game between freedom and justice; one in which, as the last populist president put it just a week ago, thought and hope are not mutually exclusive. You want moral values? So do we, but let them come from the street, not the pulpit. And if a fresh beginning must be made - and it must - let it not begin with a healing, but with a fight. © Simon Schama Hang-Ups: A Collection of Essays on Art, by Simon Schama, is published by BBC books, Price £30. http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1343956,00.html?gusrc=rss | ||
| Moore sarcasm and bad sports metaphors | 05 11 2004 | |
| Friday, November 5th, 2004
17 Reasons Not to Slit Your Wrists... by Michael Moore Dear Friends, Ok, it sucks. Really sucks. But before you go and cash it all in, let's, in the words of Monty Python, “always look on the bright side of life!” There IS some good news from Tuesday's election. Here are 17 reasons not to slit your wrists: 1. It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again. 2. Bush's victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. 3. The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%), proving once again that your parents are always wrong and you should never listen to them. 4. In spite of Bush's win, the majority of Americans still think the country is headed in the wrong direction ( 56% ), think the war wasn't worth fighting ( 51% ), and don’t approve of the job George W. Bush is doing ( 52% ). (Note to foreigners: Don't try to figure this one out. It's an American thing, like Pop Tarts.) 5. The Republicans will not have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. If the Democrats do their job, Bush won't be able to pack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues. Did I say "if the Democrats do their job?" Um, maybe better to scratch this one. 6. Michigan voted for Kerry! So did the entire Northeast, the birthplace of our democracy. So did 6 of the 8 Great Lakes States. And the whole West Coast! Plus Hawaii. Ok, that's a start. We've got most of the fresh water, all of Broadway, and Mt. St. Helens. We can dehydrate them or bury them in lava. And no more show tunes! 7. Once again we are reminded that the buckeye is a nut, and not just any old nut -- a poisonous nut. A great nation was felled by a poisonous nut. May Ohio State pay dearly this Saturday when it faces Michigan. 8. 88% of Bush's support came from white voters. In 50 years, America will no longer have a white majority. Hey, 50 years isn't such a long time! If you're ten years old and reading this, your golden years will be truly golden and you will be well cared for in your old age. 9. Gays, thanks to the ballot measures passed on Tuesday, cannot get married in 11 new states. Thank God. Just think of all those wedding gifts we won't have to buy now. 10. Five more African Americans were elected as members of Congress, including the return of Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It's always good to have more blacks in there fighting for us and doing the job our candidates can't. 11. The CEO of Coors was defeated for Senate in Colorado. Drink up! 12. Admit it: We like the Bush twins and we don't want them to go away. 13. At the state legislative level, Democrats picked up a net of at least 3 chambers in Tuesday's elections. Of the 98 partisan-controlled state legislative chambers (house/assembly and senate), Democrats went into the 2004 elections in control of 44 chambers, Republicans controlled 53 chambers, and 1 chamber was tied. After Tuesday, Democrats now control 47 chambers, Republicans control 49 chambers, 1 chamber is tied and 1 chamber (Montana House) is still undecided. 14. Bush is now a lame duck president. He will have no greater moment than the one he's having this week. It's all downhill for him from here on out -- and, more significantly, he's just not going to want to do all the hard work that will be expected of him. It'll be like everyone's last month in 12th grade -- you've already made it, so it's party time! Perhaps he'll treat the next four years like a permanent Friday, spending even more time at the ranch or in Kennebunkport. And why shouldn't he? He's already proved his point, avenged his father and kicked our ass. 15. Should Bush decide to show up to work and take this country down a very dark road, it is also just as likely that either of the following two scenarios will happen: a) Now that he doesn't ever need to pander to the Christian conservatives again to get elected, someone may whisper in his ear that he should spend these last four years building "a legacy" so that history will render a kinder verdict on him and thus he will not push for too aggressive a right-wing agenda; or b) He will become so cocky and arrogant -- and thus, reckless -- that he will commit a blunder of such major proportions that even his own party will have to remove him from office. 16. There are nearly 300 million Americans -- 200 million of them of voting age. We only lost by three and a half million! That's not a landslide -- it means we're almost there. Imagine losing by 20 million. If you had 58 yards to go before you reached the goal line and then you barreled down 55 of those yards, would you stop on the three yard line, pick up the ball and go home crying -- especially when you get to start the next down on the three yard line? Of course not! Buck up! Have hope! More sports analogies are coming!!! 17. Finally and most importantly, over 55 million Americans voted for the candidate dubbed "The #1 Liberal in the Senate." That's more than the total number of voters who voted for either Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or Gore. Again, more people voted for Kerry than Reagan. If the media are looking for a trend it should be this -- that so many Americans were, for the first time since Kennedy, willing to vote for an out-and-out liberal. The country has always been filled with evangelicals -- that is not news. What IS news is that so many people have shifted toward a Massachusetts liberal. In fact, that's BIG news. Which means, don't expect the mainstream media, the ones who brought you the Iraq War, to ever report the real truth about November 2, 2004. In fact, it's better that they don't. We'll need the element of surprise in 2008. Feeling better? I hope so. As my friend Mort wrote me yesterday, "My Romanian grandfather used to say to me, 'Remember, Morton, this is such a wonderful country -- it doesn't even need a president!'" But it needs us. Rest up, I'll write you again tomorrow. Yours, Michael Moore MMFlint@aol.com www.michaelmoore.com | ||
| EMPTY SPACE FOR BUSH? | 05 11 2004 | |
| Empty space voted for Bush -- that's interesting. Bonnie (my wife, for those of you who I don't know but am nonetheless polluting your mailboxes) suggested that people who live in close quarters with others have found it necessary and good to be tolerant and get along with one another. Perhaps they have also learned that their happiness and well being depends in some part on the happiness and well being of their neighbors. Strangely, I think those were supposed to be the small town values that people are seeking when they flee the cities to move to rural or gated suburban areas, aren't they?
I spent some time in Hong Kong back in 2000 when I was working for a company that is based there. Talk about crowded! There is absolutely no room for all of those people to drive, so they mostly travel by walking and taking the MTR train system. Sidewalks are typically full from storefront to curb, and the trains are standing room only, but everything moves. During my six weeks there, I commuted to work in the same manner, about 40-60 minutes round trip each day. What struck me about that city was how everyone seemed to move harmoniously, as though there was some mass physical consciousness that caused them to move in an efficient concert of motion. It's not that they are more polite -- step in front of an oncoming taxi and you'll get two beeps of the horn but no brake lights. And it's not that everyone moves along at the same pace -- there are old people with carts of stuff, and confused tourists (like me), and delivery trucks with boxes stacked on the sidewalk, and people in a big hurry, and people in no apparent hurry at all. And yet it all works. I think that years of conditioning in those crowded conditions have taught people that it is in their most selfish self interest to get along with everyone and everything around them, and that's the way to get ahead in their world. So that's one of the reasons why I think the blue votes were in the most populous areas, and the red votes were in the empty spaces. On the otherhand, paraphrasing Jon Stewart, people with boats voted blue and the landlubbers voted red. | ||
| 04 11 2004 | ||
| Mute Film Presents... Film Night in London
On Saturday 20th November, Mute and The Grey Area of Mute will be screening rare and unseen film and live footage at The Ritzy in Brixton, South London for this, the first in a new series of film nights. Mute Film Presents... will be an exclusive chance to see incredible footage from the Mute Films archive and for the November screening the programme will feature: * Unseen live footage of the Virgin Prunes from the Haçienda, Manchester from 30th November 1983 * 30 selected one minute movies from The Residents' brand new Commercial Album DVD * 30 minutes of rarely seen promotional videos by Laibach Future Mute Film Presents... will screen material from artists ranging from Can to Virgin Prunes and including Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Residents, SFT and Einstürzende Neubauten, amongst others. MUTE FILMS PRESENT... The Ritzy Cinema (Cinema 2) Coldharbour Lane Brixton London SW2 1JG Box Office: 020 7733 2229 Tickets: £5.00, Friends & Concessions £4.00 Senior Citizens £3.00, Children (up to age 14) £3.50 MUTE FILM PRESENTS... SATURDAY 20th NOVEMBER 2004 - 11.30pm | ||
| 02 11 2004 | ||
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| SUNN O))) vs CA 1104 | 01 11 2004 | |
| Knitting Factory Los Angeles
Sunn 0))), Earth, The Hidden Hand, John Wiese Price: ADV $11.00 | DOS $13.00 Date: Thu, Nov 18 // Start Time: 7:30 PM Wiese will be performing with SUNN O))) in LA Independent San Francisco SUNN O))), OM (Rhythm section of SLEEP) • Hidden Hand (feat. Wino) DJ TBA Sunday November 21 //Doors 7 PM | Show 8 PM Tickets $11 Adv | $13 Door Gerritt & Nate Carson will be performing with SUNN O))) in SF | ||