Just a friendly reminder...

... to everyone in general (not you - I know you know!)

Please don't use the word "caves" in reference to the Obama administration. As evidenced quite clearly by   an obvious source such as the Frontline specials on both health care "reform" and the financial "crisis", the Obama administration doesn't see itself as having an adversarial relationship to big and/or corrupt businesses and industries (choice paraphrase of a statement by Obama to the leaders of the big banks documented by the latter program: "what we have here is a public relations crisis"). Compromise is the goal, not the end result of agreeing to gain some desire at the expense of another. Usually Obama seeks and gets nothing in in terms of actual policy save  the appearance of having tried to do so.

These New Blogger Features Are Overwhelming

Anyone else feeling it?

Anyhow, while over half of my views come from the USA, and another quarter from the UK, a surprising percentage of views come from Denmark. So... hello to you beautiful Danes out there. Thanks for putting up so many American jazz musicians in the 1950s...

A Bunch of Shizzle in:re "EDM"

mnml ssgs
typically unbearable RA thread
NYT follows tha ca$h

Which do you prefer? Mindless hedonism or the tedious connoisseurship of a rapidly-ossifying "underground"? I don't think there is an ethical answer to this question, just a preference for a certain self-image. I'm starting to think the former, if only because the girls are cuter, though, really, I guess I can't be a mindless hedonist if I continue to think "they look a bit young, don't they?". You think Guetta cares? Ugh. Let me hop back on Discogs and see if the new Convextion remix has shipped from the Netherlands yet. Only three hundred copies pressed. Grey marbled vinyl. I know one percent of the people worldwide who own it. Sadness, again.

Seriously though, I think the "underground" has always had two relationships with the "mainstream". At best, the underground is way ahead, at worst, though, in many cases, necessarily, the underground is purely reactive, defining itself negatively, by what it doesn't do in comparison. The most pernicious effect of the popularity of Guetta, et al, may be, as mnml writes, the de-legitimizing of the more underground strains of the music in the eyes of those disinterested folks on whom the scene's continued existence depends, but my greatest concern is that, in reacting to the overground success of certain artists, will retreat further into the polite, non-transcendent and non-transgressive, but still anti-intellectual, well-behaved hedonism that was the hallmark of virtually every event I went to in New York, a retreat now seemingly justified not only by "taste" but also by the negation of "newer" popular forms.

(also funny that one of the promoters interviewed in the Times article is worried about co-option by corporate money - as if he hadn't already done that himself - underground is really a nice mantle to claim for oneself - now that it doesn't stand for something oppositional, or anything at all really, anyone can claim themselves as being part of it - after all, there is always someone with more money! which brings me to "we are the 99%" - very nice of the middle class to express solidarity with the working class only when all of the strenuous and sycophantic effort they have expended to ensure they are never mistaken for anything else isn't paying off...)

OK and All That

Moved from BKNY to PVD. Still unpacking, getting organized, etc. Heading back to NYC to see Pulp, then it's time to find a job... and then, more records, more bitching about politics, the usual, etc. But relaxed. I think.

Love...

I'm Not Green

That's not to say I'm not an environmentalist, it's just that the above picture from a NYT article on the Occupy protest cracks me up. It really underscores what should be an obvious lesson from the last fifty or sixty years of civil rights and environmental legislation, which is that you can have anything you want as long as that desire can be reconciled with our current economic structure.

I've Read the New Houllebecq...

... and it is good. For those who have been turned off by his unsubtle mixture of porn and polemic, those aspects are muted, even almost absent from The Map and the Territory. While this certainly makes the novel appear more mature, and a quick browsing of critical reviews confirms that the novel is being read in this way, this impression exists only in the context of a world where maturity is seen as resignation to a life where all that a human can achieve is all that can be achieved by a human. The novel is not so much anti-political as it is despairing of a society where politics is impossible as long as this vision of maturity persists.

For Nobody and Everybody...

... just a nice record.