05.31.13
Hey Joe! Friday night rock
Hey Joe, where you goin’ now with that gun in your hand?!
Updated for modernity! Featuring the ricin letter!
Like, like, like, like, like.
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05.26.13
Fighting the image conferred by the purpose driven nuisance
If you’re a 3-D printing nerd, what’s not to like here?
In the Culture of Lickspittle, the odious rise to the top. In this manner, 3-D print manufacturing, at least for the short term, is saddled with the image that it’s a bunch of libertarian white nerds and insurrectionists obsessed with making plastic weapons.
To stick it to the man!
Some are apparently bummed by this.
From the wire (no link):
To prevent 3D printers from getting a bad rap, Michigan Tech wants to highlight the positive impact 3D printing can have on technology with a new contest.
From now until Sept. 1, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering is looking for submissions of 3D printer designs that will help to make the world a more peaceful place …
Other suggestions include low-cost medical devices, tools to help people out of poverty, designs that could help reduce racial conflict, something that could reduce wars over oil by channeling renewable energy sources, tools to reduce military conflict or objects that could improve sustainable economic development.
(They forgot how to add digital plans that can kick more people out of jobs.)
Tools to help people out of poverty, designs that could help reduce racial conflict. Just like smartphone and apps do, right?
Good luck with that, nerds. We suspect the reach exceeds the grasp.
Do what you know works. Make 3-D knives. 3-D shotgun slugs.
The Cody Wilson Revolution — from the archives.
More 3-D Kool-Aid: Ending world hunger, the $200,000 chocolate or pizza maker.
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05.25.13
Culture of Lickspittle (the evidence)
“Scholars” of popular entertainment can spoil what was thought unspoilable with an ability to suck the vital juice out of anything. What usually happens when one encounters this is a creeping feeling of embarrassment because you can’t canonically list all the old folk blues artists or successfully debate who belongs in unique sub-genres of your own coinage.
Before you know it you’re actually questioning if you know anything at all.
And you’re disenfranchised, 1-2-3.
Readers of the blog know social networks aren’t. They’re frequently anti-social, but in a passive-aggressive stealthy way.
And so, as evidence, anonymized excerpts from the Facebook rock/music critic chat on “blues,” micro-blog blurts in which a bunch of upper middle class (mostly white) people name check, micro-list, and make claims. (Quite a few are excerpts from recognizable names, critics for Rolling Stone, big daily newspapers and other high profile places.)
It’s how flash mob opinion, more gently — but still to be said with a sneer — crowd-sourcing, makes you feel stupid and withdrawn.
I’ll amend that. It makes you stupid, period, particularly on the social network where the algorithms work to maximize fragmentation as well as segmentation.
Only a fraction [no link]:
[Blues] its still around, mostly sucks. though Guitar Lightnin Lee and Freddy King do not disappoint, but I would rather slice my eyeballs than go to a “blues fest” …tired of SRV, and Clapton knockoffs they are a dime a dozen, but even my band likes to kick around in the format from time to time, its still fun, and slide sounds great when you are playing it… maybe its only for musicians now. I recommend looking up Jimmy Duck Holmes at his “bar” in Bentonia, Miss its really worth the trip… Black Keys are not the blues.
I think it was when Johnny Winter got Muddy Waters repopularized in the mid-70s when Muddy came to the long-shuttered rock club in Bangor, Maine where I lived, and I saw him sitting on the third deck of the club, but almost hanging over the stage. It was really cool. Years later, saw one of John Lee Hooker’s last times out with the Flaedh festival in Boston with the Pogues and was also pretty enraptured.
It depends on the genealogies to which we attend as critics, researchers, and practitioners, right? [Damn right, it’s all about “researchers and “genealogies.”]The question of what is going on in blues communities today is, for me, a much richer one than that of genre–and one that makes the work of artists who are most often overlooked by the critical establishment legible.
I don’t think we need to avoid sweeping statements so much as categorical ones–the blues is, after all, big…it’s THE BLUES! Patrick Burke starts his great book on jazz and race in the NYC bebop scene by mentioning a sign outside of a club on 52nd street that said “Come on in and hear the Truth.” I’d make a sweeping statement and say that ONE thing the blues has always been is just exactly what that sign promised: a mode of cultural production in which Black American artists have tried to tell the truth about the Black experience in America, to each other and to the mainstream culture. If this sounds like a version of BAM, I’m not troubled by that because I think it’s right–just not everything. As a died-in-the-wool materialist, my big question is whether the economic structure has now become so overdetermined by profit that there’s no way for any commercial music to tell this particular (or maybe even any) kind of truth. In my darker moments, I’m haunted by Chuck D!
I’m sure others have written about it somewhere (I gotta read [someone you’ve never heard of’s] book!), but the other day I was thinking about the influence of Sousa on instrumental (“classic”) ragtime and the first blues copyrights, in that none of them are in verse-chorus-bridge form, but feature sequences of themes. Which makes sense, given that a brass band leader — W. C. Handy — took out the first blues copyrights.
Taj played JazzFest with the “Real Thing” tuba band, some of it spectacularly, good, though also some of it kind of meandering.
And Nashville has the coolest blues history. Jimi Hendrix was Nashvilles own Soul blues Queen of the Blues Marion James guitar player and lived in Nashville before he went psychodelic – Marion James still alive and kicking.
And I agree with [so and so] who agrees with [so and so] you can find more of Savoy Brown in The Black Keys than The Standells. How do I know this? I listened to both bands when they were popular with a critical but open ear. I suppose beer and drugs sometime infiltrated the perspective too. I digress…
jazz influence huge of course….piano as important as guitar…ragtime…NO piano Jelly Roll Morton…Alabama piano players…earliest boogie woogie are Alabama piano players…Pine Top Smith, Cow Cow Davenport, Walter Rolland…lost John. And can’t forget how much these guys all traveled…the picture and story of the blues is much more inconveniently fluid than linear! Not a story of evolving from an acoustic one string player in Mississippi delta…
[Cow Cow Davenport]
As for the blues format , I consider it quite finished, just as the saltarello and the Charleston — and rococo painting — are finished. One does them but so what ? That said, as Nat Hawthirne mentioned having the blues, Clearly the feeling is a long time given ; and I imagine the blues feeling will eventually find fresh expression some day in a firm we cannot niw imagine but will seem wonderful when we or our descendants encounter it.
A friend interviewed Pokey Lafarge and asked him about playing music perceived as “retro” and he pointed out that no one looks at classical musicians and calls them retro for playing old compositions. He views blues, jazz, folk etc as American classical music. I liked this viewpoint.
There are two camps, the purists and the blues rock combo. the former seems to totally reject the latter. The best guitarist I have seen falls into the latter catagory. People have no idea what they are missing. He is killing it in Europe on his 4th tour. Many sell outs and fest appearances. The US market is about as fickle as it gets. Except NM,Colorado and West Texas.
And of course Blues remains big business: A contemporary “Blues Festival” tends to signify a mass consumption hommage to America’s mid-20th C peak: BBQ, HotRods, etc. House of…. Etc.
I came of age loathing blues, knowing only the white baby boomer macho blues. I had to find, and learn to admire, the real stuff on my own.
Great thread. That forthcoming Pokey Lefarge record is fairly hot, and really interesting in this context, since Jack White is putting it out. It’s tapping into blues Hot Five-style, among other things. And it’s more Squirrel Nut Zippers than Mumford & Sons.
All of which pose the quantum and quintessential paradox of whether The Blues are a synonym for Black American Being or for Appropriated Black American Cultural Property. And Cultural Properties. The Archival Record? or Blackfolks evolving musical capacity for deeply felt expression of our secular, spiritual lives? We talking about the performance of blues forms or where the expression originates within the experience of being black and Black Being in America?
Any excuse to toss those two cents in –thanx, once again for the floorspace FYI [So & so’s] being adroit and modest as a Harlem Hospital bornpre-Katrina New Orleanean and one-time programmer of the Heritage Fest –but when Birdsong sez The Bllues are alright”–she pithily encapsulates everything i was trying to more longwindedly and anecdotally say about blues being a living KULCHA. The Thangs (grown) people DO ha ha ha.
I’ve been considering a blues tour this summer.
[The pop critic who brought on the flash mob] I’ve decided to shelve my plan to write about the blues for a while. Obviously I have a lot of catching up to do before I try!
Culture of Lickspittle — a blues album. Click the display to play — 26 minutes — short.
Another appropriate response, which I’ll admit might go over the head, is to form a new group named the Lee Atwater Blues Band, and start making tunes glued to old video of the fellow. I may just do it.
05.24.13
Culture of Lickspittle
Press play and it runs itself.
Upper middle class white music journalists, when discussing the blues, make no sense to me. I ran across a rock critic chat on it on social media this morning. And it immediately hit me, although I like the blues and play it a lot, why it was an exchange best avoided.
Scholars of popular entertainment can spoil what was thought unspoilable with an ability to suck the vital juice out of anything. What usually happens when one encounters this is a creeping feeling of embarrassment because you can’t canonically list all the old folk blues artists or successfully debate who belongs in unique sub-genres of your own coinage.
Before you know it you’re actually questioning if you know anything at all.
Well, I know quite a bit.
I learned to love the music’s capacity on guitar decades ago because I had records by ZZ Top and the British groups in the white boy blues boom of the late Sixties and early Seventies. And I picked up the harmonica in middle age because, as a folk instrument, it was just made to be easy to play.
Harmonica, and folk musics in general, are supposed to be simple and inviting. It is music that anyone with human DNA can dip into. You can write what you know, tell stories, make daily observations.
In America this has been turned into a genre where reverence to various stodgy pieties and ways-of-performance are embalmed as benchmarks and methods of accounting and keeping score by white American ruling culture. You cannot bring a sense of humor or alienation to it, two things that are as much a part of old folk musics as community experience.
But if you want something wrecked for the day’s enjoyment, find some pop culture critics to talk about it.
In any case, I realized I’d more than enough tunes over the last three years to make a blues album that has some relation to my American existence.
And here you have by example, what I’m talking about, Stumbling Into the Future Culture of Lickspittle. Running time = a little over 26 minutes.
That looks short. But it’s a good length to show breadth of style and the human touch. And it is definitely not repetitive (Go from “Pasadena 2012 Blues” to “Good Boy” and tell me that) although many of the songs are in the same key.
The alternate title occurred to me after I’d left the YouTube playlist: Culture of Lickspittle Blues. D’oh! So I changed it from the original post and URL marker.
How to ruin anything by crowd-sourcing the opinions of upper middle class white pop music scholars.
The raw evidence.
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05.23.13
No polishing the national security turd
Heckled twice. This is only of the heckles. He makes a joke and the boot-licks applaud.
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05.22.13
The dogshit of American tech
More belief that computers and digitization handles all problems, a feature story in the Washington Post on a grant for a 3D food printer, billed for Mars missions and as something that might combat world hunger.
So when do the 48 million on food stamps get it?
Anyway, nobody’s going to Mars in my lifetime. Never gonna happen.
Texas-based Systems and Materials Research Corp. has been selected for a $125,000 grant from NASA to develop a 3-D printer that will create “nutritious and flavorful??? food suitable for astronauts, according to the company’s proposal. Using a “digital recipe,??? the printers will combine powders to produce food that has the structure and texture of, well, actual food. Including smell.
The project — the details of which NASA plans to finalize this week — was presented at the Humans 2 Mars Summit in Washington earlier this month. At the presentation, Anjan Contractor, an engineer at SMRC and the project manager, explained how the idea originated: he had used a 3-D printer to print chocolate for his wife.
SMRC said part of its motivation for seeking the NASA grant is to pursue the even loftier goal of fighting world hunger.
“There isn’t some silver-bullet technology that’s going to solve hunger problems,??? said Gawain Kripke, policy director for food security and hunger at Oxfam America.
My, my, Anjan Contractor made chocolate for his wife. Isn’t that nice. Since this is just the kind of tech pabulum the upper class and its shoe-shiners like, he’ll be in every newspaper by Friday. But at least someone had the sense to rain a little on the premature victory parade.
Now, without using Google, name one American astronaut.
And not the guy who sang the sissified version of “Space Oddity,” he was Canadian.
There are, obviously, good things done with 3-D printing.
But the American culture of lickspittle guarantees that 3-D plastic total crap gets all the attention. Which must be really irritating to 3-D printing manufacturers.
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05.20.13
The bioterror expert rent-seeker
The American bioterror defense effort is riddled with rent-seekers, individuals and businesses who spent the better part of the war on terror years inflating threats to increase spending in the field.
Most recently DD blog covered the company Soligenix which promptly used the recent ricin case to go looking for funding in the mainstream press.
Indeed, anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins can be thought of as the most successful bioterrorism research rent-seeker. Part of his motivation in mailing anthrax, according to FBI reasoning, was to save interest in research and development on the anthrax vaccine, of which he was a major part.
Ivins was spectacularly successful. The national panic over the anthrax mailings virtually created the modern bioterror defense industry in the United States.
Over the weekend, Los Angeles Times reporter David Willman, who was the first to publish news on Ivins and his suicide in 2008, went public with a story that fingered another big name from bioterrorism defense, former secretary of the navy and pre-presidential Obama security advisor, Richard Danzig. (His biography at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity is here.)
“Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor’s biotech firm,” reads the headline in the newspaper.
Danzig, a lawyer, made himself into an expert on bioterrorism — the kind of expert who always insists a catastrophic attack was perhaps imminent and certainly probable, that such attacks were easy to mount.
From the LAT:
Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security.
Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.
U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say doing so would be very difficult. Nevertheless, Danzig has energetically promoted the threat — and prodded the government to stockpile a new type of drug to defend against it …
Danzig did this while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply just such a drug, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.
By his own account, Danzig encouraged Human Genome Sciences Inc. to develop the compound, and from 2001 through 2012 he collected more than $1 million in director’s fees and other compensation from the company, records show.
The LATimes account is damning. By all accounts, Richard Danzig’s career as a bioterror defense advisor should be over. But nothing will happen. A quick read of Danzig’s biography would convince most that he is too important in the national security megaplex. Of course, he has already made his pile.
“Dr. Philip K. Russell, a biodefense official in the George W. Bush administration who attended invitation-only seminars on bioterrorism led by Danzig, said he did not know about Danzig’s tie to the biotech company until The Times asked him about it,” continued Willlman.
“Holy smoke—that was a horrible conflict of interest,” the scientist told the newspaper.
During the salad years of the war on terror Danzig peddled a talk and paper entitled “Catastrophic Bioterrorism — What is to be done?”
In the paper Danzig recommended a counter-measure drug to anti-biotic resistant anthrax be developed as soon as possible. He added that making antibiotic resistant anthrax was an elementary process, one that could be performed by a high school student.
In all this time, Danzig did not inform many, if any people, that he was on the board of directors of Human Genome.
“A Times search found seven papers Danzig had written on bioterrorism since 2001, reported Willman for the Times. “In only one of those did he disclose his tie to Human Genome.”
Danzig told the Times he had noted his position with the firm in confidential forms required annually by the government.
During the war on terror years Danzig made the rounds in the press and consultations to the government and industry, inflating the threat with claims that anthrax posed a greater potential threat than 9/11 and that bioterrorists could attack again and again with it, a process called “reloading.”
Bioterrorism “reloading” was also a potential scenario fast peddled by Tara O’Toole, a research scientist who made the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity famous during the Bush administration. O’Toole is now a director at the Department of Homeland Security, a position that has required she keep her opinions on catastrophic bioterrorism out of the press.
Wrote Willman for the Times:
The anthrax letter attacks, Danzig wrote in his “Catastrophic Bioterrorism” paper, exposed national security vulnerabilities “greater than those associated with 9/11.” He argued that the country’s defenses were inadequate.
Doses of anthrax vaccine would have to be given weeks or months in advance of an attack. As for antibiotics, Danzig suggested that even a novice terrorist could “readily” make a resistant strain.
“Development of an antibiotic-resistant strain … is quite easy,” Danzig wrote. “Even at the high school level, biology students understand that an antibiotic-resistant strain can be developed.”
This is something beyond the capability of a high school student or even someone with graduate training.”
“It’s not a trivial endeavor,” Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University geneticist and anthrax expert, told Willman.
“This is something beyond the capability of a high school student or even someone with graduate training.”
The entire piece on Richard Danzig is here at the Los Angeles Times.
Unfortunately, readers know from experience what always happens in cases such as this.
Nothing. Conflicts of interest are like bread on the table — the staff of life in the national security megaplex.
It doesn’t matter if important people in unique positions to make policy are involved in businesses that profit directly from their policy advice and lobbying. That is just the way things work in the United States.
Recently — on bioterror rent-seeking, penny-ante stuff at Soligenix, which is not worth even a tenth in market cap value of the government contract awarded to Human Genome.
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Khan used fists, not a smartphone
Saw Star Trek: Into Darkness last night at the Pasadena Arclight.
It was not a sellout.
People in the Star Trek future are really nothing like the coming generations of Americans.
In Star Trek the communicators still look a lot like the old ones, not like smartphones.
If the medium-sized evening audience at the Arclight had been Star Fleet, Khan would have been victorious. While everyone was fidgeting, playing games and surfing the internet on their smartphones, he would have killed them all.
In Into Darkness, Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan primarily uses his flying fists, elbows and ruthlessness to beat virtually everyone senseless. He had no visible use for apps.
I liked his take on Khan, an interpretation that turned the character into a glowering action villain motivated almost entirely by revenge.
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05.19.13
Culture of Lickspittle item of the week
The tech nerd pest’s commonplace notion that an “app” is the answer to every problem in the world is a natural for our culture of lickspittles.
This week the perfect item for the progressive gadget nerd is Buycott, an app made in the child’s belief that the Koch Brothers can be undermined if we could just all check what products their multi-billion dollar business empire puts in supermarkets.
Fight back! Wave your Buycott equipped iJunk over the bar codes and don’t buy AngelSoft toilet paper people! That will fucking show them!
With the Koch Brothers vanquished and the Citizens United decision only an unpleasant fading memory, the world will be at your swiping fingertip.
App developers will turn their attention to vanquishing all bad things through automated on-line petitioning and smartphone waving.
As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg solved the problem of global organ donation over a bottle of posh wine with his wife, so will apps available on iTunes do away with malaria, the need for 48 million Americans to be on foodstamps and the regime of Bashar Hafez Assad. (I even have a name for the last one: RUSyriass.)
With national deployment of Buycott the grip of corporate America will loosen and worker’s rights will undergo a new renaissance.
After Buycott is through with them the fourteen American multi-nationals that refuse to sign the Bangladesh Factory Safety Accord will rue the day they decided to keep making garments through cruel slave labor cutouts in foreign territories.
“Buycott is still working on adding new data to its back end and fine-tuning its information on corporate ownership structures,” reads one helpful piece at Forbes. “Most companies in the current database actually own more brands than Buycott has on record. The developers are asking shoppers to help improve their technology by inputting names of products they scan that the app doesn’t already recognize.”
Crowd-sourcing will triumph. Once the word is out, millions of users will see to it that Buycott’s database is complete, comprehensive and error free! Just like everything that’s done by flash mobs united by social technology.
“This thing is awesome,” reads one testimonial at the Apple shop. “It teaches you patience while you try to register 17 times.”
05.16.13
What’s in a photo?
Newton — Pine Grove Municipal Swimming Pool Splash Party, ca. ’71-’72.
Taken by my father, George C. Smith, Jr., a Polaroid of my rock n roll band, Newton, at a Pine Grove swimming pool splash party. He could never get anything right, cutting his son almost entirely out of the picture. Did it occur to him to back up a couple steps or take an angle?
No.
It’s the only thing left, besides some childhood books, of my old life in Pine Grove, PA. I’d forgotten about it until this week when I opened a trade paperback, bought a few years ago in Pasadena, and it fell out. I’d been using it as a bookmark. The polaroid is still nice and stiff after forty-some years.
Credits, from left to right, classmate Rodney Felty, Mike Pijar on drums, Ray Symons and me. Harry Brommer, an old friend and the pool’s handyman, built the stage we played on. Part of the reason we got the gig was because two of us were lifeguards AND I had a Fender Vibrolux Reverb amp. John Herber, the swimming pool supervisor had had a band in that played through Fender “reverb” amps the year before and liked the sound.
It was an uncharacteristically cool summer night and most of the audience did not swim at all.
Both my parents are dead now — George Jr., the keepsake photographer, and Mary Elizabeth Smith. The photo doesn’t make me miss them.
They had the good luck to be part of the time when the middle class was at its height in the USA. The first college graduates in their families, they found jobs straight out of Penn State, my father as an accountant for Alcoa Aluminum, my mother as a school teacher at Pine Grove Area.
They had no debt, lived in apartment for about one year before moving into a new home in the freshly-minted Legion Acres subdivision of the Pine Grove borough.
My mother was able to quit her career as a school teacher to have children and start it right up again a few years later, scarcely missing a beat. Alcoa Aluminum felt the early wave of the great de-industrialization of America and closed the largest extrusion plant in the world in Cressona, PA. My dad’s job was spared. He quickly transferred to a small bottlecap producing facility near Lancaster.
I visited it once, a pathetic place, mostly automated where you had to wear plastic ear plugs all day. Alcoa, it seemed, could still domestically make soda pop bottlecaps at a profit in the late Seventies.
I never liked my parents much. Besides the outward physical similarity in looks, I had nothing in common with them. They were mediocre. Although they had a good start they were ill-suited to raising children, mostly because they lacked empathy and warmth. They took what society and time gave them, doing just what everyone else they knew did.
That was OK. America is and was a huge country, one where you can’t have a vibrant civilization (which we don’t have) where everyone has to be at the very tip-top of the global totem pole in coveted skills.
They didn’t have to deal with the stupid lies we’re fed daily by the 1 percent and Tom Friedmans of the country. My parents thought the United States would always be the best place in the world. They were full of aphorisms about it.
“Time is money,” George Jr. always said, a lesson he learned from business. Yes, in corporate America your time is worth less and less money, maybe almost nothing.
Neither my father nor my mother liked writing, or music, or language and thought, or reading. (Paradoxically, my mother became a reading teacher later in her career. She did not read books and took mine when she needed to put something in her middle school classroom library.)
And they didn’t understand science at all although they believed it was very important I be trained as a scientist.
So as I got older the family disconnection always worsened. It was happening when I was playing guitar in Newton at the Pine Grove swimming pool.
Whose kid was I? Not theirs. We shared nothing, not a single blessed value. What, when, who or why? There were no answers.
So I’m looking at the swimming pool photo, again this week: Half-assed but good enough for three-quarters.
I’ve outlived the man who took it. My father died in the mid-Eighties, younger than I am now. Not a moment in our lives has been the same. DD came along a few years after he was gone. We would not have been pals.
Another ugly paradox: Corporate health care gave him the best benefits to be had, no questions asked. These kept him alive for five years after cancer struck. Congruent with modern America, I’ve had no health insurance for a number of years. Before that I had a program familiar to many, one that only pays for treatment of catastrophic illness, one that will eventually kill you. No treatments for the dozens of things people normally need to go to the doctor for.
This is what my parents had for life. It was not because they were spectacular examples of American exceptionalism, because they had some mythic work ethic, some always fresh and absolutely essential worth in the machine. It was because they came into the economic system before it had turned into a grinder that would gradually pit all against all. The country had enough leaders who believed a great society should not just be a matter of fortune at birth and root, hog or die.
You never can tell what an old photo will trigger in the head.
Something you miss? Or a distant condition already vanishing when the photo is taken, then quickly gone, the flickering half-life of a short-lived isotope, a fluke.
In the age of Google the memory of a family name is framed by the member who’s the best writer. Often not the person you want it to be.
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