August 1, 2006

mr. jones is a man who doesn't know who mr. jones is


Thorina Rose, Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe 1, 2005.

* Alexander Cockburn on The Triumph of Crackpot Realism. excerpt:

"The frayed threads anchoring the American government to reality have finally snapped, just at the moment radiologists are reporting that Americans are getting too fat to be x-rayed or shoved into any existing MRI tube.

"The gamma rays can't get through the blubber, same way actual conditions in the outside world bounces off the impenetrable dome of imbecility sheltering America's political leadership.

"Twenty-three years after one of America's stupidest Presidents announced Star Wars, Reagan's dream has come true. Behind ramparts guarded by a coalition of liars extending from Rupert Murdoch to the New York Times, from Bill O'Reilly to PBS, America is totally shielded from truth."
...
"Iraq's morgues reported receipts of 3,149 dead bodies in June; over 14,000 since the beginning of the year. Senior Iraqis in the government confide that break-up of Iraq into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish enclaves, each protected by its own militias, is now inevitable. Iraq as a viable country has been utterly destroyed, with even vaster carnage coming up over the horizon, and here's the numbskull President touting it as an advertisement for American nation-building at its best, and inviting its prime minister to Washington to proclaim Iraq's approaching renaissance, all in sync with the U.S. 2006 election campaigns."
...
"'Crackpot realism' was the concept defined by the great Texan sociologist, C. Wright Mills in 1958, when he published The Causes of World War Three, also the year that Dwight Eisenhower sent the Marines into Lebanon to bolster local US factotum, Lebanese President Camille Chamoun.

"'In crackpot realism,' Mills wrote, 'a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. .. The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; ... instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe....They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. ... they prefer the bright, clear problems of war-as they used to be. For they still believe that 'winning' means something, although they never tell us what...'"

* From a splendidezine interview of Dean Wareham:

Splendid: I was going to say that "Dizzy" bears more than a passing resemblance to Van Halen's "Jump".

Dean Wareham: I don't think I'm familiar with that song. Could you sing it for me?

Splendid: I'd rather not. And trust me, you'd rather I not, too.

Dean Wareham: (Laughing) Yeah, you know what? It does. In the chorus. I stole the melody from Van Halen's "Jump".

Splendid: Deliberately?

Dean Wareham: Yeah.

Splendid: Because you know, no-one in rock 'n' roll history has ever stolen a riff or a chorus before.

Dean Wareham: I think it would be good to have them kind of sue, wouldn't it?

Splendid: All publicity is good publicity, right?

Dean Wareham: I wonder how many notes it is? I should count them up. I don't know how many notes you can have before it's plagiarism.

Splendid: Well, it's not plagiarism if you play it yourself, right?

Dean Wareham: Well, I suppose it can be. John Fogerty got sued for plagiarizing himself. By his record company. He won the case. Saul Zaentz was the guy who ran Credence Clearwater's label -- he's a big music producer, very well-loved in Hollywood, a great, friendly guy, but he sued John Fogerty for plagiarizing himself. Anyway... yes, that melody is taken, and when I sang it, Sean came running in from the other room and said 'You can't do that!' And I said 'Okay, I'll sing it another way,' and I tried it some other ways, and they didn't work as well.

* DC band The Caribbean will hit the road this week: Thursday, August 3rd: Tritone (Plain Parade), Philadelphia; Friiday, August 4th: The Grog Shop, Cleveland; and Saturday, August 5th: Garfield Artworks, Pittsburgh. Upon their return to DC they will be headlining the August 10 Fort Reno show. if you are in one of these cities, check them out, and say hello.

* "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST..." --Frank Zappa

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