townies. ugh.

i expected those, though. it's a miracle it took this long, really. best to avoid them....

"you know, you should open up the advertising a little bit so people know the shows are going on."

"but it's a tight knit scene."

"that's why you should open up the advertising, so people outside the scene know what's going on."

"if you want to join the scene, you should come down. it's very tight knit."

"but, that's why you should open it up and make it less exclusive."

"but, it's a very tight-knit scene."

ugh...

fuck tight knit scenes, i want radical inclusion.

somebody shows up and offers suggestions on ways to open it, and all they get is a lot of attitude and an almost violent desire to maintain a small, incestual clique-y group. that's not something i want anything to do with. it's radical inclusion, or fuck off.

i mean, the bottom line is i haven't seen much of anything that's interesting in terms of local music over the year i've been here. it's all very generic and boring takes on different styles of punk, or equally boring folk music. my conclusion is that there's really not very much interesting music happening in the area at all.

but there's a specific bar that doesn't have a show calendar online. now, i really have little reason to think the bar is booking anything that's worth going to. i think the reverse logic is pretty applicable - if anybody worth watching was playing the bar, the bar would be updating it's listings. but, i'm the type of person that wants to know what's going on at all the bars i can get to, anyways, just in case there's that one rare act that seems interesting....

having idiosyncratic tastes requires this kind of meticulousness.

you wouldn't think a suggestion for a bar owner to update a web page would set off such a defensive reaction, but that it did says a lot about the area and the people that inhabit it. it demonstrates a very clique-y mentality that is suspicious of outsiders and wants to "vet" people before they're allowed to integrate.

going to a bar to watch a show doesn't imply a desire to join a club. and i definitely have zero desire to join a club....

this is why i prefer big cities to small towns. when i go out somewhere, i don't want to meet up with a group of people that i know, i want to fade into the crowd. i don't want everybody to know my name; i don't want *anybody* to know my name! i cherish that level of anonymity.

so, detroit's a good fit for me. windsor, less so...

in the end, if the local bands in the area just want to play to the same group of friends every show then that's their choice. i'll go hang out in detroit and watch some more interesting acts in the process...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoCfiZnOplY

naomi klein gave a very important speech at unifor about a year ago, and i was ecstatic when i heard it because she articulated exactly what i've been saying about this for years. it's nice to see that jill realized it's importance, as well. trying to be "bipartisan" about climate change is a waste of time - there is a bipartisan consensus, and it's that dealing with it sounds expensive. if you want to change something, forget about building consensus in washington. that doesn't work. you have to bring in the whole machinery of worker's politics, and you have to be willing to fight those that will reject those politics. what defines our social relations within capitalism is conflict, not consensus. we have to start telling the hippies to fuck off.

the status quo provides us with two ways to change things. first, we can pass regulatory laws. now, we're consistently bombarded with messaging that regulation is tyrannical, but worse is that the regulatory bodies inevitably end up controlled by industry. so, that leads us down the garden path to the elite's preferred method of change: markets. the elite prefers this method because the only change that markets are capable of producing is increased class stratification.

jill is being careful with her language, but what she's calling for is worker ownership of production. and, she's right. naomi was right. i'm right. there is no way the government will ever work against the corporate lobbies to impose substantial sanctions or provide serious incentives. rather, government will continue to work in the interests of capital - and dirty energy - so long as government exists. so, that rules out using both regulation and markets.

this is the option the status quo declines to inform us of, and it's the only way forward. we're not going to elect a saviour that will fix the issue with centralized government policy. we're not going to solve the issue with green toilet paper, or subsidies for clean energy. we have to take over the factories and convert them. we have to take over the oil fields and shut them down.

...and we have to get over our programming that teaches us to work within a system that was constructed to be useless and stop pretending there's another answer.