i got my cleaning and groceries done and i'm about halfway through the second debate, which i'm going to run through to get it over with. i should be back to work either tonight or tomorrow.

i don't expect my analysis to this point to be popular, but here it is.

i was expecting the second debate to be a complete disaster, and that's more or less what it is so far. what i'm watching is a lot of people throwing what amounts to a bunch of bullshit at biden, who is carefully trying to assert the actual facts of the matter. now, that's not to say i agree with biden - i don't. i think his policies are awful. - but he's at least trying to get an honest debate in amongst a bunch of people that appear to have no interest in such a thing.

and, i have to hand the entire thing very comfortably to biden at this point, but that means i have to curve everybody up. there's a catch on the curve, though. we'll see if somebody steps up in the second half, but, right now, i'm going to have to give biden a D- and everybody else a well deserved F.

also: it's easy to understand that tulsi gabbard got a lot of hits on this night, but i'm not sure it had much to do with what she said. you know who actually watches these debates, right? yeah. ok, moving on...

i just want to close the thought with an example, though, and it's about what obama did or not do regarding immigration reform.

i watched months - it may have been years - of whitehouse press briefings over 2014 and 2015, and i have a very clear understanding of what actually happened. obama was absolutely deadset on comprehensive immigration reform, but he had absolutely no support from the republican held congress, and this is an almost entirely congressional issue. after trying for years to get a bipartisan bill, what happened is that he finally gave up and passed an executive order regarding the dreamers that is, in truth, of exceedingly grey legality. the actual reality is that the dream act is probably unconstitutional, in the form it became law under (executive order).

so, of what value is there in sitting there and blaming the president for not passing something he had no legal authority to pass? the failure to get anything passed is fully the fault of the republican congress, and that's really simply all there is to it. and, the step that obama made was so drastic and desperate that it would probably be struck down by a proper court. what i watched unfold in front of me was consequently in a parallel reality where facts don't exist. and, biden was the only defender of reality on stage.

i don't think i'd vote for joe biden. but, i'm not going to support a bunch of dishonest politicians that are looking to pull the wool over everybody's eyes, either.

i'll say this again: what's happening at the border is not a failure of oversight, although there is a failure of oversight in motion. nor is it the result of specific cruelty by an insane president, or even just a cynical ploy to win votes. what's happening at the border is systemic, it's by design, and it's not going to be altered by anybody standing on that debate stage. the raids are part of a complicated and very purposeful system of state-managed labour for the transnational corporate sector.

if you don't understand the problem, you can't take steps to fix it, and nobody on stage understands the problem. maybe, for some of them, they're just ignorant. it's possible, it really is. but, for all of the talk about prison-industrial complexes, let me throw this question out there: how much money have each of these candidates taken from big agribusiness?

we'll see what else comes up.

so, i got through the two day bender and while i'll say i didn't have any problems, exactly, it was also maybe not the best way to get through certain parts of it. i was a little fadey for saajtak, after 30 or so hours of drinking and smoking leading up to it. i smoked through more than four packs of cigarettes. it's an issue to balance - i seem to be able to do around 25 hours or so, and i'll get a second wind after, but i don't want to put myself in a situation where i'm seeing a headliner in that state.

the highlight of the weekend had to be a completely ridiculous cover of taylor swift's shake it off, by a local band that you've never heard of called the sunburns. i hope somebody caught a good part of that.

briefly, here's the update on what i did and didn't do:

17:00-19:15 - trey priest @ detroit shipping company.

i'm usually late for most things.

20:00-21:15 - my brightest diamond @ dso courtyard.

it's interesting that she's putting such an emphasis on detroit, because she sounds more like late 80s chicago. the new record might have been a strong wax trax! release in the late 80s, and in that sense it's kind of more of a retro thing. but, it's only retro if you know it, right? if jamie stewart & annie lennox did a collaboration...

21:30-02:00 -  another dimension @ tangent gallery.

i was hoping for a lot of guitar theatrics, but it didn't really happen. i'm not sure if it was the same guy or not, but there were two guitar + dj type performances, both more in the realm of "guitarist jams over techno song he likes" rather than any kind of meaningful integration of the guitar into the set. it actually came off as a gimmick, mostly for show; it was less about integrating the instrument into the sound and more about the idea that a guitarist standing beside a dj just looks kickass and cool.

so, i spent the night composing, and if anybody saw me lost in my head outside tangent friday night, that's what i was doing. i tend to avoid composing when i'm dancing for a number of reasons, and it's actually been a while, but the guitars just completely triggered me. and, trust me: the imaginary guitar solos, as imagined in the mind of the imaginer, were far more intense than what i saw in front of me. there was also some dubstep (they call it 'bass music' now), and it was tedious and boring like it always is, but the fact that i was spending the night composing in my head kind of took the grind out. it's funny that all they really needed to do was put a picture of a guitar on the wall to save the vibe, and that trick won't work if it gets overdone, but i did enjoy the night well enough.

chirp came on exceedingly late and was more interested in playing it safe on this night. i caught parts of their set, but not all of it. i will say that whatever kind of guitar synth he's using is exceptionally good sounding, which is to say that it seems as though the technology has really come up in the last few years, and i should take a closer look into that. the last i checked, they had tracking systems through computer sound cards, but the latency wasn't there yet. i guess that all they'd need to do is put that technology in a phone and ramp it up, which is easy enough to convert into a pedal. so, i'm less surprised on a technological level than i am...i'd just never heard anything that realistic from something on the floor, before. 

02:30-6:30 - late party @ unknown location. i was at a secret party with mostly gay men, and it was very secret, so secret that i'm not really going to talk much about it. even if you could find the place, they won't let you in without a password. or if you look too straight. but i'll say that it was more like a house party, so the cops would really have minimal powers in actually doing much. and i did have some fun there.

i got a little lost after that, but after going around in circles for a bit (which included smoking a large joint and figuring out a way to take cash out of the machine in detroit, something i'd never done before), i ended up back in hamtramck for a little before 8:00. i locked up at ant hall and took a walk down the street to find a coffee, which took me half way up campeau to a diner not far from the cvs. it was almost 8:30 before i got back. sometimes, it's things like this that eat away at your time; sometimes, it's a good way to eat away at it.

9:00-12:00 - dsa meeting @ ant hall.

the head organizers ("leadership") were there an hour early, and you could tell right away that these people were running a political party. indeed, it became clear enough fairly quickly that the actual purpose of the meeting was to present some bourgeois politicians to a crowd that is going to act as campaign volunteers. further, while it's not entirely clear where the platform was written, nobody made any effort in trying to conceal that it was being pushed down from somewhere else. so, this meeting would not be accurately described as an organizing meeting of the political grassroots in the community, but rather as an opportunity for an outside organization to find recruits to carry through with it's cause. it felt less like an organizing meeting (and, it's been a while, but i've been to quite a few.) and more like a ponzi scheme sign-up (which i've been to quite a few of, as well. hey, i was looking for a job. that's the hook.). they passed a collection plate at one point.

i didn't really want to address anybody at the meeting, and i wasn't intending to sign up. i was merely an observer from the temporary autonomous zone; a friendly anarchist that was between parties and really just hanging out for general interest.

but, this group is clearly much more focused and almost career-oriented than anything i'd want to involve myself with. we're talking about strictly vertical organizing with a completely pre-written platform, almost more like it's a franchised extension of a fast food restaurant. so, this is a political party, whether it's calling itself one or not. worse, there is clearly a centralized bureaucracy behind this, and you clearly need to get promoted to a higher position in the hierarchy before you're allowed to meaningfully participate in the process. everything i saw was just textbook bourgeois politics that is directly antithetical to any concept of socialism that is worth discussing. there was even one point where one of the "leaders" stated to the crowd that the candidates didn't have any ideas of their own, to the point that it wasn't even worthwhile to ask them questions because everything they know about the party is in the platform; she really wanted to make it clear that all of their positions are defined perfectly in the platform, and if they win then they owe everything to the party, who would be in complete control.

it was at least well attended for what it was, i'll give them that. the crowd was a mix of people that is hard to define in any specific way, as you usually get at these events. that said, it was noticeably white for an area with a majority muslim population (in fact, many of the people were from ferndale), and they seemed cognizant of how unusually white they were for their region, too. i guess all the brown people were too busy working to show up.

so, i don't know exactly who's "steering" this, but it was clear pretty quickly that it's just some "progressive" democrats that are co-opting socialism as a marketing term rather than any kind of meaningful grassroots movement. a better name for the organization as it exists today should probably be "socialist democrats of america" rather than "democratic socialists of america". and, i'd consequently advise avoiding them.

i was torn between waiting for the bbq and eating early, but by around 12:30 the choice had been made by my stomach. i didn't want to show up at the bbq and eat all the food. so, i grabbed a very thick six-inch at subway (bmt + mozz + bacon) before going to the bbq....

13:00-21:30 - punk rock bbq @ kelly's.

i came in super early to grab a beer and basically just hung out all day. i had one hamburger and one chicken burger, which for me was part of the reason i went there.

the bands were just kind of there and that's sort of what you expect from something like this, which is really just a bunch of people, most of whom knew each other, and most of which were over 40, having a beer on a patio. people were kind of only vaguely paying attention.

there was an opener that i can't find the name of - i think his name was steve - that did an atonal singer/songwriter thing. i don't grasp this style of music or understand what it's appeal actually is, but people keep doing it because people like it. i didn't understand a word he said, but his vocal tone was like bob dylan with a bad cold in the middle of allergy season. if he knew a fourth chord, he didn't show it off.

womb worm were on next and they did a mildly interesting no-wavy or weeny math-y sort of thing. this appears to be trendy right now. but, what i'd actually like to hear is somebody make it more complicated and that much weirder (the problem is that it's a 40 year old schtick, and it's actually a highly predictable style), rather than a little bit catchier, which is what they actually did.

there was then an all-girl ramones cover band called the whoremones. i'd doubt any of them were born before 1990, and they were kind of more josie and the pussycats, to be entirely frank about it. they did some newer songs by acts they actually like (colleen green was one of them, and that made more sense) as well. i'll admit i digged watching somebody play the classics like i wanna be sedated at that particular point, but it was actually kind of contrived and, while i recognize that this gig may be profitable for them, i do hope they're able to start a band of their own some time soon.

pet psychic kind of just floated by. i may have been a little too stoned at the time. but, i think it was pretty stripped down - like, early beatles stripped down.

and, i only vaguely recall bourbon squirrel, which i think was also pretty stripped back and kind of slow moving. 

the person that organized this show plays out a lot in detroit under the pseudonym of "lady darkness" and seems to perform in a bunch of different styles. she remembered me from the last two day party, as she did an acoustic set at the dequindre cut midway through it (and i interjected into a conversation she was having about joseph conrad). as i've checked out sound samples previously, i was actually expecting something in the realm of glam rock or even hair metal, as that was what the samples had implied, but this was a different animal - more of an art-rock band (with a violin player), which opened up space for the vocals, which were actually a little reminiscent of a mid-90s jarboe, or maybe a pj harvey. i don't think they got across what they wanted to, and they seemed visibly irritated that people weren't really paying attention, but it was a good proof of concept, at least. what i'll say is this: burgers were maybe not the best way to bribe interested parties to see a band of that sort; she might have got a more interested crowd by bribing them with ramen noodles.

the last band appear to have been a punk band at one point, then grown out of it, then rejoined for the hell of it. that's a guess based on the musicianship, the age of the band and the length of time since their last bandcamp release (7 years). it was skate-y, but full of jazzy fills that were designed simply to show off, kind of thing. so, i enjoyed this. and, near the end of the set they did that cover of shake it off that was just absolutely brilliantly absurd.

so, it's around 20:00 and i'm trying to figure out if i give the next band - jimmy ohio and the ultimate overs - a fair chance or not, knowing i won't be staying for the later acts, which i know well and am not really into. the saajtak show just seems more interesting to me. first, i decided i'd finish my beer and go because the band will be on before i finish my beer. nope. so, i decide i'l have one more smoke, and then they'll be on. nope. they started playing right after i bought another beer, and while i didn't end up missing anything at the other show (in fact, i could have stayed at the barbeque a little longer....), i did spend much of the set outside. it had that angular television vibe to it, but as seems to be normal nowadays, was kind of bombarded with glossy pop. so, i didn't get much out of this. and, i left when they were done....

21:45-02:00 - saajtak record release @ ghost light.

there was a burlesque show and a comedy club event in the same venue, so the place was busier than it ought to have been and the first act didn't come on until like 22:30. i think i impressed some of the improv people in the smoking section with a good run on human sacrifice being theoretically permissible. see, if there was any actual empirical evidence of it's efficacy, it would be hard to argue against it under certain scenarios like drought or climate change. however, because i am aware of no evidence that causally links human sacrifice to any sort of measurable outcome, i can't, in good conscience, stand in favour of it. i actually don't really know why i've never done any stand-up, other than it just never really coming up. i know i'd be good at it because i seem to be able to make people laugh more or less effortlessly. the problem i'd come up with is the crowd being too stupid to get half of the jokes. i guess it's an inversion of how people see it, which is a function of market theory: capitalism insists that it's the clown that needs to adjust to the market in terms of being properly entertaining, but i'd insist that it's rather that the educated clown, at least, shouldn't have it's jokes corrupted by the interference of the audience, that the educated clown must persevere until a sufficiently educated audience that can understand the jokes can be found. so, a really talented comedian should spend at least five years playing to empty clubs, because people are invariably going to be too stupid to get the joke the first time through. and, then i'm just running into the same problems i have with my other art projects. one day, though, somebody will get me drunk enough at ghost light to drag me to the comedy club in the back, and i will slay the one person in the room that took courses on the intersectionality of byzantine history and quantum physics. that is how they got the greek fire.

i think i do enough stand-up sitting down here at home, thanks. these posts are 95% stream of consciousness; the difference is solely in the latency problems that exist between my brain and my (one) typing hand. it's less like a bobbing parrot, and more like an anthropomorphized arthropod at the end of my arm that is connected to my brain via a 14.4 baud modem, even though i'm well aware that the wiring in my body is operating at speeds and on levels that we don't truly understand. for example, did you know that your brain can register an impulse for suicide before you are exposed to fall out boy for the first time?

i think we got the point across.

the first band had a guitarist that i've seen pop up in a number of other projects around town that are a little more....sophisticated than the one i saw on saturday night. if somebody were to notate the parts and print them on to a piece of music, the result may be challenging to perform, i'd have to grant the point. but, the presentation, which sounded like a very young kim gordon fronting some kind of john zorn project, was just simply not very compelling. the impression that i got was that they seemed to sort of be playing down to the audience. now, i'm a fan of certain kinds of noise rock that have more structured components to them, but this just wasn't that. if you've seen something like vampire belt, you get the general point, but the truth is that they were really just literally fucking around for a little while and it just came off like they were wasting their talent. let's hope that it doesn't take them too long to grow out of this particular phase because these musicians should be doing something better than this.

i didn't have a lot of interest in the second or third acts.

when saajtak finally came on - and i don't remember what time it was - i was literally having a hard time standing up. i was less drunk and just more tired; i wasn't in danger of blacking out so much as i was just in danger of falling asleep. and, i may have nodded off for a few seconds, while standing in the audience. but, what i remember of the show is that (1) the sound problems they had at mocad were gone. they sounded good, here. (2) they're actually moving in a more abstract direction that is perhaps making lesser use of the singer's ridiculously high level of technical talent. saajtak has always reminded me a lot of a band from the 70s called yes (that i don't actually like that much), but taken to a modern level of technological wizardry. so, the keys/drums duo often has a very wakeman/bruford feel in it's dichotomy between diddly arpeggiation and weird atonality, but the technology in the synthesizer work is updated to feel a lot more contemporary. legitimate advances in prog rock are rare, nowadays, and they're getting close to their maximum shelf date. so, i think you want to get this while you still can.

2:30-07:00 - late party II @ other unknown location. the second show was not as secret, and it may be unnecessary to hide it's location. there were also less people than there were at the secret show, which is curious, but it was more of a mixed crowd. so, there was some dancing and some smoking (and some drinking) and then i left and went home...

even if i could have stayed awake past that point, i was out of cash and didn't want to spend more. and, the eight hour wait for the book club was simply too daunting.

15:00-17:00 - socialist book club meeting @ 2283 holbrook. $0 + coffee.
19:00-00:00 - cherubs + child bite @ small's. $13 + beer costs.

i'm not a substantive cherubs fan, but would have liked to see them. tell them to come back. and, i still haven't seen child bite because it just hasn't yet made sense.

i was back at the tunnel a little before 8:00, hit the renaissance for a large bowel movement, caught the 8:25 bus, picked up some fruit when i got back over and made it home to some spaghetti at about 9:30, and a shower and some good sleep after that.

i need to finish the cleaning that i put on hold last week, do some groceries and get back to finishing up the last journal compilation.

listen: i'll take new age woo over jihad & sharia any day. marianne willamson is not as scary as keith ellison is. it's just a difference of scale.

but, it's at best a step sideways and at worst a massive step backwards to start bringing the kind of language she uses into the discussion.

if she could learn how to rephrase her terms, and what the appropriate socialist concept is for each of the concepts she tries to present, then she might be the ideal candidate. and, in that sense, i can hope that she's the future of the american left.

but, the future of america cannot be in what marx called utopian socialism. thoreau was not a prophet, but a fool. utopian socialism will just lead us back to fundamentalism. and, i'm not getting on a one-way trip to gilead via iran.

she's still scary, and i might have even said that first. but, if she's not interested in learning how to convert her language away from the discourse of spiritualism and into the language of marxism, somebody else should be studying how she's doing this, and step in front of her and do it instead.

and, do i think that kerry would have had a less violent presidency than gore?

yes. and for good reasons.

i know that the revisionists keep going on this, but the fact is that the reason that gore lost to bush is that he couldn't generate enough support on the left of the party because his record was about three degrees too far to the right. al gore was always a conservative in office, from the start. that he would have bombed iraq anyways (and he would have.) is actually secondary to the loss. he lost because he was a moderate conservative, and his opponent was far more radical than he was.

i still don't think that gore would have been that different from bush at all, actually.

kerry wasn't an ideal candidate, of course. but, he at least came from a genuine anti-war background, and there was some evidence that he might have continued on with it.

his tenure as secretary of state, at least, should go down as a rare bright point in history over the last several decades.

and, i'll point this out again.

- in 2000, i would not have voted for al gore. i would have supported nader. until the end. and, i'll remind you that gore was a very loud voice in favour of bombing iraq, going all the way back to the 80s.
- i did support kerry as a lesser evil in 2004. kerry was a better choice than gore in many ways, but most importantly, in context, as the least pro-war candidate.
- i had no interest in barack obama in 2008. my answer to "clinton or obama?" was kucinich. i would have voted for the greens.
- what is the point in having an election between mick romney and barack obama? how are they different, at all? i would voted for the greens in 2012.
- i very, very weakly endorsed clinton in 2016, under concerns about trump's uncertainty. if the argument is "they're both the same, it doesn't matter who wins anyways, so vote green", then it broke down somewhat under the lack of clarity about what trump was actually going to do. so, for example, he said he was an isolationist, but we didn't know that he really was. on the other hand, we know clinton is an interventionist and an imperialist and has been for a very long time. if that's your issue, it's tempting to vote for trump, as the undefined unknown is better than the defined known, if you are staunchly opposed to it. but, if trump is just blatantly lying - if he's a hyper-interventionalist nazi - then you've been had. i strongly suspected he was lying, so i endorsed clinton.
- i will not support any of these candidates besides bernie in 2020, and i may not even support bernie. the changes he's made in an attempt to appeal to a larger audience have been discouraging. let's see who the greens actually run, first.

that means i would have supported democrats in two of the elections this century (2004,2016) and greens in three of them (2000,2008,2012).

and, i think i've posted here quite a bit that i would not define myself as a democrat, at all.

and, what's the deal with williamson?

she'd be a good speechwriter, if she isn't one already. in terms of memorable statements, she blew everybody else away, and she stated a lot of correct-sounding things (mostly about root causes) while everybody else was focusing on the banality of modern retail politics. she doesn't have the numbers for the moderators to take her seriously, and they didn't. but, in a sense i think she represents the future of the left better than anybody else on stage....both in good ways and bad ways.

she said a couple of things that will likely end any further ambitions she has in politics. you can't use terms like "dark, psychic energy" in a serious audience of any sort and expect not to get laughed out of the room. but, as is usually the case with hippies and other people that exist in the apolitical side of the libertarian left, if somebody could sit her down and work out an actual analysis with her, then she'd probably be quick to get her head around it, so long as she doesn't try too hard to hold on to her charms and spells and idols, as the imperialists pull them out of her hands. in that sense, she both represents hope for the party's future and a cautionary tale of how it may end up, if it's not rescued from the mystics and gurus.

we'll avoid quoting seminal dead kennedy's tunes, for the moment.

so, who won the debate?

bernie gets a C-, i'll give williamson a D- and the rest of them get an F.

Responding to constituents at her regularly scheduled “office hours” last week, Massachusetts senator and celebrated left-wing icon Elizabeth Warren defended her vote to send $225 million of American taxpayer money to Israel for its Iron Dome missile defense system...

ok. that's the closest thing i can get, but if you support the iron dome system, you can't be too opposed to missile defense, as that is what israel is doing with it - testing systems for the empire's eventual use. 

and, if you're not opposed to missile defense then you don't oppose building first strike capability, because that's what it's actually about.

but, i'd like to see a clearer statement.