dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja: 11/25/13

Monday, November 25, 2013

let freedom ring (original discarded outtake)

so, this is an interesting thing to have sitting on my shelf. it's the 'i have a dream' speech, orchestrated with some soaring guitars.

i should point out immediately that i got a lawsuit thrown at me by the king estate when i tried to upload this back in early '00. i thought that was really trite, but it's not really a legal battle i want to have. i would react more or less the same way should i be threatened a second time, except to point out this time that it's fair use so long as i remove the price tag and basically just do that.

the story behind the song is not very remarkable. the working title for the track was just 'progblues thing'. it was intended to be a structured instrumental guitar track that mixed the flair of hendrix with the minimalist structure of steve reich. the speech sort of came to it by accident.

it was also the result of my dad getting himself a drumkit for christmas that year, which my step-mother promptly placed in my bedroom as a disincentive for further use. score, i guess. but it didn't survive the move a few months later. in the mean time, i got some recordings out of it - as well as a few moderately crazy drunken weekend jam sessions.

i'll note that that christmas also produced a grand piano a few feet outside my door. it's intended recipient was my sister, but she wasn't around much. me? new pc, with a convenient recording interface, and some more functional microphones. despite talk of family jam spaces, one might suspect my father was actually conspiring in my favour. there is probably a great deal of truth in this suspicion. these conditions held for less than a year, but i made the most of them.

so, the idea of the track was initially about experimenting with the new reverb system built into my new soundcard interface, by triggering it with the drumkit that had recently magically appeared out of good fortune. it had been a few years since i'd played the kit much, and, unfortunately, it kind of does show. i had spent a little time practicing along with "nevermind" and "siamese dream" for a few weeks to get back in shape, but i wasn't really "there" yet at the time of this recording. i didn't want to program loops into the song, so i compensated by splicing the track up. of special interest in this wave editing is the backwards cymbals, and especially how they intersect with the soaring guitars.

and of those soaring guitars? a fairly simple blues pattern. sure is lovely, though, isn't it?

the speech became attached to the track when chance managed to have them playing simultaneously for me. i had cnn on in the corner. it was doing some kind of special on mlk, perhaps related to an anniversary that is related to a yearly holiday. placed together, it knocked me flat on my ass.

the idea in my mind from the start was integrationist, if not really consciously so. on the one hand, the guitar part is raw southern blues. on the other hand, the structure is sterile white minimalism. i didn't just realize this juxtaposition, i was trying to exploit it, even if the racial context hadn't occurred to me. when king's speech was played over it, though, the idea really exploded; the context became much deeper. it was an instant exponentiation in profundity.

i also thought it would work well as a foil to the doonesbury sample that is in the track that follows this one [entropy (original mix)].

in hindsight, there are some problems with this. i was a moderately wealthy white kid from canada. there was never much chance of me turning a profit on this, but if i did it would be a type of appropriation. this track does appear on the deny everything demo (jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/deny-everything) but under the title of "a commercial break" - and without the dr. king samples. that's probably for the best.

that doesn't change the feeling i got when i first heard the two things together, or take away any of the power that the pairing produces.

i think this is worth sharing.

recorded in january, 2000.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/let-freedom-ring

missed connection (original discarded outtake)

this was initially written to be the first track of my third record, which i was calling trinri as a working title. yet, it was written about the same time as i was finishing up my covers disc. i wanted to add at least one more track to the disc to make it a bit longer. for whatever reason, i ended up using it as an introduction to the hummer cover, rather than as it's own track.

i've pulled it out here, in instrumental form.

recorded in sept. 1999. isolated on nov 25, 2013.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/missed-connection

hummer (remix/cover for inrimake)

this is two things.

the introductory synth section was created independently as the introduction to a theoretical third demo (which became deny everything). i had also already decided to compile the covers disc and ended up using it for an introduction to this cover of hummer, instead. so i "lost" the section. i've regretted letting the part go a few times since. and, going this route factored into the decision to include the first two tracks (which are not covers). anyways...

the rest of it is actually two different approaches to the same thing. i ended up using them both by stringing them together rather than one or the other.

i was also feeling trapped in the covers project, generally. this is something that took a huge amount of time and energy. why wasn't i applying that towards original material? the samples at the end are meant to represent me breaking free of myself, and letting myself loose to get back to my own ideas. so i could live again. i plead guilty to all counts of being a drama queen.

i also ended up co-opting the song, mildly. i focused solely on the instrumental part in the second half of the track, which has a very carefree quality to it. it's not explicitly about rejecting war. but it fits.

musically, for the second part, i need to weight two tendencies. first, it was consciously meant to have this silly fake-jazz strut to it. second, i was clearly more interested in free jamming than composing anything with structure. it's a weird juxtaposition that sounds kind of dorky. sometimes, you have to begin analyzing something by determining whether it accomplished it's goal or not. i feel this did, but the intent was admittedly unusual.

this is so dramatically different from the original that it's reasonable to say something like that it's "inspired by" the original rather than a remix or a cover. it does contain creatively reinterpreted samples of the original.

created in sept & oct, 1999.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/hummer

if you were curious.

(it was obviously the cia. he got shot several times in short range. there's no debate here - it *had* to be set up by his own guys, then suppressed by them. the interesting question is who set it up. dulles? hoover? i lean towards lbj, but we won't know until the documents get released. if they ever even get released.)

========

We turned to other subjects, but Fidel came back to Kennedy once more, the next day, when he said to me, apropos of nothing, “Kennedy was very young.”

I later asked Julia Sweig what this might have meant. For Castro, she said, Kennedy may forever stand for something out of reach. “He’ll never know what would have happened had J.F.K. lived. He may have reserved for Kennedy in his own mind the possibility of greatness. It’s completely fascinating and frustrating to him.”

http://theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/11/fidel-castro-oswald-could-not-have-been-the-one-who-killed-kennedy/281674/

also, castro is such a fucking capitalist pig...

suppose a really progressive pope decides to shut the whole farce down by declaring himself fallible. could the next pope reverse the claim?

i mean, he could only do so under the truth of the claim he's attempting to reverse; the pope's infallibility could only be reasserted by understanding his fallibility.

this new guy seems to be left of hitler, which is admittedly a nice - if unexpected - change. maybe....?

i mean, it's russell's paradox. it's a problem the church can't just gloss over.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/exiting-the-vampire-castle

see, i sort of agree with him. i mean, it's a fix. yeah. what i *really* want is to abolish all currency systems and construct a system based on need rather than want. yet, that's not going to happen any time soon.

in a real sense, the options before us are bubbles or austerity. as somebody that has no assets, bubbles are a better choice. if they can be kept going, grand. but do i really care if people lose their assets as a result of gambling them? no.

so, yeah. bubbles + regulation is better than austerity + deregulation. and i think that might be what paul is thinking.

besides trolling. paul's a good troll.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/22/blowing-bubbles-with-paul-krugman/

right or wrong in this context depends entirely on what the goal is. challenging machiavelli isn't in the process of questioning his logic, it's in questioning his altruism. and why should we prioritize this? well, why shouldn't we? and that's the point. he may be less shocking today, but he's no less repulsive.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/machiavelli-was-right/354672/

we don't need to fight the "culture of entitlement". we're living in super-production. insofar as labour is necessary, it's only necessary to do a very small amount of it. a lot of what hasn't been mechanized has been offshored, which, in context, means we don't have to do it at all. we could split up what's left so that we're each working only a few hours a week and still have plenty to spare.

rather, we need to fight the brutality of the "protestant work ethic" and the mindset that argues that our lives are defined by our ability to provide profit for our employers. we need to have a greater respect for the idea of freedom and it's corollary of idleness.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/the-gops-cruel-crusade-against-food-stamps/281708/

when somebody uses a word like "entitlement", what i hear is "recognize your place as a slave". what i hear is "we ought to decide if and when you should eat, sleep and shit based on how much work you've performed for us".

years ago, we didn't use the term "entitled". the term we used was "human rights".

we didn't talk about how young people feel entitled to food, shelter, education and at least a pursuit of happiness. we talked about how everybody has a basic human right to these things.

so, i plead to you - the next time you hear some fucking nazi blowhard rambling on and on about entitlements?

yes, you feel entitled to a number of things, and those things are called human rights. and if this son of a bitch feels like he wants to stand in between you and your fundamental human rights, then he'd better grab a shotgun because it's worth fighting for.

hey, it's my boomer crash theory.

except it doesn't mention that the outcome is good news - falling housing costs. wait, that's good news for who?

it's not really a generational fight, it's a class war. it's just that a large percentage of boomers own property, and many fewer of their kids don't.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/the-next-housing-crash/354689/

i've seen this a lot. i'm going to guess it's a twofold problem.

1) the people that the liberal parties and ad agencies hire to "represent young people" come from highly privileged backgrounds. the process, from start to finish, never leaves an upper class prism. the result is that the political system only understands wealthy young people, rather than young people.

2) the whole thing upholds the media bias, which goes to reinforce the advertising bias. a circular loop of self-fulfilling delusion, if you will.

it really serves to demonstrate how out of touch the system is. they think that paris hilton is the average young person in which to model their shit off of.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/what-the-brosurance-and-creepy-uncle-sam-ads-dont-get-about-millennials/281667/

i'm nearly 33. that puts me on a cusp as far as these stats go. but they're arbitrary in how they cut generations in half. there are some characteristics that make me a "millennial", like the role of the internet in my life. but the internet was very different when i was 15 than it was five or ten years ago.

i get along better with people that are 43 than with people that are 23. that's not just a maturity issue. it has more to do with common interests. music. politics. outlook. perspective. hobbies. i'm both the first millennial and the last punk, but i'm more of a punk.

so, i'm often attacking the kids like a bitter old woman. most of what i say is true....

....but they're not to blame for the economic situation. this is systemic. and it wouldn't have happened if the real villains here - the boomers - hadn't let the world go to shit in a haze of 80s cocaine binges.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20145-blaming-the-victims-media-bias-against-struggling-millennials

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2011/10/generation_catalano_the_generation_stuck_between_gen_x_and_the_m.html

rent increases are arbitrary acts of random theft. if we acknowledge that rent should be 30% of income, at most, capping rent increases to 30% of average income is a perfectly reasonable way to prevent landowners from fucking people over.

i don't care if it eliminates profitability for rentiers. actually, i do - that would be a good thing because it would make it easier for a co-operative model to be normalized.

http://libcom.org/blog/wave-housing-occupations-bologna-19112013

this could really lead to a political backlash against the democrats. finally. i've been hoping for as much for a while...

the democrats, at best, are a party of the bourgeois "left". at worst, they're pawns of wall street. the idea that regular people can rely on this party is flawed.

the biggest mistake made in the history of the american left was merging the socialist party into the democrats. had that not happened, america would not be so far behind.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/11/18/obam-n18.html

yeah. nobody gets paid, therefore no growth.

people look back at the depression and laugh. but they didn't know better. today, we know better, and are still making the same mistake.

well, their buddy karl pointed out that history repeats itself as a farce.

we need to spend....lavishly...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/11/18/pers-n18.html

facebook didn't exist when i was in high school, but newsgroups and email lists did. i noticed a difference, myself, going forwards from about grade 11.

there's a caveat. you'll notice i don't capitalize. i'm not very interested in conventional grammar; i'd actually argue it should be abolished in favour of a concept of interpretive grammar. there are certain rules that i systemically reverse on purpose. i probably wouldn't have developed these habits had i not spent so much time on the computer. on that level, the luddites have a point.

yet, the general idea that facebook makes people's writing worse is just flatly daft. writing isn't innate; we excel through practice. the more practice one gets, the better. is facebook somehow taking away that practice time?

the argument is maybe a bit better for twitter and it's business-focused character limit, but it's still hard to see how the silly and verbose could somehow reverse time spent actually writing.

unless one wishes to argue that kids are spending less time writing in their journals and more time on twitter? sorry, mom, but if your kid was going to do that then she'd be on livejournal, not twitter.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/facebook-has-transformed-my-students-writing-for-the-better/281563/

what scares me about these people is not how racist they are but how stupid they are.

it makes law enforcement look brilliant, in comparison.

http://libcom.org/blog/bulgarian-fascists-run-nightly-patrols-targeting-immigrants-17112013

nobody should take care of them, and that fact should be explained to kids when they're about to sign up as a disincentive. the kinds of wars we're fighting right now wouldn't be fully possible outside the context of our existing war culture. disassembling war culture doesn't mean just going after the politicians and generals and corporations, it also means tearing down the soldiers.

fuck the soldiers! let them die of gangrene in the abandoned fields! i neither support the troops, nor the war.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20056-us-soldiers-become-victims-of-empire