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the side project, day 1

I have a side project going now, one that I can only talk about vaguely at the moment because I’m not entirely sure it’s supposed to be public knowledge yet. It’s not intended to replace anything I currently have going on, it’s just a chance to work with someone who’s stuff I admire and see what comes of it. The plan right now is to try to put together an EP.

We got together on 3/21 for the first time, not having really done anything up to that point apart from watching Beatles movies looking for obscure phrases that made good band names (no success so far). I’ve never really collaborated with anyone to this degree; in Radiant City, Robi and I would come in with songs pretty much written and then as a band we’d figure out the arrangements. But the goal with this was to try and literally co-write the songs. Starting completely from scratch with someone throwing out a musical idea, both of us working up a melody, piecing together the direction musically of the rest of the song and then getting it down on tape. I don’t think either of us expected to accomplish much the first day; I sort of figured we’d just end up talking about what we wanted to try and do, but instead we ended up with a decent skeleton of a song.

Not bad for a two hour visit.

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It’s midnight and I’ve been watching CNN for awhile now.

Take whatever your stance is on what is happening and set it aside for a second, if it’s possible.

There is nothing quite so otherworldly than watching a split screen on TV… live footage of the American troops speeding through the southern Iraqi desert toward Baghdad on the left, and live footage of Iraqi troops milling around in northern Iraq on the right.

Does seeing it happen like this make the war more acute or less real in the end? I’ve had both feelings come over me in the course of watching.

There are so many bigger things happening here… removed from a political context there are things happening here on a cultural level. The war itself may be a footnote in the end, but somehow it feels as if the shape of the next 50 years of our lives is being drawn now, in innumerable ways.

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the Gulf War 2 (Electric Boogaloo)

Reading some journals, some communities, can be really depressing.

I am a dissident in my own country.

I know it’s a common belief of those who place themselves outside what’s accepted as the political spectrum, particularly Chomsky, that the average American cares more and is smarter than we are led to believe. His example given is in listening to sports radio one night, and hearing the callers go into such great detail about statistics and history. His point was that people are willing to devote themselves to the things they care about and pursue them passionately, and that the majority of people have been led to believe that politics and world affairs are too complicated for them to understand, so they should leave these matters up to their leaders.

I have tried, for years, to hold fast to that belief. That people are not stupid. That they simply have been marginalized for so long that they’ve come to believe they are exactly what their government thinks of them, what Alexander Hamilton called “the dirty rabble.”

But when something so blatant, so obvious is happening, and you watch the debate form around it in the most asinine, most limited and most ill-informed ways, it’s hard to maintain that faith.

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“When I was a kid, I wanted to be in the parade so bad, man. It took me years to get up the nerve but I finally did. I got some crepe paper — tied it all over my bike and rode along side all the fire trucks and everything. And do you know what happened?”

“Everybody laughed.”

“No. Nobody gave a fuck at all.”

—Hutch Owen’s Working Hard – Tom Hart

Go back to bed, America, your government is in control.