from Howie Klein’s DownWithTyranny! blogsite…

“I am a former Marine and the mother of 2 children in the military. My oldest son is currently in Iraq. I tried very hard to disuade him from joining. This is not the time to join the military with a war going on, besides that we have a president to has abused the military for his own agenda. Have always been opposed to the war. My son knew that I went to D.C. last September for the protests. He thinks Bush is a dick but wanted to get out of Cleveland and do something with his life. His father and I were both in the Marines so it is something he has always wanted to do. Having served myself under Carter/Reagan (I’m dating myself) I served honorably and would not trade the time I had in the Marines for anything. But when you have a Commander in Chief that has no regard for the men and women who wear the uniform, and uses and abuses the military, I would be loath to encourage any young person to join the military. I would encourage them to challenge any recruiter that came to their school and to let them know emphatically that they are not interested. I have always been a fan of Godsmack, until now. I will never buy any music from them again and would even consider tossing the cd’s that I currently own. I can’t imagine why they would want to market their music to the military hoping to recruit young people and possibly send them to their death. I guess that just proves the old moniker, “money talks, bullshit walks” is true. What a shame that is one way they have chosen to make money. Maybe Sully should join the military. Perhaps he would have a differing opinion when he realized that his president doesn’t give a rats ass about him. Who needs Godsmack anymore. Neil Young is a real rock hero.”

New York Times

By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: May 6, 2006

HALBERSTADT, Germany, May 5 Ôø? “Three, two, one, out!” With those words, two organ pipes were lifted from their position on Friday. Like a sudden change in light, the chord that had been continuously sounding inside an ancient church here shifted, growing thinner and higher.

It was another milestone Ôø? well, inchstone Ôø? in the performance of “Organ2/ASLSP,” a version of the John Cage composition titled “As Slow as Possible.” And slow means slow. The piece, which began on Sept. 5, 2001, is not scheduled to end until 2640. But there will probably be a break after the first movement, which lasts a mere 71 years.

On a beautiful spring day, more than 100 people gathered inside St. Burchardi Church in what has become something of a ritual every year or so, when a chord changes. They snapped pictures and held tape recorders as a local government official, Rainer Robra, and a German composer, Peter Schnebel, grasped the pipes, which were sounding octave E’s, and lifted them out of the organ frame at 3:49 p.m. People applauded. Mr. Robra bowed, then posed with his pipe.

Meanwhile, an electric bellows continued to pump air into the organ. Small bags of sand held down the organ’s three keys, which controlled four other pipes. They continued to sound, filling the space inside the church’s bare ruined walls with a sound somewhere between a hum and a squeal.

The next chord change will come on July 5, 2008. (Until then, for those interested, the chord consists of G sharp, F sharp, C and A, in descending order.) All changes occur on the fifth day of the month, in honor of Cage’s birthday, Sept. 5. Pipes will be added or subtracted as needed, although some of the project’s backers dream about building a whole organ one day.

“We love the event because it’s so brilliantly funny,” said Jens Frohling, 38, a bank employee who had come from Frankfurt to this town about 110 miles southwest of Berlin. He said government officials had been trying, without great success, to draw visitors to eastern Germany. “So why not this?” he said. “I think it worked.”

Hans-Georg Busch, a former mayor who said he planned to run again next year, was also on hand. He said he was not enamored of Cage’s music, but he thought the performance exciting all the same. “It’s avant-garde,” he said.

The performance is in keeping with Cage’s efforts to explore the boundaries of performance and how music exists in time and space. The change of notes prompted philosophical musings among some listeners, many of whom lingered for more than an hour after the chord change.

“It brought back the idea about time, and how time’s changed,” said Frank Edelkraut, 47, of Hamburg. Others compared it to cathedral-building.

“It’s sort of like in the Middle Ages, when the people building the foundations of those really big churches knew they would not be able to finish the church,” said Werner Kuhlemann, 53, of Hildesheim, a town about an hour away by car.

The chord change was accompanied by a slate of cultural activities. Officials held a news conference to inaugurate the John Cage Academy, a center for new music that will be housed in a building next door within the former Cistercian monastery. A photography exhibit was held there, followed by a concert of Mr. Schnebel’s music later in the evening at the cathedral.

The academy’s first event is a symposium, likely to take place in 2008, with the subject, appropriately, the nature of time.

Money for the project and the academy is tight. The government declined to provide funds, and the organizers depend on small contributions. Plaques inside the church honor those who have sponsored a performance year. An anonymous donor dedicated the first, 2000, to Johann Sebastian Bach. Henning and Inger Bergenholtz went for 2024, which will be the year of their 50th wedding anniversary.

Halberstadt, a once-thriving town that was flattened in World War II and left to molder under the East German authorities, is struggling to bounce back from economic woes unification has brought on the east. Restoration money has poured in. The area also has a problem with skinheads.

Yet like many German towns, Halberstadt takes its culture seriously. The municipal theater puts on more than 500 opera, symphony, theatrical and dance performances a year. The town has a magnificent cathedral, with a concert series, and a handful of museums, including one dedicated to Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, an 18th-century poet and minor Enlightenment figure who lived here. After Friday, John Cage, who was influential on Germany’s postwar music scene, appeared to be more firmly in the club.

Along with the church, Halberstadt also provided the piece’s duration. The cathedral was said to have had the first organ with a modern keyboard arrangement, built in 1361. That year subtracted from 2000 yields 639, the number of years of the Cage performance.

Sarah Plass contributed reporting from Halberstadt for this article.

From Agony Shorthand blog…

Monday, May 01, 2006
After our post from a couple weeks ago on “The Rapidshare Connundrum”, Scott Soriano of S-S RECORDS and the CRUD CRUD & STATIC PARTY mp3 blogs sent us his take on the whole RapidShare/SoulSeek phenomenon and its implication for labels like his.

“I am not sure if there is much of a difference between soulseek style filesharing of LPs and rapidshare downloads of full LPs (that are in print) on specialty blogs. Though you can trust a blogger’s taste, same goes with individual soulseek posters. People not only search for specific things on soulseek, they also follow certain posters and hit all their files.

As far as the impact on a label’s sales, I can’t speak to the impact of rapidshare and a specialty blog, but I do know that the combination of soulseek, lower priced DSL, fast burners, and 10 cent cdrs killed my CD sales. I put out three cds, all great records, all that got great reviews and much airplay on WFMU and other stations. I pressed and sold 1000 each of A Frames s/t & A Frames II and sold them in less than a years time (slower than both vinyl sales by the way). I did a repressing of each thinking that they would sell the same or faster due to the Subpop signing. Funny thing happened with the rise of soulseek and the other things I mentioned: My sales of A Frames CDs ground to a near halt. Of the second pressing of both cds, I’ve sold about 300 of AF II and 500 of AF s/t and that after more than a year.

The Monoshock cd has sold about 500. Its release was unfortunately timed with the jump of popularity of soulseek. After we were done editing it Scott Derr thanked me for putting it out and hoped I was able to break even. I quipped that it would sell 1000 and download 3000. I was off. It sold 500 and probably downloaded (or was burned) 5000. Of the 500 I sold, about 450 was in the first 9 months. In the past year and a half I’ve sold 50. If not for Revolver pushing it, I would have sold far less.

Compare that to undownloadable vinyl. A Frames – Complication 7″ sold 1000 in 4 months. 1500 of A Frames – Police 1000 were pressed in November and 150 are left. I pressed 500 each of Frustration 7″ & Cheveu 7″ and that was maybe a month ago. I have 200 left of Frustration, who have a following, and 300 of Cheveu, of whom few outside Paris knew about til the S-S record came out.

I reluctantly started doing CDs because there was a call for them and I thought the profit would make it able for me to put out more and more obscure vinyl. Plus it would enable me to actually pay the bands decent money rather than give them a pile of records with the words, “Here sell these.” This worked for one pressing of each of the A Frames CDs and then the downloaders, filesharers and burners killed that. I now put out only vinyl because I love the format and it pays for itself. I can sell a small run of 7″s by a relatively obscure band in far less time than I can a CD by a known band. The way it is now putting out a CD by a known band is pretty much an announcement to people that it is now available for free on soulseek.

Because putting vinyl on to the internet involves a real time commitment and not point click copy download, only real obsessives do it. And real vinyl obsessives are always gonna track down and buy the vinyl even if it is available as a download. People also want an object that they think is real and so they buy vinyl. Cheveu’s Dog was available on their MySpace site for at least 6 months before the record came out and if anything its availability has helped vinyl sales. I think this is because people look at CDs as a cheap ripoff and as disposable as a bic lighter.

You might suggest that I get into the paid download game to make up for the loss of CD sales. Being a small label, doing the pay for download thing is cumbersome and really not worth it. The major distros of downloads dont deal direct with small labels. They want volume not one download a week. So to get in with something like itunes, I would have to go through two more layers of distribution, which means the distros make more than me for doing nothing but accounting. At the end of the year, I’d be lucky to split $500 between the label and the bands.

All that said, I do an MP3 blog, though it is of music that is very obscure and/or out of print, and I download off of similar blogs. I don’t have a problem with it. What I do have a problem with is the mass denial by “indie” people regarding download/filesharing’s affect on labels. There is this cavalier assumption that everyone who checks something out via unpaid download is going to buy it. In my experience, that isn’t true. At least not with CDs. I say, just be frank. Downloading/filesharing is not home taping and it does have an adverse effect of labels, the impact being greater on small labels where 500 lost sales is a hell of a lot more than a major losing 5,000 sales. That is something that really needs to be kept in mind if one is truly a supporter of independently produced music. This isn’t about greed. It is about finding a way to pay the bills.”

CEREMONIES OF CONSUMMATION
Delia GONZALEZ & Gavin RUSSOM

May 4 Ôø? June 24, 2006
Opening Thursday, May 4, 6 Ôø? 9 pm

Javier Peres is very pleased to present the first Los Angeles solo exhibition of Delia GONZALEZ and Gavin RUSSOM, “CEREMONIES OF CONSUMMATION.” Gonzalez and Russom will present a new body of sculptures triggered by sound. The artists reside in Berlin and New York and will be present for the opening.

For their first exhibition at Peres Projects, Gonzalez and Russom reference Kenneth Anger’s films “Puce Moment” and “Ceremonies of Consummation”. In their sculptures and installations, Gonzalez and Russom explore the forces of magic on earth via simple modular forms made in Formica. The sculptures are often arranged to suggest a range of images, from minimal sculpture to failed architectural experiments to vanity mirrors, but the sound components imbedded within the simple forms are at the heart of these works. The duo imbed analog synthesizers that play meditative, repetitive sound, based on the settings of knobs on controls panel built into each of the works. The sound that lurks from the forms takes over space via repetitive sound waves which create new forms that become sculptures that exist, albeit momentarily, yet continuously. The forms created by the sounds can be made and remade infinitely, in a multitude of forms, as an endless pursuit of creation, meditation, and consummation.

Recent exhibitions include “While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body Ôø? an Exhibition about Sound Performance and Sculpture,” curated by Heike Munder and Raphael Gygax, Migros,Museum fur gegenwartskunst Zurich, Zurich (with catalog), “I Feel Love,” Galleria Fonti, Naples, Italy, “No Ordinary Sanctity,” curated by Shamim Momin in conjunction with Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Kunstraum Deutsche Bank, Salzburg, Austria, and “Evolution is Extinct,” Daniel Reich, New York, New York. Their work has been featured in numerous US and international media, including The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze and most recently, they appeared on the cover of Arthur accompanied by a feature story entitled “INNER SPACE ODYSSEY, How Delia and Gavin Are Making the Earth Cooler”.

“CEREMONIES OF CONSUMMATION” featuring Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom will be on view at Peres Projects Los Angeles (969 Chung King Road, LA) through June 24, 2006. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.

The truthiness hurts

Stephen Colbert’s brilliant performance unplugged the Bush myth machine — and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping.

By Michael Scherer, Salon.com

May 1, 2006 | Make no mistake, Stephen Colbert is a dangerous man — a bomb thrower, an assassin, a terrorist with boring hair and rimless glasses. It’s a wonder the Secret Service let him so close to the president of the United States.

But there he was Saturday night, keynoting the year’s most fawning celebration of the self-importance of the D.C. press corps, the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Before he took the podium, the master of ceremonies ominously announced, “Tonight, no one is safe.”

Colbert is not just another comedian with barbed punch lines and a racy vocabulary. He is a guerrilla fighter, a master of the old-world art of irony. For Colbert, the punch line is just the addendum. The joke is in the setup. The meat of his act is not in his barbs but his character — the dry idiot, “Stephen Colbert,” God-fearing pitchman, patriotic American, red-blooded pundit and champion of “truthiness.” “I’m a simple man with a simple mind,” the deadpan Colbert announced at the dinner. “I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there.”

Then he turned to the president of the United States, who sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. “I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”

It was Colbert’s crowning moment. His imitation of the quintessential GOP talking head — Bill O’Reilly meets Scott McClellan — uncovered the inner workings of the ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate. He reversed and flattened the meaning of the words he spoke. It’s a tactic that cultural critic Greil Marcus once called the “critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems.” Colbert’s jokes attacked not just Bush’s policies, but the whole drama and language of American politics, the phony demonstration of strength, unity and vision. “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady,” Colbert continued, in a nod to George W. Bush. “You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.”

It’s not just that Colbert’s jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more “truthiness” than truth.

Obviously, Colbert is not the first ironic warrior to train his sights on the powerful. What the insurgent culture jammers at Adbusters did for Madison Avenue, and the Barbie Liberation Organization did for children’s toys, and Seinfeld did for the sitcom, and the Onion did for the small-town newspaper, Jon Stewart discovered he could do for television news. Now Colbert, Stewart’s spawn, has taken on the right-wing message machine.

In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery “dÔø?tournement,” a word that roughly translates to “abduction” or “embezzlement.” It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. “Plagiarism is necessary,” wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. “Progress demands it. Staying close to an author’s phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas.”

But nearly half a century later, the ideas of the French, as evidenced by our “freedom fries,” have not found a welcome reception in Washington. The city is still not ready for Colbert. The depth of his attack caused bewilderment on the face of the president and some of the press, who, like myopic fish, are used to ignoring the water that sustains them. Laura Bush did not shake his hand.

Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone’s clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. “Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function,” wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram.” “It’s critical and destructive, a ground clearing.”

So it’s no wonder that those journalists at the dinner seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking forward to spotting Valerie Plame and “American Idol’s” Ace Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures of this silly conversation. We trade in talking points and consultant-speak. We too often depend on empty language for our daily bread, and — worse — we sometimes mistake it for reality. Colbert was attacking us as well.

A day after he exploded his bomb at the correspondents dinner, Colbert appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” this time as himself, an actor, a suburban dad, a man without a red and blue tie. The real Colbert admitted that he does not let his children watch his Comedy Central show. “Kids can’t understand irony or sarcasm, and I don’t want them to perceive me as insincere,” Colbert explained. “Because one night, I’ll be putting them to bed and I’ll say … ‘I love you, honey.’ And they’ll say, ‘I get it. Very dry, Dad. That’s good stuff.'”

His point was spot-on. Irony is dangerous and must be handled with care. But America can rest assured that for the moment its powers are in good hands. Stephen Colbert, the current grandmaster of the art, knows exactly what he was doing.

Just don’t expect him to be invited back to the correspondents dinner.