Category: Uncategorised

except for you

I don’t have as much as a draft as I wanted. My current creative endeavors involve Fred Phelps and Bill O’Reilley talking about homosexuals. Augh. Can’t deal with another day of that. Today I must figure out my taxes. I fly back east Sunday. I didn’t take care of some thing with the county assessor office. I have no idea what it’s even about.
I need a better way of dealing with stress other than envisioning breaking dish wear. grrr. kill. smash. break. I have a list of people I wanted to see today, but I feel too frustrated to make polite conversation.
Maybe it’s my morning coffee. I’m not good at caffeine.
Tag: Celesteh

Google now allows you to search the text of books. This I knew, but they also let you search books which are still in copyright. My advisor told me to look at the section on taping in William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Expolded. I’ve heard some of Burroughs’ tape pieces and I think I’ve even been to a museum or library or something dedicated to him, but I’ve never actually read his writing before.

ha ha. you can’t cut and paste from google’s results, so no blockquote for you. Start with “Take an everyday situation you are arguing with your boy friend or girl friend remembering what was said last time and thinking of things to say next time the whole stupid argument going round and round like the music in your head until it bores you silly to hear it . . .” Midway down the page and read the next couple of pages
As a veteran of the great verbal wars of 1995-2003, his solution is entirely brilliant and certainly great conceptual art, but I can’t imagine putting it into practice without causing even greater warfare. But you know, if you end apologizing for the same past misdeeds over and over and over again, why not just tape it and play the recording?
I apologize to any and all who are inflamed by this post. An mp3 of an apology will be forthcoming.
Tag: Celesteh

Ok, so I’m messing around with Fred Phelps. His sermon that I’ve got is like an hour long. I’m cutting out all his ramblings about Billy Graham (who, when he was with Phelps at Bob Jones, used to preach about hell nearly every time he preached, says Phelps), the Washington Post, and that den of sodomites calling itself the Topeka City Council. Actually, I left in the part of the den of sodomites. When I think Topeka, I think sodomy.

Ahem. One of the members of the Topeka City Council is a lesbian. Phelps’ granddaughter ran against her recently for the seat, mainly on the platform that the entire city would be destroyed by fire and brimstone, ala Sodom, but in the afterlife, if they elect a homosexual. Phelps didn’t get very many votes.
It’s actually very surprising how much in common Phelp’s sound-bite-ish sermonizing has in common with Ann Coulter’s sound-bite-ish pontificating. Ad hominem all the way. It’s also kind of disturbing that Phelps has a more nuanced understanding of the war in Iraq. “They don’t want us there.” We’re “slaughtering” them. “They have ideas and they’re not ignorant.” And “That miserable little idiot in the whitehouse” has “a phony, false, hypocritical religion.” Right-on. Oh, no, wait, it’s because he’s part of the sodomite agenda. Nevermind.
Fred Phelps’ website God Hates Fags
Who funds this guy? He’s so over-the-top, I wonder if some pro-gay group is secretly funding him to give homophobes a bad name. I also suspect that Peta was created by the beef industry.
Tag: Fred Phelps

If you have no idea about any of the pundits I mention, the CBC has an excellent documentary introduction to political discourse in the US. It explains who is who, gives both sides, etc. I started out being displeased with it because it said that liberals were engaged in hysterical attacks as well as conservatives and then played clips of liberals trying to get a word in edgewise on Fox News. On the other hand, it’s true that Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is a somewhat inflamatory title . . .. But a funny book. They talk about Richard Mellon Scaife without talking about how he was directly involved in digging up dirt on Clinton to give to the Starr investigation. However, they come to conclusions that seem correct and the many of the clips they use of pundits in action are all from the anti-Canada day that ran on Fox News when there was talk of blue staters migrating north en-masse after the election. They didn’t play the full clips, but I’m pretty certain I recognized them. (heh heh heh) There is also a very wonderful exchange with Ann Coulter there, in a separate short file. I’ve never seen her speechless before. She had her ass handed to her on a platter, but very subtly. It was great.
Also, I am under the impression (possibly incorrect) that Canadians think labeling homelessness a “liberal” issue is insane. As opposed to a social issue or a moral issue or a problem-that-needs-to-be-solved issue, but I could be projecting here. Watching foreign documentaries on the US is useful because they don’t make unspoken US assumptions, but confusing because they make their own unspoken assumptions.
It would have been nice if they had some expert talking about the difference between the media serving power and the media serving people and how “liberal” issues are often connected to the people, like universal healthcare and poverty, vs corporate handouts, but, you know, I could make my own documentary . . ..
So, if you want to know what’s going on on the most popular TV News show (the O’Reilly Factory) and what sort of political news plays away from The Daily Show, check out this documentary.
Tags: Pundits, Ann Coulter, Canada, Media

I was listening to NPR this morning, whilst half asleep and there was a balanced-type news article, one that talks to both sides of an issue. The subject was torture. The question: does it work?

Ok, sure, they said “extreme interrogation methods,” which, it should be noted, violate the quaint Geneva conventions. We don’t do this in domestic prisons . . . yet. But,um, I’m appalled. How did torture become a debate? And how on earth could the debate have gotten over to whether or not it works. The debate should be, “torture: total evil or complete evil?”
Ok, so we have a guy who knows where the ticking time bomb is. Torture him! Ok, we have this guy that we’re 90% certain knows where the ticking time bomb is. Torture him! Ok, we have this guy who is 80% certain. Torture! Ok, we have 3 guys and we’re 90% certain that one of those three guys knows where the ticking time bob is. Torture all three! We can sort out the innocent later! Ok, we have this guy and we’re 90% sure that his brother in law planted a bomb. There’s an 80% chance that this guy knows where his brother in law is hiding. But when we ask him, he keeps saying “I don’t know.” Torture him too, right? Ok, you might know where your best friend, the brother in law of the bomber, is hiding. You’re innocent. The brother in law is also innocent but is scared out of his wits knowing that chemical lights are destined for his anus. The bomber is completely uninnocent and has found an excellent hiding place. We torture you, right? Innocent people might die if that bomb went off. It could go off at any second. We need to torture you, right? Because when you say “I don’t know,” you might just be protecting you innocent best friend. But, whoops, we failed to catch you. You took off when you heard we might torture you. We just caught your spouse, whom we have no choice but to torture . . .
Ok, so this was a problem, but we would still torture the bomber, right? Because the bomb could go off at any second. However . . . he holds out for two days. That’s not unreasonable. In the mean time, the bomb has either gone off or the bomber’s co-conspirators noticed that the bomber is missing and have moved the bomb. Our “intelligence” isn’t so valuable then, is it?
Meanwhile, you, your spouse and the terrified chemical-lighted brother-in-law, all of whom thought the bomber was a lunatic, have realized that the government really is a bunch of torturers and have started working to overthrow it.
However, even if torture did “work,” it would still be wrong. If we always caught the right guy and he always confessed in the nick of time . . . Because our soldiers have knowledge about coming bombs, knowledge that is valuable to the societies we destroy. Soldiers know what their orders are. They know what houses might be raided next. If we torture, why shouldn’t our targets torture? Or is it only ok if we do it? What if we’re at war with another state, not an insurgency, the war with Finland? Why would they abstain from torturing our soldiers if we are documented torturers?
And finally, What kind of monsters are we for torturing prisoners? All other concerns aside, it’s just wrong. Evil. Bad. Wrong.
At some point in this country, morality came to mean objecting to what other people do in bed and how well others conform to ideal gender, class, religious, national and racial identities. Healing the sick, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, clothing the naked, examining your own conscience and trying to be a “good Samaritan” have all fallen out of favor. Torture isn’t immoral unless it’s a consentual SM scene in the East Village (which isn’t actually torture). Darwinism is bad, unless you’re talking about ruthless social darwinism, in which case, survival of the fittest is god’s law. Torturing evil folks is a-ok, and those Iraqis are not conforming very well to being white American Christians, so they’re excellent targets.

Update

Fafblog explores the moral quandry of torture: “There’s a bomb on the streets of Hypotheticopolis – a ticking bomb! – and only Giblets can stop it! But time is running out and in order to find it Giblets may have to resort to the first weapon of last resort: torture.”
Tag: Torture

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

http://www.aim.com/tos/tos.adp (emphasis added)

Does this say that AOL can use the content of my instant messages in any way that it wants? IChat uses the AIM network. I’m offline until further notice.
Actually, um, I’ve strongly advised against IMing sensitive corporate material for a long time. It goes through AOL servers. They probably don’t read individual messages. But I’d bet money that they’re scanning for links and probably also key words, in order to compile statistics. La la la. When I worked there, I’d get a weekly report of web traffic through their servers, as they could tell what websites their subscribers were hitting. It was very interesting. I bet SBC also collects web stats. I bet somebody buys these sorts of stats. I bet there are folks paid to spend a lot of time and energy analyzing these stats to see what sort of useful data they can gleam from them.
What’s a good replacement for AIM?
Tag: AIM

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I’ll write them here in case I decide I need more padding . . . err discussion.

In Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky documents extensively how media in the United States serves power. He demolishes the myth of the liberal media. This persistent myth is also countered quite effectively by David Brock, in his coverage of how fringe right wing ideas got coverage in mainstream media outlets. He also documents how the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal became so biased that they embarrassed the news section of the Journal. News in the United States is controlled by corporate power, which has little interest in actually reporting the news. Journalist Laurie Garrett wrote in her goodbye letter to NewsDay, “All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations – and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions.” (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/151255) This increased drive for profit hurts news, because the profitability of investigate journalism is low. They go instead for cheap: celebrity stories and often “news” releases produced by corporations or the government. Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story detailing how PR firms hired by the federal government produced several “news” stories, which aired as if they were actual news on local news broadcasts across the country. Aside from airing blatant propaganda, media outlets cut costs by replacing journalism with pundits – talking heads which shout talking points at each other, giving the impression of analyzing the news, but in fact doing nothing but trying to advance an agenda with information that is often incorrect.
This shortchanging of news is inherently conservative. Liberals who watched a lot of TV news coverage post 9-11 tended to shift rightward (yadda yadda). Laziness and cheapness in reporting means repeating what official sources say. Official sources are not the voices of the people, but instead the voice of the government and of corporations, whose interests often run directly counter to the interests of the people and whose voices often run directly counter to the truth. With no money spent debunking these lies, and a media culture of serving power, the lies become the reported truth.
Pundits are the most obviously biased and openly right wing media voices of our government policies of prison torture, scapegoating, pro-christianity and conservatism, so they make the easiest targets for protest music. However, in addition to going for what is obvious and easy, leftists must engage all of the “liberal” media and must fight media consolidation.
Garrett commented, alarmedly, that people under 30 are not consuming official news sources. “First of all, all across the news industry there’s a recognition that people under 30 are not watching. They’re not reading. They don’t subscribe to newspapers. They’re not watching the evening news, and in many cases, it’s hard to pin down exactly how people under 30 in America are getting information. It’s a kind of information cocoon in which you’re osmotically absorbing from thousands and thousands of places from the internet, from your friends, from text messaging, from God knows where.” (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/151255) I suspect that “god knows where” is often music, the blogosphere and from independent media outlets. Dropping out of the toxic, lie-filled mainstream media is a good start, but, like Plato’s guy in the allegory of the cave, we must return to the darkness to expose it as fraud.
Not to be elitist or anything . . .
Tag: Celesteh

I am unaware of to what extent leftists
listen to and engage right wing pundits. 
I am under the impression that conservative media outlets are mostly
consumed by conservatives. The popularity of the movie Outfoxed, a film that does nothing but advances the
hypothesis that Fox News is biased, seems to support this assumption. Brock’s
fact checking efforts represent a new era of fighting the right.  It is critical that the left engage
right-wing media, but as active participants and not as passive consumers. On
March 8, 2005, University of Madison, Wisconsin published a study that showed
that post 9-11 TV watching tended to push liberals in a rightward
direction. 

 

The survey showed that among liberals who
watched little television, about 20 percent favored more government police
powers. But about 41 percent of liberals who were heavy viewers of TV news
supported such measures – much closer to the 50 to 60 percent of conservatives
who supported greater police powers, regardless of how much TV news they
watched.

            (Chaptman
http://www.news.wisc.edu/10779.html)

 

            Many
leftists are aware that popular and conservative television media is biased and
distorted and so to preserve their sanity, refuse to engage it.  I do not watch TV.  I follow media through Media Matters
and through blogs such as Newshounds (“We watch Fox so you don’t have to”), the
Wonkette and Atrios. TV’s constant stream of biased, corporate-produced images
is overwhelming to me.  My
fascination with punditry is as an outsider.  My pieces are like tourist photos.  I do not know if the locals would consider them trite or
compelling.  (My media-obsessed
friends seem to like them, though.)

To fight the echo chamber, we must be
aware of how the far right is changing discourse.   I write pieces with the idea that they will help raise
this awareness. I hope that awareness persuades leftists to action or at least
to outrage. At the least, one hopes that all of the Alien Others constantly
attacked by the right wing would begin to feel solidarity for each other.  Arabs and queers are often used almost
interchangeably. Imus in the Morning described an Iraqi resistance fighter as “an enemy combatant
who had sworn fidelity to some bearded fatwa fairy.” (http://mediamatters.org/items/200411190009) Queers stand-in for almost any social
“problem.” Bill Cunningham said while discussing classroom discipline on Hannity
& Colmes, “In the
good old days, back when AIDS was an appetite suppressant and when gay meant
you were happy, back in those days there was discipline in public schools. But
not today.” 
(http://mediamatters.org/items/200503040003) Ah yes, back when people
knew their place and social norms could be enforced with lynching, in that mythical
golden age, children were well-behaved. 

This post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins, all Right Reserved

Tag: Celesteh

Michael Savage and Imus

 

Savage
Beasts

 

Before
I created Coulter Shock,
I listened to other pundits, including Michael Savage, who advocated increasing
prison torture and sticking lit dynamite in the anuses of Arab detainees.  The problem with Michael Savage is that
he does not mean to be taken seriously. 
He’s like Howard Stern.  His
use of "irony" provides a shield where he can say completely
offensive and racist things and then later claim he didn’t mean them.  Ha ha only serious.  His voice is also somewhat unpleasant
and uninteresting.  People clearly
listen to him for his insane content rather than his dulcet tones.  I put him aside, temporarily to work on
Coulter and then Limbaugh.

            After
I finished with Limbaugh, I went back online to search for new material for my
next piece.  I downloaded a Media
Matters clip from a morning show on NBS called Imus in the Morning. 
He was showing pictures of Palestinians mourning the death of Yassir
Arafat.  One of the voice-overs
from the Imus show was calling the Palestinians “animals” and was advocating
dropping “the bomb” on them and killing everyone.  The other co-hosts laughed along with this idea.  Later that morning, they played a clip
of someone pretending to be General Patton, speaking about how an embedded
reporter had just filmed footage of a US Marine shooting an injured, unarmed
Iraqi insurgent.  “Patton” used the
term “raghead,” and the phrase “bearded fatwa fairy.” Imus’ racism was thus
clearly linked to his homophobia.  (If
anyone doubts that these struggles aren’t linked.)  In the first half of the program, one of the male voices
said something about the “fat pig wife of [Arafat] living in Paris.”  Thus he added Francophobia and sexism
to the mix.  Another commentator,
noting the emotion of the Palestinians said, “It’s like the worst Woodstock.”  Hippies are liberals are feminists are
Palestinians are ragheads are gay are women are Iraqis are French.  Every group is standing in for every
other group.  And while they
laughed, one of the commentators kept repeating “animals” and “kill them all.”

            This,
of course, reminded me of the Michael Savage calls to kill all the prisoners in
Abu Graib, whom he called “subhuman.” 
His comments were interspersed with bizarre attacks on media
organizations for being communist, apparently because they published photos of
prisoner abuse.  As if Al Jazeera
would have ignored the pictures if the “communist” New York Times hadn’t run
them.  He called for more prisoner
abuse and then dared listeners to report him to the FCC for it.  Then he claimed that it was the
American People who were really going to suffer.  Because of having a poor image abroad?  Because we could no longer torture
prisoners?  It wasn’t clear.  “We the people” still don’t seem to be
suffering as much as tortured prisoners. 
And certain not as much as would prisoners if, like Savage recommended,
they had dynamite stuffed in their orifices and were dropped out of airplanes.

             Savage
and Imus are both entertainment. 
They were both going for a shocking laugh.  Savage, like Limbaugh and Coulter, is completely caught up
in himself.  All of those people
are in love with their own voices. 
They are completely pleased by their clever sophistry and smug beyond
belief.  At the same time, they
think themselves to be victims. 
Hence, Savage dared people to report him.

            Savage
seemed to be addressing several different issues in his comments, many of them
along the popular right-wing logic that the media lost the Vietnam War by
demoralizing the American people by telling them what was going on.  (If only they had lied, we would have
colonized all of Vietnam!) These were neither here nor there, so I cut them
along with the FCC dares.  I
returned to Imus and made one track that just contained the laughing and
“animals!”.  Then I made another
track that just contained racism and calls for violence, eliminating “fat pig
wife” and “worst Woodstock.”  I
skipped “Patton” entirely.  All
these issues are connected, clearly, in the words of the pundits, but I just
focused on calls for genocide and violence.  I looped the laughing track and played violent phrases from
Imus and Savage on top.  Thus the
Imus men laugh hysterically at themselves and at Savage.  The entertainment value of genocide,
violence and torture is thus highlighted.

            91Angels
comments on this approach, “Cutting away the fluff and feathers and presenting
what they really say in it’s ugliness and baseness, everyone able to see what
is at the end of their fork, engages the listener so they have to make a judgment
(one that you hope will be in favor of what you are trying to communicate, of
course) instead of just being preached to.”  (http://www.livejournal.com/users/celestehblog/66886.html?thread=15686#t15686)  However, as I worked on the piece, I
became discouraged.  NBC was forced
to apologize for the content of the Imus show, but the piece only reminded me
of the left’s failure to turn torture into a mainstream issue.  I decided that offensive statements
about the desirability of torture were not enough to support the piece, as
clearly, not enough people would care. 
Also, “here’s a guy saying something offensive” seemed too weak to carry
a piece. 

I remembered a piece about laughter made
by Kingston, an undergraduate who took MUSC 220 in the fall of 2003.  His piece started out cheerfully, with
friendly laughter, but turned dark and ended with mocking, menacing
laughter.  In our culture, we
generally think of laughter as friendly, beneficial and desirable.  Clubs have even formed where member
gather and laugh, believing it to have health benefits.  Kingston’s piece changed the way that I
think about laughter by articulating its dark side.

The laughter from Imus initially seems as
innocent as all laughter seems. 
However the words “animals” and a disgusted “look at this!” left in the
laugh track showed it’s true, cruel nature.  I decided to make the laughter the focus of the piece.  I create an increasingly heavy overlap
of laughter, using my spatilization algorithm, so that the overlapping laughter
does not interfere with itself or with non-spatialized racist comments played
on top of it.  I used my
phrase-finding algorithm again in this piece, to break up Imus and Savage into
their sound bites.

This piece is only a few minutes
long.  I recorded a realization
that came in at 2:22.  However,
when I play that recording, it seems to go interminably.  I would have sworn it was at least
seven or ten minutes.  This piece
had serious crash bugs until the spring break of 2005 and so has never been
performed.  This is absolutely my
last right wing voice piece. 
Unless I take on Bill O’Reilley and Fred Phelps to do a piece concerning
homophobia.  God help me, I don’t
know if I could stand it.
This post is not creative commons. It is copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved

Tag: Micheal Savage

Rush Limbaugh

 

The
first pundit that I downloaded was Rush Limbaugh. His voice is not polished,
but he’s been current for many years and is unfortunately not likely to go away
soon.  I downloaded some audio
files from Media Matters.  His
comments were what I was seeking, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them.  I tried looping them in quick
succession, so that the same file would start to play and then another copy of
it would start to play only a few milliseconds later and then another one a few
milliseconds after that, until there was a dense texture.  This made a nice sound, something like
a washing machine.  I wanted to
call it Spin Cycle.
This technique seemed similar to Steve Reich’s audio loops in pieces such as It’s
Gonna Rain.  However, the dense texture obscured
Limbaugh’s words. I feel that the content of Limbaugh’s speech is fundamental
to exploring his meaning and the seductive lies of the right wing.  However, all meaning was quickly lost
by my looping and the text was totally obscured.

            I
gave up on Limbaugh and moved on to create Coulter Shock, returning to Limbaugh when I could no
longer stand Coulter.

 

Rush
to Excuse

 

My
Ann Coulter piece had a proposed third section that I did not complete.  This section was going to find the
pitches of all the short grains of vocal sound that made up the last part of
the piece.  I used the program I
wrote for that instead with a clip of Limbaugh mocking, downplaying and
sometimes praising the torture of prisoners at American-run Abu Graib prison in
Iraq.  His statements were
outrageously offensive and included imitating the barking of the dogs used to
terrorize and bite prisoners, calling officers "orrifcers", etc. 

            I
had an idea that I would play equally-sized short grains of text in a loop
while computing their pitch material. 
As the pitch of a grain became known, a pitched sound would replace the
original audio content.  Then,
after all the pitches were known, the program would then progressively “forget”
pitch content until the grains returned to their original text state.  Meanwhile, like in the second half of
my Coulter piece, I would gradually reshuffle the order of the grains.  My experiments with these methods were
unsatisfying.

            Then,
while I was working on it, Alvin Lucier played Paul De Marinis’ work Odd
Evening for his
composition seminar class.  I told
the class that Marinis had already written the piece I was trying to write and
had gotten better than I was going to. 
Alvin told me to write the piece anyway, so I carried on. 

            I
noticed that shuffling the grains made their meaning disappear too quickly, so
I mixed them with longer phrases, which were automatically discovered, just as
in Coulter Shock.  I decided to change the grain length on
each pass through the loop.  I
think this is a good compromise between the musical interest of hearing the
pitch of spoken voice and political interest of hearing content.  Also, like with Bush’s speech, the
repetition of phrases makes their meaning more evident.

            The
speech starts with an introduction of the just the pitches of the last 20
grains of the clip.  Then it plays
all the grains of the clip, in order, with both the pitch and the text
material.  I then scramble the
grains and play them back mixed up with some longer phrases from the start of
the clip.  Then I double the size
of the grains and again play them back in random order with pitch and voice,
intermixed with longer phrases that come from a bit further into the clip.  I repeat this process until the grains
are long enough that words like “fear” can be clearly heard.  The piece ends with Rush’s mocking
question, “Is that allowed in the Geneva Conventions?”

            I
have submitted this piece to numerous festivals, but it was rejected.  Surprisingly, Limbaugh’s comments
failed to generate much controversy just as systematic torture of prisoners
failed to be reported outside of the Pacifica Network and the left wing
blogosphere.  I worried the piece
would slip into irrelevance before anyone ever heard it.  I posted a realization of it, my
Coulter piece and my Bush State of the Union piece to my website under a
Creative Commons license that makes it possible for people to download, share,
commercially use and remix the piece as long as they include attribution. The
commercial value of these pieces to me is near negligible, especially as the
controversies fade into the forgotten past.  I would rather have people hear them than not hear
them.  Unfortunately, I have not
had time to adequately promote my downloads.  A log search shows that it has been downloaded by one person
unknown to me in the United States and one in Britain.  As far as I know, it has never before
been performed in public.  In the
future, I want to launch a podcast of my music, which I hope will garner more
listeners.
This post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved.

My thesis is so strange
Tag: Rush Limbaugh