Rocking and awful

[imomus]

"There is no hope for liberals if they seek only to imitate conservatives, and no function either," said J.K. Galbraith, who died yesterday. You could extend that idea: there is no hope for peace if peace demonstrators, deep down, think war, death and aggression are cool.

Yesterday was a strange and interesting day. I began it by joining the March for Peace, Justice and Democracy on Broadway. The marchers carried banners saying "Fuck Bush" and chanted "1-2-3-4, We don't want your fucking war, 5-6-7-8, Fuck the cops, smash the state". I couldn't help wondering what kind of peace demonstration calls for things to be fucked and smashed, and, as a socialist who believes in the state and in civic order, I left the demo rewriting the chant in my head: how about "improve the cops, improve the state"? No? Too wishy-washy for you?



These thoughts were focused beautifully at the Whitney's Peace Tower demonstration in the evening. An event which could have been sanctimonious, worthy and boring turned out to be nothing less than explosive, full of fascinating contrasts.

The idea was to celebrate the original Peace Tower built in 1966 by Mark di Suvero as a protest against the Vietnam War. This tower has been reconstructed in the Whitney courtyard by di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The evening began with a blonde lady singing Dylan's "Masters of War" (complete with Martin Luther King samples and Muslim calls to prayer) in a sententious "invocation" reminiscent of the very American moment when some over-wrought soul singer warbles "Amazing Grace" a capella in a baseball stadium. Call it "motivational melisma". This was followed by some of the veterans of the original peace tower in LA reminiscing about it, 60s radicals who'd been hounded by the security services for their political activities (one brandished his FBI file, full of hilarious references to "young men of unkempt appearance demonstrating against the war in art galleries").

I then sang five songs (Morality is Vanity, Beowulf, Frilly Military, I Refuse To Die and Tinnitus), executing my usual deformed twitches, Japanese girl poses and fake folk dances. There were more speeches, which I missed because I was clearing my gear out. When I got back, thrashcore band Apeshit started up. They played a set of screeching, jerky noise. I screwed in my earplugs, and noticed children in the room covering their ears in dismay. The older people, the 60s veterans, also looked pained, and many of them left. Basically all the frail people, the people who need the benign protection of other people, left the room. The strong remained.



I saw John Giorno pacing about, looking pensive, while Apeshit played. How would he follow this punky, nihilistic din? But Giorno is an old pro, a master of the crowd as well as a world-class poet and veteran Beat. He performed two long lyrics from memory, enunciating forcefully and clearly. Here's the second one, an excellent political allegory about a tree:

There Was A Bad Tree

After Giorno, a Japanese (well, the drummer is Chinese) group called New Humans set some fluorescent tubes on the floor and began slowly fading up pure feedback from their instruments. Intense, still and concentrated, they looked like Buddhist monks meditating. Rhythms began, an organic tattoo played with sticks on the back of a speaker cabinet. Then there was a "song", but strikingly original, sculptural, made of sheets of harsh concentrated noise. I thought New Humans were great, fresh and pure, proof that rock music doesn't have to be Dionysian, sharky, populist, fascist; it doesn't have to use exhausted rhetorics and hackneyed structures to whip up the crowd.



It was at this point that the evening took an extraordinary turn. DeeDee Halleck of Deep Dish TV, the radical video-makers whose excellent documentary about Iraq Shocking and Awful can be found in between the gift store and the toilets (the Whitney have taken some flak for siting it there), took the podium. She told us that she'd brought Faiza Al-Arji, an Iraqi woman whose blog A Family in Baghdad details everyday life in Iraq under the American occupation. But, close to tears, DeeDee told us that Faiza had decided not to speak, and had left. "I think it was the music that did it," she said. "I think she felt it was the kind of music that the American soldiers in Iraq listen to in their tanks."

At this, Ian Vanek of Japanther, who was setting up his drumkit for the band's performance, exploded in rage. "That's fucked," he interrupted. "What do you mean, the music they listen to in the tanks? We're trying to set up a fucking rock show here, and you tell us this is the music they listen to in tanks? That is so fucked! We support our troops in Iraq!"

Halleck left, looking bewildered. Other speakers calmed Vanek down with calls that he at least respect Halleck's right to speak, and someone tried to smooth things out with the statement that "A lot of the artists who performed tonight are motivated by deep anger at the way things are, and they need to express that anger in the music they play".

I ran over to the fraught Halleck and told her that I thought she'd made a good and important point. What does it mean to advocate peace using the textures, rhetorics and semantics of war? How can you be into peace when you're talking about fucking x and smashing y? And what does it mean that a representative -- the only representative -- of the people supposedly being helped by this evening's events, the Iraqis, sensed a deeply alienating menace and aggression in the music being played, and associated it with the spirit of the occupation?

Having shouted down a radical video-maker, Japanther took the stage, and played a populist set accompanied by two giant styrofoam puppets, grotesque Garfield-type figures decorated with fanged skull motifs and Satanism-ready, Thanatos-friendly phrases like "Moloch" and "Pack of Spades". One puppet was a lion with a knife, the other a chainsaw-wielding cat, and they proceeded to dance about in the crowd, hacking each other to bits like a gigantic Tom and Jerry. In other circumstances it might have been fun, but in the light of Vanek's disgusting dressing-down of Halleck and (by implication) her Iraqi friend, it was actually pretty obnoxious. Japanther's music showed none of the formal originality of New Humans' sheets of abstract noise; it's punked-up surf music, a lo-fi, speeded-up rehash of 90s American alternarock.

I left before the end, and met the Japanese musicians from New Humans on the street. They were also skipping Japanther's set, riding the subway home with a nice guy who turned out to be a friend of Marxy's. (Here's an mp3 compiling some of the evening's sounds. You hear the Broadway peace demonstrators, followed by Apeshit, followed by New Humans, followed by Japanther.)

Back home, I googled Japanther and found a Brooklyn girl called Laura talking on her blog about the swimming pool gig the band played last week. The conversation turned to clothes, some boutique called F21, which Laura thought sounded "like a cool code... or a fighter jet".

It's a small detail, but, like the fanged skulls on Japanther's puppets, it really brought home to me how little Americans in their 20s care for the iconography, the textures of peace. The Whitney's problem, in trying to assemble a 1960s-style program combining peace speeches and music, is that rock music today comes from a subculture that doesn't celebrate peace. It comes from a dark, nihilistic place more in love with death than life. Forty years ago that wouldn't have been the case. The rock music of 1966 would have been charged with Eros, not Thanatos.

The plant imagery of Giorno's poem, and its humane message, marked him out as someone who loves life, and his poem is about peaceful co-existence with nature. These are the values of the 1960s Peace Tower veterans, but they're also values I can see in the blogs of young Japanese -- Rinko Kawauchi's photojournal, for instance. The flower imagery Kawauchi loves so much is mirrored in the photos Faiza Al-Arji takes in her Baghdad garden and shows in Pictures in Baghdad, her photoblog. Unfortunately, on last night's evidence, America's rocking and awful subculture seems more in love with power than flowers. It really does sound more like a man stuck under a tank hatch or glassed into a jet cockpit than a woman watering her garden.

Comments

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I think that the notion of produce costs going through the roof if illegal aliens as farmworkers were deported is a bit overstated. I grew up in a farming community in the San Joaquin Valley and I picked many a grape, and harvested many an olive in my teens, for gas money. More to the point, there are too many examples of other countries where they manage to produce their own--er--produce without relying upon illegal workers or charging $12 for a tomato. Like most of Europe and Canada. And American taxpayers already subsidize American farmers to an astronomical sum.

Distasteful cowboys aside, I have to wonder about some of the overheated rhetoric from the left that suggests that if one doesn't support the illegal immigrants in whatever cause is currently being championed, one is heartless and/or unAmerican. I keep hearing the "but we're ALL immigrants" line, and it's just so much nonsense. We're all immigrants, but we were either born to US citizens, or we went through the correct process. What do we say to those who have spent years of struggle to earn their citizenship the legal way? "Thanks for the effort, but we've decided to give away what you earned"?

The "lifeboat" analogy is too apt for people to forget. America can't accept an infinite number of new immigrants without it affecting the economy and the quality of life of those already here. And we're definitely sending a dangerous message to the world if we condone circumventing the Constitutional requirements for citizenship because we feel badly for some disadvantaged people (who happen to be breaking the law for their own gain). Sorry if that sounds cold, but I have yet to hear an argument to the contrary that wasn't predicated upon misinformation and emotions.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

I saw a commercial recently, it was one of those "you ought to know" type things. It was a man in a restaurant saying, "I think people should learn English in this country. Know what I mean?" And this man stands up and says, "NO, I DON'T." And then a written message comes up, "Make a stand for what is right."

Somehow, this ties in with what you said. This sort of, "We need to let all of them in, we can circumvent the naturalization process, and we can't get annoyed that they don't speak English, we're just being jerks, we need to go learn Spanish for them."

It's completely alien to me. I plan on moving to Momus' favorite place, Japan, and I can't imagine living there illegally, not learning Japanese, and then making demands. I feel like a guest there.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I too am moving to Japan, in April of 2008. I visit there twice a year, and the more I'm there, the more I want to stay. I've been taking Japanese lessons for about a year now, so hopefully after 3 years of classes, I'll be able to communicate reasonably well. A few years ago I moved to the Netherlands (actually, it was right after Bush didn't win the first time; "to hell with THIS country!", I recall saying). Even though I was just there for a year (on an artist's residency) I still took classes to learn Dutch, in a nation where everyone under 40 speaks English. Why? Because I was a guest. It's what guests are supposed to do--meet the host country's best expectations for their guests, not demand that the host country change to accommodate the guests. I find it shocking that people can't grasp that.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

It's shockingly common, along with the attitude of, "oh no, my children are becoming Americanized!"

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Yes, but what if you really, really want to be right?

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

And we're definitely sending a dangerous message to the world if we condone circumventing the Constitutional requirements for citizenship

The preident of the united states has gotten really good at circumventing the constitution. Not to mention international law. Helping "some disadvantaged people" would be a minor infraction.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Your hyperbole aside, Bush hasn't done anything wrong. He's just doing his job.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Your over simplification aside, invading defensless countries is not in his job description.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Where did Bush invade a defenseless country?

Did he do this all by himself or did Congress and the UN have a chance to stop it and didn't?



If all you're going to do is get out your tired, old bumper sticker slogans and shout loud enough to make me tired of arguing with you, you don't need to reply to this...it's not worth talking about.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Did he do this all by himself or did Congress and the UN have a chance to stop it and didn't?

Congress didn't do their job. The media didn't do their job and the US trumps the UN.

If all you're going to do is get out your tired, old bumper sticker slogans and shout loud enough to make me tired of arguing with you, you don't need to reply to this...it's not worth talking about.

This reminds me of the time I visited the Ann Coulter board.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Many Republicans don't even agree with you. Don't you think you're throwing around accusations of hyperbole a little freely here?

[(Anonymous)]

Rather than presume what legal immigrants think of illegal ones, I'll let the legal immigrants speak for themselves (elsewhere, or here if any are present). Some thoughts (not yet organized into a completely coherent order): the need for survival will always trump the law, so when a person can more closely approach a survivable wage by illegally crossing a border, of course the person will do it. The system by which immigrants become citizens is clearly far too byzantine. If you live here for X years and hold a job, marry a citizen, or give birth to one, you should be regarded as a citizen: end of story. I think much of the animus against illegal immigrants has to do with their structural necessity to our economy in filling jobs at wages citizens (covered by laws regarding wages and working conditions, however emaciated by Republicans and their sympathizers) will not or cannot have. If all these "illegals" were to become citizens, they could no longer be grossly underpaid and abused in their working conditions...and either prices would have to rise (sadly, the likeliest result) or the grotesquely swollen compensation of upper-level executives would have to be scaled back dramatically (the more desirable result). This is an argument against the civility, justice, and morality of our economy - not against immigrants (legal or otherwise). The brutality of laws that would criminalize even aiding illegal immigrants is dangerous for several reasons: basic civility, public health and safety (those forced underground cannot treat contagious diseases, for example), and a host of other reasons. (I think many of the arguments against illegal immigrants somehow imagine that they're not *already* here...) Incidentally, regarding the language issue several people have raised: what makes you think large numbers of immigrants are actively refusing to learn English? Learning a language as an adult is difficult; and at any given moment there will be plenty of people who have not (yet) learned the language. Furthermore, in large parts of the US, Spanish-speaking people settled the land well before English-speakers did. Why don't the English speakers in those places learn Spanish? Are they rude or something? --2fs

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Interesting post, although I find I disagree with much of it.

For example, you wrote "...the need for survival will always trump the law, so when a person can more closely approach a survivable wage by illegally crossing a border..." That's neither been established, nor is it entirely sensible. Other than dealing with an oft-corrupt government, and the self-imposed burden of Catholic reproductive efficiency, there's nothing in Mexico that has to keep it second to any other nation on earth.

Eire pulled itself into the First World by soliciting investment and emphasizing growth industries such as high tech. Why should Mexicans need to come into the US to survive? About a hundred million of them do, right there in Mexico. Mexico has far more natural resources than Eire, a workforce 25 times as large and no shortage of intelligent and hard-working people. And yet, we keep treating Mexicans like they're poor cousins, deserving of things that say, a German or Chinese person who wants to move here--shouldn't likewise feel entitled to. I'm sorry, but that argument is entirely emotional, and it doesn't even begin to address the tax burden Americans pay in benefits to illegal immigrants.

[(Anonymous)]

"That's neither been established, nor is it entirely sensible": I wasn't making a factual argument, necessarily; I was saying that people faced with abusive, sweatshop labor conditions that imperil their and their families' survival are likely to choose any option that increases the likelihood of that survival. If you are starving to death, but it's illegal to "steal" perfectly good food discarded in a restaurant dumpster, for example, you will not choose to starve yourself in order to obey the law. (I cannot, off the top of my head, remember Brecht's pungent phrase on starvation vs. morality...)

As to Mexico's potential: is this "tough love," that if we weren't so soft toward their plight they'd improve their lot and fulfill the potential of their situation? I'm not sure I believe that's likely. There are a host of factors inhibiting Mexico's social and economic performance, but I don't think emigration from Mexico is what's preventing that performance.

As to the tax burden issue: study after study has demonstrated that immigrants, including "illegals," make a net contribution to the American economy. And more specifically: if they were made citizens, and were paid livable wages, they'd be paying taxes - not merely using them.

Regardless, I feel queasy arguing ethical issues in terms of economics. Or in terms of law: it strikes me that people quite often pick and choose which laws they think have ethical force and power, and ignore others. I don't know anyone who rigorously obeys every last law in all situations...so the reason for wishing any particular law to be enforced can't be merely because it *is* the law. --2fs

[bricology.livejournal.com]

How many of the Mexicans who come across the border to work here are actually facing that option or starvation? Very few, I suspect. So again, I think we're loading an otherwise objective issue with emotional freight.

"As to the tax burden issue: study after study has demonstrated that immigrants, including "illegals," make a net contribution to the American economy. And more specifically: if they were made citizens, and were paid livable wages, they'd be paying taxes - not merely using them."

I haven't seen such studies, but to me, it's entirely counter-intuitive. How much does an average migrant farmworker earn per year? If they're earning less than $8,000, they wouldn't pay any Fed tax. If they're earning between $8,000 and $30,000, the Fed tax is 15%. At the top end of that bracket, that means that they're contributing $4,500 in Fed taxes (actually less, since most can claim dependents and other deductions). Now consider that the cost of having one baby delivered at a hospital like San Francisco General (where it's essentially socialized health care), is more than that. Consider that the cost to the taxpayers of one child in a public school is FAR more than that. So, I doubt that the studies prove that the average immigrant earns enough to contribute positively to the tax pool.

Of course, it's uncommon for people to obey all laws, but I would greatly prefer it if people would at least obey all laws that breaking has a negative impact on others. Gambling, prostitution, soft drug use, sensible speeding--those are laws many of us could deal with others breaking without serious repercussions. But the working poor Americans are being harmed by everything from the cost of unnecessary wars to the cost of healthcare and education for illegal immigrants.

You do make some good points, but ultimately, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Remember a time when there were no Border Patrols, Immigration Departments, Illegal Aliens and etc.?

Imagine there's no countries anybody?

This whole system is just another tool to protect the rich from the poor (in this case, to keep wealth in rich countries and not allow for it to be spread around).

[bricology.livejournal.com]

That doesn't make sense to me. The rich (in America) are the ones who primarily benefit from having a supply of laborers who will work for the minimum wage (or below) and those workers have no legal recourse for demanding better conditions. The working class (in America) are more negatively impacted by illegals than other groups, as they are in competition for jobs and for public services.

I'll give you an example: here in San Francisco, there's a stretch of old Army street where undocumented Latin American day laborers hang out every day by the hundreds--sometimes thousands--hoping to get picked up for a day's work by contractors, landscapers, etc. They can earn $100 to $150 for a day's hard work. That's many times what they could earn in Mexico doing the same work, but for every one of them that gets picked, a citizen is essentially denied the right to compete for the same work, because a citizen would be guaranteed other benefits besides just pay (workman's comp., etc.), and the employer would have to pay into the system (workman's comp., withholdings, SS, etc.).

So the system, as it is being bent here, benefits a few contractors and other employers, and the undocumented workers, but at the expense of legal would-be employees, and of taxpayers who have to bear the financial burden of paying for public services for those who don't pay into the tax pool.

Notions like "spreading the wealth around between countries" may play well to some people's emotions, but there's nothing beyond a warm fuzzy feeling going for it. Nations in the 21st century who are rich are so because they devote the fruits of their citizens' labor into building up their infrastructure, fostering business growth through corporate incentives, and so forth. Given that the success of "rich countries" like Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan and others are based upon a combination of attributes of their workforce and their government, why should "poor countries" like say, those in Sub-Saharan Africa--deserve to have the fruits of rich nations' labor "spread around" over them?

I'm a working artist who earns less money from my labor than does a bus driver or security guard. Do I deserve to compel the lawyer or corporate executive who earns ten times as much as I, give me money because I "deserve" it? If so, I'd ask you to put in a good word for me.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

I understand what you're saying but the major difference at play here is that we're both artist but you're talking from an extreme inside of the box point of view and I'm obviously talking from outside of the box.

Therefore your analysis/criticism of the system doesn't make any sense to me because basically the system doesn't make any sense to me (or if it makes sense, I disagree in principle with it).