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I’ve been variously impressed and disappointed by the line-ups for the Chicago Jazz Festival over the last four years or so, but this time, to commemorate their 30th year, they’ve really outdone themselves: AACM performs Friday night (I saw Roscoe Mitchell live with a trio when I was at the University of Illinois, and it was quite a mind-blowing experience), Vijay Iyer and Dave Douglas on Saturday. and (the group I most look forward to seeing) ICP (a Dutch free improvisation group) and Ornette Coleman on Sunday.
Here’s the full line-up for the main stage.
I’ll probably be taking a train (or carpool?) in for the weekend and staying at Hostelling International Chicago for a few nights. Any other Purdue folk interested on a Labor Day weekend in Chicago? They give discounts for groups of 10 or more.
As a fan (and unpublished participant?) of the Flarf movement in poetry (see here and here for more about that) (oh, and here’s a flarf poem I wrote earlier this week), I was delighted when my friend Seth pointed me to this gem at Ubuweb: Sound — The People’s Choice Music. Here’s part of the description from the Ubuweb page:
With the collaboration of composer Dave Soldier, Komar & Melamid’s Most Wanted Painting project was extended into the realm of music. A poll, written by Dave Soldier, was conducted on Dia’s web site in Spring 1996. Approximately 500 visitor’s took the survey. Dave Solder and Nina Mankin used the survey results to write music and lyrics for the Most Wanted and Most Unwanted songs.
I don’t see why the aesthetic of Most-Unwanted-Music shouldn’t take off as a movement of its own, parallel to the Flarf movement in poetry. Sure, musically it’s a different kind of painful experience when compared to Noise music, Free Jazz, or John Zorn’s more abrasive output–it is less about hurting your ears and more about hurting your taste; but it seems to me equally viable as an avant-garde approach to composition as any of these other forms.
One great thing about this is that you can listen to both compositions from the project for free. Check them out.
- Listen to The People’s Choice Music at UbuWeb: Sound.
This is how Chris Hedges recent article “What it Means when the US Goes to War” from the Asia Times begins:
Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations”. Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of soda, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.
Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing – the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm – to murder – the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.
The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. [emphasis added] There is very little killing. The savagery and brutality of the occupation is tearing apart those who have been deployed to Iraq. As news reports have just informed us, 115 American soldiers committed suicide in 2007. This is a 13% increase in suicides over 2006. And the suicides, as they did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as distraught veterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cotton wool that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality of what they did to innocents in Iraq.
It continues from there to give some quite disturbing information about what goes on in Iraq told by US veterans of the war themselves. The article is adapted from Hedges new book, co-written with Laila al-Arian, entitled Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.
These stories are nothing new to me; I heard similar things from a classmate of mine who was sent to Iraq in the Illinois National Guard in 2003/4 and after only a year or so back home committed suicide. There are too many stories like this now. The atrocity of this war is bad on all sides, except for the contracting firms and the Administration-Crony-Good-Ol’-Boys that insist on continuing it until there is nothing left for them to feed on. Fucking vampires, all of them.
I’m assuming this isn’t a controversial statement to make by this point, unless you’ve successful kept your head up your ass for the last year or so. Denial is a popular position to take in this country right now, after all. But a perusal of the US economy page at The Guardian should leave anyone with a pretty bleak feeling.
And as if there isn’t bad news on the economy daily, here’s some more to worry about:
State and city governments have yet to shrink the economy; indeed, they have even managed to prop it up. They have quietly maintained their spending at pre-crisis levels even as they warn of numerous cutbacks forced on them by declining tax revenues. The cutbacks, however, are written into budgets for a fiscal year that begins on July 1, a month away….
[T]he states and municipalities have increased their spending in recent quarters, bolstering the nation’s meager economic growth. Over the past year, they have added $40 billion to their outlays, even allowing for scattered spending freezes and a few cutbacks in advance of July 1. Total employment has also risen. But when the current fiscal year ends in 30 days (or in the fall for many municipalities), state and city spending will fall, along with employment — slowly at first and then quite noticeably after the next president takes office. (NY Times)
Maybe this is a good time for us to stop worrying so much about this election, which promises to change nothing important for the country’s ruling rich, and start focusing on what can be done now to improve our lives. November is not only too far off, it’s also the same empty promise that it’s been for decades.
