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Mira Calix and Midaircondo

Photo from Midaircondo.com

I saw Mira Calix and Midaircondo in Copenhagen last night. I was really pleased to see some relatively esoteric music here, because that doesn't happen too often (not likely to happen again soon either because there were only about 20 people in the crowd).

Midaircondo were a real treat. They're three women from Sweden (only two were on stage), playing an ethereal mix of loops and samples, with some looped video scenes of city life at night on a huge screen behind them. They sounded like a mixture of Boards of Canada and the Norwegian band Flunk. Check out their site and listen to some mp3s... they're very chill.

Mira Calix was more experimental, and also did the mixture of esoteric music with some fascinating video in the background--waves breaking in a sea of grass, with strangely high resolution and high contrast seagulls dodging around in the sky. I just wish she'd have played longer. The set was only about an hour long, which meant about four songs. Good stuff anyway.

Paris shots

Here are some pictures from Paris in August, including some nice night shots of Notre Dame and the Seine. I was visiting Marton, who was working for Wall Street Journal then, and Hannah, who was just in town on one leg of a tour across the UK and France.

I was so busy and stressed the week before and the week after that the trip kind of buzzed by and didn't really stick too deeply in memory afterwards. It was great to go through these photos though because it brought back a lot of pleasant memories, reminded me how much I really do love that city.

Storm Clouds Gather

Western diplomats report that Iranian scientists are refining large amounts of Uranium Hexafluoride, which can be further refined to create either fuel rods for nuclear reactors, or cores for nuclear weapons. Iran has more oil than they know what to do with, and has no need whatsoever for nuclear power. Clearly, something fishy is going on.

But honestly, are we surprised? Let's do a little role-playing. Okay, pretend you're Ayatollah Khamenei. George Bush has just named you, Iraq, and North Korea as the "Axis of Evil." Iraq is not an immediate threat to anyone, but it doesn't have nuclear weapons. North Korea is potentially an immediate threat to most of Asia, with a huge military and unpredictable leadership, and oh yeah, they also have the bomb.

Who does George Bush attack? The country that doesn't have the bomb.

The lesson here? The Americans don't invade countries that have the bomb.

Now you see that the war in Iraq may or may not be winding down and the Americans are beginning to sniff around your door (remember, you're the Ayatollah now). So what do you do? Well, if it was me I would start refining Uranium Hexafluoride as fast as I could, and get my centrifuges geared up in a Tehran minute to start building me some shiny new atomic bombs.

In a different note, I also can't understand why people on the left are surprised and horrified that Bush named Condoleezza Rice as his Secretary of State. Do people think that things somehow just got worse? I think this is a pretty natural choice, and if anything it makes it easier for other countries to decide how to deal with the US.

I used to respect Colin Powell, but I think he was utterly ineffective as the "voice of reason" for the administration that so many people hoped in vain he might become. In effect, I believe Powell was an enabler for the administration, and helped them build support for some of their more unpleasant policies. Can anyone imagine that there would have been the same amount of international support for the final Security Council resolution against Iraq, if it had been Condi instead of Powell there in the General Assembly two years ago, waving around that little vial of "anthrax"? By appearing as the reluctant moderate, Powell gave legitimacy to the policies that he may have personally opposed.

So now we have Condi as the country's chief diplomat. All pretences gone now, and the rest of the world can see the wolf for what it is, shed of its sheep's clothing.

Dublin pics up

I'm on a roll now... I just got pictures from Dublin up on the photo pages. I love this, when I finally get around to putting these pics up, it reminds me of the great times I've had in these different cities. It all starts to feel less abstract. I'm lucky to have friends and lucky to get to see them in so many places.

No energy left tonight, but if I get a chance tomorrow I'll keep working my way down the stack. Paris, Utrecht and San Francisco next.

First Snow

Hey, it's snowing! First snow of the year. Nothing's sticking yet but it might be a white weekend. Time's been going by so quickly I hardly noticed the seasons changing.

Moscow and Chicago

Jesus, I was going through some old files at work and I realized it's been a year since I was in Moscow. That was such an awesome trip... and I've been so busy since then that I just haven't noticed the time flying by.

I heard that they tore down the Hotel Rossiya and are going to build a block of luxury apartments in its place. It was an architectural monstrosity, granted, but I still felt a little melancholic when I heard the news. That place had such history... you could feel it when you were inside the thing, like you were back in Brezhnev's Moscow in the 70s. I'm glad I had the opportunity to stay there while it was still possible.

Anyway, as I keep complaining about, I've been sitting on a ton of photos from different cities that I haven't done anything about. So finally I cleared a couple of hours free and put up a batch from when I was hanging out with Jeremy and Hannah in Chicago last month.

Take a look and tell me what you think.

I found a new gallery script which makes putting these up a bit less time intensive. I'm not really ecstatic about the result, but just don't have the time to build these manually anymore.

Sorry Everybody

We tried. We failed. We're sorry.

This will be my last election-related post for a while, I promise!

The Death of the Enlightenment

This picture--which pretty much sums up all we need to know--came from a Washington Post article talking about the politicization of the evangelical Christian movement in the US.

Will someone please wake me up? I seem to be having the weirdest nightmare...

Reality Check

In an earlier and more angry post, I accused middle-American voters of not being able to consider objective facts and make reasoned decisions. That might have been a little harsh. Maybe the behavior of these people evidences not the inability to consider objective facts, but rather the willful choice to ignore them (not surprising since many of these people prefer to read the Bible rather than the news). But if that's true, it makes the responsibility of the American public for what is coming even more grievous.

That willful ignorance is letting some very smart, extremely dangerous people run away with the ball. Unless reality and accountability start finding their way back into the process, there will be no stopping them.

I lifted this tract by Ron Suskind from William Gibson's weblog, which liberated it from New York Times magazine. This is the kind of thing that makes you stare at the ceiling in the dark, listening to the clock tick away...

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure,�and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

What scares me most about this is not (only) that I think such people are evil and I oppose what they want to do, but that I think that we have terrible, terrible historical precedents of what happens when a powerful country gets an expansionist, ideology-based leadership that divorces itself from reality. Please forgive me for being alarmist, but when I hear the word empire I want to reach for a gas mask. The US is unquestionably superior in military and strategic power to any other country on the planet individually. But do Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Dick Cheney really have the hubris to believe that if it came down to it, the US could take on the rest of the world and win?

Some, with similar worldviews but in different countries and different times, have thought so. All have been wrong. And the penalty for being wrong is severe. A friend of mine once told me her father had to spend one summer of his childhood crawling through the bombed out ruins of Berlin, setting traps for pigeons because his family needed the protein.

We know what hubris leads to.

Schism

A potential early sign of the schism between the generally "moderate," generally business-inclined conservatives that provide most of the money that runs the Republican party and the religious fanatics that make up the party's other core constituency.

The fanatics are trying to block the Judiciary Committee chairmanship of Senator Arlen Specter, because he dared speculate that the Republicans might run into trouble if they nominated candidates to the Supreme Court that were likely to outlaw abortion in the US.

In Senator Specter's primary race this year, his rival from the wacko-fanatic camp called him a "Ted Kennedy liberal." (!!!) To compare Senator Specter, a pro-business tax hawk who has advocated abolishing the progressive income tax, with Ted Kennedy just makes it obvious how out of touch with reality the wacko camp really is. I think this means storm clouds on the horizon for the Republicans.

I'll write about the far-right's interesting relationship with objective reality in a minute.

Divided we Stand

My friend Diana captured a lot of the feelings I've been hearing from people in an open letter to her friends a couple of days ago. She's Swiss and living in the US. Thanks Diana.

I really felt like sharing some of the thoughts and feelings I see and experience after the election here in the US. I am very angry and disappointed. Es ist mir sehr wichtig, mit Euch die Emotionen und Gedanken zu teilen, welche ich hier spuere und sehe. Ich bin sehr wütend und enttäuscht. Believe me when I say: we are extremely frustrated at the outcome of the election and NOT all of the Americans are stupid. Glaubt mir wenn ich sage: dass wir sehr frustriert sind über die Resultate der Wahlen und NICHT alle Amerikaner sind dumm. Almost half of the population here is outraged, angry, sad and embarrassed that after all that has happened here in the last couple of years. But unfortunately the American majority wants 4 more years of this mess. Who the hell are those people? Fast die Hälfte der US Bev�lkerung ist traurig, verärgert, 'pissed off' und schämt sich, dass nach all dem was passiert ist in den letzten paar Jahren: Leider aber wollen die Mehrheit der Amerikaner vier Jahre mehr von dieser Schweinerei. Wer zum Teufel sind diese Leute? These are not people I have ever met or people that I have anything to talk about. Religious freaks, conservative people, people that most definitely have not been critically following politics within the US and international politics. (No questions asked) Das sind nicht Leute, die ich kenne oder ich irdendetwas gemeinsam habe (möchte). Religiöse 'freaks', Konservative, Leute, die definitiv sich nicht kritisch mit Politik im In- und Ausland auseinandersetzen. Bush managed to make this country become more divided than it has been since the Vietnam War - that is not what America should stand for. Bush hat es geschafft, dieses Land zu separieren, mehr wie jeh zuvor seit dem Vietnam Krieg - das ist nicht warum Amerika gegruendet wurde und wofür es stehen sollte. Sad but true: NOT: United we stand - BUT Now: Divided we stand A sad day for us all over here. I am scared of the next few years.

Readjusting

The winners... vile overgrown frat boys (Image from Washington Post)

There was a column in the New York Times today that suggested the strong support for Bush in this last election means that America has undeniably shifted over the last ten years to become a socially center-right country. The religious fringe has become mainstream, and the center-left, basically secular-humanist, basically tolerant ideology of the Democratic party is no longer as mainstream as it used to be. Not mainstream enough to win an election, obviously.

I guess we who grew up on the coasts need to adjust to that and recognize that we're a minority now. The separation of church and state in America is now over, in practice if not in law. The power of reason and skepticism is no longer the main, or even an effective, driver of public policy. It seems to have become too much to ask of a lot of Americans to even try to consider objective facts and make reasoned decisions based on evidence. The right wing talk show, talk radio, news machine, together with the politically-conscious religious indoctrination of the churches, has become so effective in the middle of the country that it has nearly become absolute. I'm not sure where that leaves us, but it's pretty scary.

My first memories of the country I grew up in were Nixon having just been thrown out of office, and the country suffering from the oil embargo and scrambling to develop alternative energy as fast as we could. We never got there. I remember Carter, who tried to reach out to the people using reason and logic and argument (or at least that's the way it seemed when I was a kid and watching him on TV).

I don't know what happened... When they send me to the states now and I watch the unbelievably poor news and look around at the politics and the jackoff SUV-driving ex-frat boys that have taken over the place... Jesus, I just don't recognize my country any more.

But I�m sliding into defeatism here and I don�t want to do that, at least not completely. Bush and his people have pushed the Republican party so far to the right that the moderates may begin to become very uncomfortable. There may finally be the schism between the religious social conservatives and the big business fiscal conservatives that many have been predicting. It may all still blow up in their faces (and let's just hope they don't take the rest of us down with them).

Nixon annihilated McGovern in the 1972 election, but a little more than year later, Nixon was on his way out in disgrace. Smugness leads to hubris, and we all know what hubris leads to.

All right, that's all I've got tonight... I'm signing off and heading for the liquor cabinet.

Pretty bad

It's pretty bad when one of the questions that showed up in my email box this morning (from one of my European friends) was "How many people are going to die now because America elected the wrong guy?"

The Day After

Well, I was wrong about Florida, so the rest of it hardly matters. Bush won Florida with 300,000. I was wrong about Iowa and New Mexico too, and Bush is ahead 100,000 in Ohio, pretty much an insurmountable lead with 93 percent of precincts reporting. It's over.

We're just waking up here in Copenhagen, and the commentators on the radio just sound shellshocked, horrified. They just don't understand. But this time, there was no ambiguity about the vote. The Americans have given Bush a national lead of three and a half million (so far).

Now the voters are going to get what they asked for. Bush will appoint justices to the Supreme Court that will change the basic nature of American society for the next thirty years. The tax breaks to the ultra-rich will continue, just as the national debt will continue to balloon. The system of internal surveillance and control will expand. And Bush must be joking if he thinks the international community will do much more to help him out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or wherever he chooses to invade next.

The Americans chose more religion, more intolerance and more war. I don't recognize this country.

I feel nauseous. I think I'm just going to lie back down in bed.

My Prediction

Polls are just now opening on the East Coast... I'm going to make a prediction.

Of the swing states, Bush wins Ohio

Kerry wins Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico (putting my hopes on the New Agers in Santa Fe here)... and FLORIDA. I'll say it now, I just hope to fox that I'm right.

That will give Bush 247 in the Electoral College, and Kerry 291.

Here are state by state results from the Washington Post, which will be updated as the day progresses.

Let's do this thing. Let's remember this day afterwards as the day we stood up against fear and dogmatism... the day we held the bastards back.

I love you all.