Hardcore for Nerds

Sh!t White People Say: Pt. 2

“I hope Das Racist cancelling their entire European tour for undisclosed personal reasons is just a massive postcolonialist joke.”

(previously)

das racist irony

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“Our group came about as the result of each of us growing tired of all the get rich quick scams that run so rampant on the internet. Many of the programs are excellent and workable except the average person becoming involved in them simply do not have the skills to put them into action.”

ahahahaha…

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“ For me, it’s some form of intellectually satisfying ecstatic music that I keep failing at achieving. I wish it was more ecstatic, I wish it was more brain-explodingly robust, and each time I finish a record it’s kind of a failure to get to those points.

—

Tim Hecker interview at Resident Advisor

This is really good - he says some very intelligent stuff without sounding too esoteric or bandwagon-jumping; e.g., on Ravedeath

“The record is not about the technology. In some ways it isn’t about anything at all, like an expression of bare composition. […] Record titles or track titles are a chance to cloak the work with a kind of poetic garb. That isn’t glib in any way, I take it very seriously—and that’s not saying that the titles are about nothing—but often people run with that stuff so far that you need a meaning structure around it to interpret a work.”

and how it developed:

“I actually began to write them with piano in mind and I used a lot of piano pieces to kind of play with motifs. I actually recorded all that early stuff and released it as Dropped Pianos, but the more I worked on it in the studio the more it became these sort of suffocating, internal, mixing desk only-type of pieces with digital reverbs.

I felt it lacked a kind of three-dimensionality that I’ve never been really good at getting with my music—almost a fake kind of liveness. So I took it at that point to an actual physical space and, with really good microphones and recording techniques, we got a pretty fantastic way to contrast that sterile nature of the pieces I was working with.”

He even says, giving an excellent quote to finish off an interview, that

“interviews are one of the rare occasions that a musician like me gets to really think about their work and discuss and bring words to things that aren’t often spoken.”

which might well have something to do with his music being instrumental in nature, that it successfully avoids a lot of the linguistic meaning that gets piled on to most halfway interesting bands in the current era, while enabling such discussion to be both rare enough and accessible to the listener.

tim hecker electro

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» The Cedar Lounge Revolution: Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week

From a leading commentator in Ireland’s best-selling Sunday broadsheet:

“Much though I hate to disagree with our esteemed President, on Hayek, I have to. Far from being discredited, Hayek is our inspiration now. It was he who showed how state intervention — the US Fed and Bank of England setting ultra-low interest rates in the Twenties — contributed to the Great Depression, and how, far from causing recovery, Keynesian economics resulted in the US economy sliding back into recession in the late Thirties. Likewise, low interest rates and sub-prime mortgages a decade ago caused this crisis. Last week’s temporary pick-up in US growth is less a sign of recovery and more a sign that quantitative easing has moved from being a needed and justifiable tool to save the US financial system to an unsustainable counter-productive tool for pump-priming US domestic demand.”

Is he saying Keynesianism is “low interest rates” in the middle of an economic boom? Or is he saying that higher interest rates and more tightly regulated lending would have been necessary state intervention? Does it really matter, except that this is what passes for economic discourse amongst a depressingly large part of Irish society?

Not only is the historical example laughably incorrect (it could only be correct in a reductively simplistic view of the whole decade), but he also seems to then misplace the term ‘counter-productive’ for ‘counter-cyclical’, while having used an example of totally un-Keynesian pro-cylical fiscal policy to point to the unsustainablity of the approach he’s ostensibly promoting. WTF?

You could say he has something from a valid point about demand, as from the opposite side of the political spectrum on the environmental left (yes, it exists!) we should really be moderating our demand in order to create a globally sustainable, equitable economy, so I’m uncomfortable with more consumption being touted as the left-wing solution to the crisis in Europe or anywhere else. However, as the right-wing austerity project is simply to drive down pay and conditions low enough to reduce the marginal cost of ‘job creation’ for wealthy corporations and businesspeople, it ultimately has to rely on consumer demand just as much. Hence consumption - much like confidence in financial markets - is merely the necessary means to an end we have yet to choose.

Here’s what our esteemed President actually said:

“The crisis is … also an intellectual one. Decades of Keynesianism have given way to decades influenced by the theories of such as Friedrich von Hayek, to unrestrained market dominance. A new dominant paradigm emerged. That paradigm has consequences for all institutions including universities. It is a paradigm that makes assumptions and demands as to the connection between scholarship, politics, economy and society. It has fed off and encouraged, I suggest, an individualism without responsibility. It not only asserts a rationality for markets, but in policy terms has delivered markets without regulation.

As a consequence, the public world is now a space of contestation. It is a space that sets what is democratic in tension with what is unaccountable. Much ground has been lost in terms of the public space, the public world, the shared essential space of an independent people free to participate and change their circumstances, to imagine their future, be it in Ireland, Europe or at global level. Intellectuals are challenged, I believe now to a moral choice, to drift into, be part of, a consensus that accepts a failed paradigm of life and economy or to offer, or seek to recover, the possibility of alternative futures.

economics irish politics hitler runoff

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“ Many of the funds that show up on Romney’s tax returns but not his financial disclosure are affiliated with Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm he ran for 15 years. Several others are apparently unrelated offshore entities such as Babson 2006-1, which is based in the Cayman Islands, and Barracuda Investments, which has an address in Dublin, Ireland, but appears to be owned by Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm based in San Francisco.

—

Romney tax returns detail funds not included in ethics forms - Los Angeles Times (via)

I for one welcome our new world leader pretend/overlord of foreign (in)direct investment. Somebody needs to pay for all those brass plaques!

(since the company address is in Dublin 4, and the loosely-regulated Irish financial sector has attracted the term ‘the Wild West of Europe’, then Flann O’Brien writing about Ringsend cowboys in At-Swim-Two-Birds might have been especially prescient)

dublin irish politics

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betterbooktitles:

George Orwell: 1984

This is a rather ungood title - it’s the ending, for chrissakes! It took me a moment to work that out though, so kudos I suppose. But since it’s all most people reference from the book anyway, I’d go with ‘Big Brother’s Little Brother (The Novel)’.

(Or, more mischievously, how about ‘Big Government is Bad’?)

(via orioleorgans)

books orwell tv

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“It is admirable that Higgins touches upon issues of scholarship with a certain amount of prior knowledge, but his invocation of “technocracy” is the sort of neoliberal posturing, simultaneously absolving individual responsibility and reasserting the need for “better leadership” (of what?), that seeks to historicise itself (à la Gingrich’s campaign speeches, currently, in the U.S.) whilst maintaining its position firmly on the fence. As a cultural history lesson, it’s spotty, and as a “statement of intent”, it’s suitably vague and platitudinous to satisfy the lotus-eating youth who voted for him whilst not upsetting their parents.

Perhaps it’s not appropriate to criticise Higgins’ track-record with regard to towing the party line while a TD, but Edward Saïd being the only theorist he quotes from the last thirty years suggests his decline into neoliberalism was simultaneously a political and an intellectual one.”

comment by pinocheo on the previous post

“lotus-eating youths”? really?

I get enough anti-Labour leftist rhetoric from the comments on the CLR (and in a way I’m glad to see them getting back what they gave to the Green Party over the last few years), but it’s more galling to see this level of condescension, whatever about tendentious critique, towards what is a highly unusual and unorthodox political statement in Irish public society.

The guy in the highest office in the land - ceremonial or no - has just launched an intellectual critique of market economics, and not just in the ‘oh, we need fairness’ way, and your response is that it’s fence-sitting? Have you seen where the fence is lately? Whatever about parents and platitudes, I find this a good deal more energising than the politics of protest.

also, it’s toeing the line and he quotes Habermas from the past 12 months.

irish politics Michael D. Higgins

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“ It was a cracker of a Michael D speech: we counted a head-wrecking nine paradigms along the way, although a few may have slipped through the “interstices” as we considered how “utopian alternatives must be accompanied by a praxis that is envisaged and one that is applicable within, and in the context of, institutions”. As Ernst Bloch might have said, before we cantered through the reconstruction of 19th century Europe, the Glass-Steagall Act and the libraries of Alexandria.

—

First they came for our sociologists, and I did not cry out because I was not of that faculty…

feeling a bit reductio ad hitlerum today (in an ironic way)… maybe I should go back and do my PhD in 1930s European Communism.

irish politics hitler runoff Michael D. Higgins

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This is how this ‘macro’ works, right?

Full text of President’s speech - ‘Intellectual crisis’ concerns Higgins

Michael D. Higgins irish politics

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For those claiming that Tune-Yards doesn’t appear androgynous, then maybe listen again to this (and mentally compare the vocals to, say, David Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors on Bitte Orca - which is the obvious, and to my mind and personal taste, superior comparison). She sounds like - and kinda looks like - a man a lot of the time here, and there’s nothing wrong about that, obviously.

Another thing in that Klosterman article which seems to raise more profound objections is his cynical assessment of her future career trajectory:

“She could end up like James Murphy or Cat Power. But it’s just as possible — in fact, more possible — that this will not happen. She will probably just make a bunch more albums of varying quality, none of which will get the collective adoration of w h o k i l l. And then Garbus will end up with this bizarre 40-year-old life, where her singular claim to fame will be future people saying things like, “Hey, remember that one winter when we all thought tUnE-yArDs was supposed to be brilliant? That fucking puppeteer? Were we all high at the same time? What was wrong with us?”

Aside from the (sarcastic) nastiness at the end, it’s not impossible to read that sympathetically - we all have been excited about artists that seemed to embody the zeitgeist, or more importantly, challenge the staid setting of culture they found themselves in, only to find a year later that things are different but the same (artists, setting). Equally, I get the response by Sophie here:

“We all make this mistake on occasion, assuming that because we don’t fit in an artists audience their music is bad or of little consequence (and sometimes it’s true, too). What bothers me is that in both of these cases, the parties involved (Chuck Klosterman and LDR’s audience) represent a demographic that is CONSTANTLY pandered to. For the concerns of those outside that group to be treated as silly or delusional (a stereotypical accusation), is all the more proof that sexism is alive and well, and even a distanced nostalgia for a time when it was socially acceptable (which LDR’s music displays) is worse than reversing what marginalized people have been working towards since the days of Ellen Willis, it’s spinning car around and flooring it in the opposite direction.”

But maybe you can take Klosterman’s ill-phrased but undeniably engaging comments and see them as a challenge, to either cement the significance of one’s favoured artists (more good writing! is I guess all I’ve got, though) or reject that somewhat patriarchal/rockist canon of success and establish oneself as a genuine counterculture (this is the argument I’d apply to punk, mostly). Either way, it’s probably more constructive to accentuate and advance the positive rather than, rightly or wrongly, take issue with where Klosterman himself is coming from.

I’m still not sure whether I can personally tolerate Tune-Yards sound, but some of the lyrics (which, um, switch between genders?) are very interesting and rather apropos to this whole issue:

“What’s a girl to do if she’ll never be a rasta

Singin’ from her heart, but she’ll never be a rasta

If you move into her neighborhood, she’ll never make a sound”

tune-yards

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