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| blogging since Oct '01
This is Gordon Osse's blog.
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"He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence."
-- Rilke
Love,
the powering,
the Widening,
light
unraveling
all faces followers of
All colors, beams of
woven thread,
the Skin
alight that
warms itself
with life.
-- Akhenaton, "Hymn to the Sun"
Opt your children out of Pentagon harassment
Donations appreciated:
WHO I WORK FOR: Mount Hope Wholesale
Wholesale nuts, grains, fruits and spices (and more) shipped from Cottonwood AZ
(Tell them you heard about them on Gordon's blog!)
WHAT I'VE SEEN LATELY:
MOVIES
(r) = re-viewing
God Told Me To (1976, Cohen)
Whispering City (1947, Otsep)
Times and Winds (2006, Erdem)
Dirty Money (Un flic) (1972, Melville)
10th District Court (2004, Depardon)
RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy (2007, O'Sullivan)
The Furies (1950, Mann)
In a Lonely Place (1950, Ray)(r)
The Adjuster (1991, Egoyan)(r)
TV
Mad Men The Buddha of Suburbia Intelligence (2006, Haddock) Family Guy
SUGGESTED VIEWING: The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004, Curtis) [available for streaming/download here]
the most important comic between Nichols & May and Richard Pryor? Certainly one of the most influential comics of the last 60 years, unforgettable.
Lately he was so bitter I didn't watch him much, but i understand the bitterness, and share it my self at times. Hopefully we'll learn from his work and wisdom.
I tried out amazon's mp3 store today, since their daily deal is the Ramones' re-mastered Rocket to Russia for $1.99. Works pretty well. Their downloader (which you have to use) opens up iTunes or WMP, but the files are DRM-free and all in all a good experience.
it should surprise no one at this point that congress and shrubco are not only hopelessly deluded and/or blithely corrupt, but dangerously incompetent -- but if you need another clue, try the offshore oil fiasco [courtesy of the ever-trenchant undernews]
According to the NYT, the Energy Information Agency estimates that the total amount of oil in the offshore zone in question is about 16 billion barrels. If we assume that it would take about ten years from the day of authorization to get to peak production and that most of the oil is pumped out over 30 years, this would translate into a bit over 1 million barrels of oil a day.
That would be equal to about 1 percent of world production in a decade. If we assume a long-run demand elasticity of 0.3, this would imply a drop in world prices of approximately 3 percent. In today's prices, we would be looking at a drop in the price of a barrel of oil from around $135 to $131. If this were passed on one to one in gas prices (this is long-run story), we might expect to see a drop in the price of a gallon of gas from around $4.00 to around $3.92 a gallon. These are of course very crude numbers (someone has probably done a serious analysis), but they should get us somewhere in the ballpark.
oil is over folks. the longer it takes to get this, the harder it will be.
just had to quote someone who isn't myopic about the real tim russert
Okay, so Russert was an enabler of the neocons, who allowed his vastly influential program to function as the War Party's sounding board, but then again, so many were duped that it seems vindictive to emphasize this point so soon after his tragic death. Right?
Wrong. It wasn't just his sycophancy in the presence of power that motivates my little exercise in Russert revisionism – it's what was clearly his vehement hostility to anyone who challenged the status quo in any way and sought to provide an antidote to the Dick Cheneys of this world. Example number one: his disgraceful interview with GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who made opposition to the war and our foreign policy of "preemptive" imperialism the linchpin of his remarkable campaign.
In what has got to be one of the worst examples of high-handed hectoring and attempted intellectual intimidation I've seen in my lifetime, Russert tore into Paul the way he should have lit into Cheney, impugning his integrity, spending half the interview on the arcane subject of the Civil War – which Paul had never made a speech about, and obviously wasn't even a minor issue in the campaign.
susan has been touched by the remarkable (to me) appreciation of russert on tv, though i doubt she ever watched him at work.
and oh yeah, it's been a bad week for the nazis: of course the supreme court ruled that gitmo detainees can appeal to civilian courts, and artist steve kurtz's nightmare encounter with the jackboots in buffalo is over after 4 long years (that's what that "art is not terrorism" banner at the left was about, if you didn't click in)
America loves a whore. We're a nation of whores, after all -- just try holding down a job in this great land of ours without compromising your values and shortchanging your best ideas. We grow up hearing "Be yourself!" and "Follow your dreams!" but the marketplace tramples all over such fanciful rainbows-and-unicorns notions of identity and self-respect with its big, dirty, hobnailed boots. Thus are plucky, original human beings transformed into polite, agreeable team players, anxious to waste a lifetime kowtowing to the lowest common denominator.
Once you sell a big part of your soul for a hot slice of the American dream (something about grassy lawns, enormous mortgages and life insurance policies you can't afford), you've set the stage for a lifetime of doing stupid, demeaning shit just to make your nut. When you recognize that your "success" in life has cemented you on a path of unending compromise, getting paid to get screwed up the ass by a stranger really doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
So sure, we'll tsk-tsk over Eliot Spitzer's ambitious harlot or Heidi Fleiss' slut brigade, but underneath it all, we know they're kindred spirits, throwing a little leg to get a leg up in a world gone mad. [link]
an article by mike rubin detailing the tortured relationship between Neu! members michael rother & the recently deceased klaus dinger, and more
Even given such turmoil—what Rother describes as “a virus of new ideas”—it’s still remarkable just how radical the Germans’ take on sex und drogen und rock und roll was. Traditional pop song structure was out, and in its place was an increasingly freeform, often improvised psychedelic squall. Some groups experimented with electronics (like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and Cluster), others flirted with acid-damaged freakouts or cathartic noise (such as Amon Duul I and II, Ash Ra Tempel, and Faust), and still others applied avant-garde academic theory like the former Stockhausen disciples in Can. Although there was no unifying element to any of these bands’ approaches besides their long-distance country code, that didn’t stop the always tactful British press, perhaps with the sound of blitzing Stukas still ringing in their ears, from terming their music “krautrock.” “There was this growing feeling of change being necessary in all areas of political, social, and cultural life,” recalls Rother over a coffee at an outdoor cafe in Hamburg on the banks of the Elbe River, “and this also included music. It made it necessary to create your own ideas, to drop the heroes I had grown up with, to drop all of that in the most radical way and go back to sort of zero—to be aware of avoiding cliches, avoiding the repetition of something some other artist had already developed.”
History belongs to the victors, and in the annals of rock & roll, three men have emerged as winners: Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bo Diddley, a holy trinity who were there at the start. Diddley's importance is acknowledged but less often celebrated. His music strikes many as more simple, more direct than his contemporaries, yet it remains more difficult to categorize, understand or explain. Listen to "Bo Diddley" and you won't hear the teenage fantasy of Berry's "School Day" or the youth-gone-wild adrenaline of Richard's "Tutti Frutti." It is slower and unearthly, with a space-age tremolo guitar rippling through the song, the nervous rattle of constantly shaking maracas and a staggered shuffle-beat that sounds completely primal yet wholly original.
" 'Maybellene' is a country song sped up," says George Thorogood, who has covered Diddley songs on at least half his records. " 'Johnny B. Goode' is blues sped up. But you listen to 'Bo Diddley,' and you say, 'What in the Jesus is that?' You sit there and you get numb listening to it."
Keith Richards recalls experiencing the same shock. "Muddy [Waters] and Chuck were close to the straight electric blues," he said. "But Bo was fascinatingly on the edge. There was something African going on in there. His style was outrageous, suggesting that the kind of music we loved didn't just come from Mississippi. It was coming from somewhere else."
Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.
--Chris Marker