The Feral Government

The soapbox was stinking up the rest of this otherwise artsy and personal blog, so I've finally moved politics over to a blog called "The Feral Government." Check it out and enjoy (or whatever one does with political discussions).

Congratulations Jason and Frederique

I attended a lovely engagement party last night for my friends Jason and Frederique. Many mutual friends were at the party, which was good fun. I am even more excited about their wedding than I already would have been because they've asked me to officiate the wedding (I've been a Universal Life Church minister since 1992, though I'm getting re-ordained just in case, since I was ordained in Massachusetts at the time and am not sure just how careful the record keeping is down there in Modesto). Having a year to plan for it already seems like hardly enough time. I'm even more nervous about it than my own wedding, because at my wedding I just had to do one part properly, not be in charge of holding the entire ceremony together.

Regret

"The funny thing about regret is it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done." - The Butthole Surfers "Sweat Loaf"

Friday I hung out with a friend I hadn't seen since the mid-90's. It was nice to see Bella, and I look forward to doing so again next time she and her beau visit from Denver. However, the first time I see someone I haven't seen in a long time, I start to get into a nostalgic mood -- and with nostalgia, comes regret.

Bella was part of a group of friends that included my ex-girlfriend Beth. While my relationship with Beth was doomed to fail for a variety of reasons, and my breaking up with her was inevitable, the way in which I broke up with her is one of the stupidest, worst things I've ever done. Twenty-three year olds are prone to being stupid, particularly about relationships, and I was no exception. She has never communicated with me again, and thus I've never been able to apologize. I regret having dumped her in a letter, without calling, and for the truly idiotic reasons I gave for ending the relationship.

But, the Butthole Surfers are right -- it is better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done. While I regret the way that relationship ended, and also that with two of my other previous girlfriends, those pale in comparison to how much I regret not seeing my grandmother again before she died. That is the one thing I regret the most in my life. I had reasons for not seeing her: I couldn't deal with seeing someone who'd always being so strong on her deathbed, and I tried to convince her (and myself) that the treatments would work and there was no urgency to the matter anyway. Sure, I talked to her on the phone several times, but I refused to go see her. My mother claims she understood and loved me all the same, and with all my grandmother had seen in her life (which included 16 years in labor and DP camps), I suspect that she really did -- but I have never been able to forgive myself (and I probably never will, so don't bother with any comments intended to be helpful in that regard). My inability to confront death head-on continues to plague me, but it hasn't caused any worse remorse than this incident.

That is the funny thing about regret, after all. Who knew Gibby Haynes was such a sage? So my advice to everyone out there is this: do everything you can do, because one time you don't do something because you choose not to, that'll be the worst regret you ever have.

Confessions of a Yakuza

I just finished a very interesting book called Confessions of Yakuza, which I highly recommend if you're interested in the history of Japan.

What is most surprising about the book is its relative lack of violence. The old guard Yakuza portrayed in this book are most concerned with keeping the Police away through maintaining good relations with neighbors, and providing a comfortable gambling environment for their customers. While Eiji, the titular Yakuza, does spend time in jail for killing a man, it was a fellow Yakuza, and if his story is to be believed, it was in self-defense. And there is little reason to doubt his story, as the book is full of confessions and tales which are embarrassing and unflattering. It seems he was holding back little from the author, Dr. Saga.

The portrait of Japan during the prewar period is especially interesting, with its rampant corruption and rotten infrastructure, it is easy for a Yakuza to come off as more of a good guy than the Police or Officials. Many gangster books romanticize the life, and make the code of conduct and code of honor seem more inviolate than they ever really were, and this book does seem to be doing that. But knowing whatever crimes Eiji may have omitted to make himself look better would do nothing to diminish the fact that Japanese life during his time was not the utopia that many in the US currently fantasize about Japan.

It is a kind of historical biography that is very uncommon. Criminal histories abound, but biographies of someone who isn't famous are quite rare (Eiji was a Yakuza boss, but he is very far from a household name like Al Capone). Without that fame getting in the way, the author need not have an agenda, and the resultant book feels convincing, and definitely worth a read if this sort of thing is your cup of tea.

End of a Long Relationship

No, Anu and I are not separating. Our relationship is great. It's Amazon that I'm breaking up with, after thirteen years (I bought books from Amazon when they first opened).

Amazon was unable to ship me my books without damaging them after 3 tries. Even after two complaints, the books were still just tossed into a box and the edges and corners damaged.

I will no longer order art books or other collectible books from Amazon. They just can't get it right. When a customer complains about a specific problem, and you then repeat that mistake twice in a row, while supposedly attempting to redress the mistake, that is outright embarrassing. I'm still willing to buy non-art, non-collectible books from Amazon, so I guess we'll still be friends with benefits, but I think it's time I see other booksellers.

Amazon is so focused on their other businesses, including trying to destroy the wonderful cultural artifact that is the book with their Kindle device and ridiculously overpriced, transient digital books, that they no longer really deserve to be called a bookseller anyway. I'm going to give my money to smaller businesses, like local booksellers and Bud's Art Books (who ship their books perfectly packaged). I've also just received my first order from Heavy Ink, but I'm less than thrilled with their packaging (they're new and small, so we'll see if they respond to my complaints or not). though it's still better than the absolutely terrible job Amazon does.

Visual Effects Society

The Visual Effects Society had its membership meeting yesterday. Parts of it were dreadfully boring, and other parts were quite interesting (particularly the debate that arose about awards categories). VES is still a young society, and there are a lot of improvements that can be made about how the organization benefits its members. I've decided to throw my hat in the ring and have applied to join the Technology and Standards & Practices committees. Hopefully this organization can succeed in its goals of raising the stature within the industry, and therefore the credit, compensation, and job security, of the artists who are responsible for a large percentage of what people are actually excited about in most blockbuster films these days.

You Break It, I'm Not Buying It

I just had Amazon ship me a replacement for five art books I ordered from them. The original order was just tossed into a box, one of the books landed open, shipped open, and got a cracked spine. What caused me to become so annoyed that I not only wrote them a letter, but am blogging about it, is that the replacement order was packed just as poorly.

Amazon sometimes smartly plastic-wraps books to a piece of cardboard to help prevent corner damage. If done wrong, that process itself causes corner damage, but if done right, the cardboard absorbs all the damage. In my note to them to request replacements and get my return ticket for the 5 damaged books, I specifically requested they properly pack the books by wrapping them to plastic and using enough padded mailers to prevent further damage. They did not do this.

When a customer specifically requests something which your company has done for them in the past, and which they are now upset isn't being done, you should either provide them with that service or tell them it is no longer cost effective to do so, and the customer can decide whether or not to go do their business with another vendor. I doubt Amazon can't afford protective wrapping, I think it is laziness and bad quality control. After all it is more expensive to now have to pay return shipping for two orders, totaling ten hardcover books. What seemed like a casual moment of cost savings has the potential to cost them a customer of thirteen years.

A number of articles have run in business magazines over the last few years about dwindling customer service, some complete with cost-benefit analysis showing that customer service isn't worth paying for and that businesses are better off losing a few customers than paying to give them good service. This kind of short-sighted thinking is leading American business down an unfortunate path, one which I personally feel is contributing to the unsustainable disposable-economy mindset prevailing today.

My preference is still for local bookstores, but that preference is declining. This isn't because of gas prices or even lack of time away from work (though the latter does account for most of my on-line shopping, I make time to go to bookstores and record shops), but rather because instances of damaged merchandise are also skyrocketing at small shops. People using bookstores as libraries has always contributed to damaged stock at brick-and-mortar places, but lately it seems that in addition to rude customers, shopkeepers just don't care how their merchandise is cared-for (price stickers that are hard to remove have pissed me off for years, but now it seems many places don't pay anyone to straighten-up the stacks, watch for clumsy or malicious customers, etc.).

I find the whole situation very unfortunate. My hope is that Amazon won't suffer a third strike, but given that their packing in general has been spotty lately, I'm not holding my breath. If you have something like this happen to you, please complain. Companies will not spend money to improve their customer service unless their customers demand it.

Pop Music Is Better In A Foreign Language

I've been listening to a lot of unfamiliar music lately. I can't help but do that periodically, and thus the record and CD collection keeps on growing. I've had the most fun unearthing great old (i.e. 1977-1982) Punk stuff I haven't heard before on sites like Killed By Death, Good Bad Music, and 7 Inch Punk. These sites are a treasure trove of obscure bands like Breakouts, Modern Warfare, Hugh Beaumont Experience, Le Ritz, Frantix, Crap Detectors, The Huns, and a whole slew of other bands, many of which never released anything beyond one or two 7" singles. (And if anyone out there has any Brainbombs stuff you want to part with, let me know immediately. I wish I'd found them when stuff like Burning Hell, Genius & Brutality, and Urge To Kill were still in print.)

I've also been checking out some Hip-Hop, in particular Chamillionaire (I saw the Hip Hop Police / Evening News video while doing some music video research, and it's possibly the best Hip-Hop video I've ever seen, so I was hooked), and anything I can get my hands on by Dangermouse (the genius behind Gnarls Barkley, and the Grey Album -- which in my opinion is the gold standard for mash-up, and one of the best Hip-Hop anythings ever released).

Both genres underscore the fact that popular music often has stupid lyrics because, more so than mainstream rock or pop, there is often enough decent (not always intelligent, but at least clever) writing going on that the unbearably bad stuff really stands out. Hip-Hop suffers from this more than Punk, because it is driven by the lyrics, whereas with Punk it's easy enough to blather incoherently behind a wall of distortion (and often a fine idea, one which Death Metal fortunately takes to its logical conclusion).

Writing pop lyrics isn't easy, though. Many older forms of pop music (what we now call by names such as folk, world music, renaissance song, etc.) were structured around storytelling (most music that wasn't was liturgical or martial or otherwise ceremonial, and generally is classified differently). Since there was no three-minute radio format, songs could be as long or as short as needed to tell the tale, and "concept album" type collections of multiple songs used to tell a single tale were also an option. Even with those relatively liberal format constraints, it's still not easy to write something that is simultaneously engaging, thought provoking, and metrical. Throughout the ages, most pop music has been vapid and dull. Now add the additional constraint of the (roughly) three minute contemporary pop format, and it gets much harder. Fortunately (for them), many pop lyric writers seem to eschew trying very hard.

Further complicating things is genre constraints. Hip-Hop, for example, seems to have a requirement for at least one of the following tracks on every album: "don't mess with me because I'm tough and I'll smack you down," "I had it bad but now I'm rich and/or powerful and those of you who doubted me all suck," "the police are always giving me trouble," and "that woman left me for another guy and now I hate her. " Even an artist like Chamillionaire who has smart tracks like The Morning News and The Evening News is still obligated to make less engaging fare such as Pimp Mode. Punk, also, has its genre obligations, which are actually fairly similar to those of rap: poverty, street violence, run-ins with the police, and bad relationships.

Few if any Punk bands (even mainstream Pop-Punk like Green Day) have ever embraced the "I'm a player" stance of mainstream Hip-Hop, instead sticking steadfastly to rebellious conterculturalism. This, to me, is preferable to the "player" type tracks in Hip-Hop, and part of why I enjoy Punk -- even in English - - quite a bit more than most Hip-Hop. That doesn't mean there aren't silly, boring, or stupid Punk songs (those are legion), but the stylistic mode is different and so when the best of the Punk bands put out so-so tracks, the manner in which they are inferior to their best work is different than with Hip-Hop acts.

Which brings me to the title of the post. I am a big fan of pop music (including Punk, Hip-Hop, Metal, etc.) in languages that I don't understand. This allows the vocals to just become another textural element in the soundscape, and though I can't understand the words, the emotional tone of the vocalist still rings through. That is often the most compelling part of pop vocals, anyway. Instrumentals are also enjoyable, but the human voice is an instrument itself with many interesting sonic possibilities. Songs in foreign languages maintain the different layering, both emotionally and texturally, which sets vocal music apart from instrumentals -- yet at the same time, I don't get jolted out of a song by inane lyrics.

So, if you're in a band, and you have the ability to sing in any language other than English -- for my sake, please do.

Stop The Subprime Bailout

Even CNN has noticed that many taxpayers are far from excited about a government bailout of individual borrowers and institutional lenders involved in the subprime mortgage crisis.

As a responsible homeowner with a non-exotic mortgage, one which is no small burden to maintain given the high prices here in the Bay Area, I do not feel it is right to be asked to shoulder the burden of paying for other peoples' financial mistakes through my tax dollars. Why should the government reward financial irresponsibility on the part of borrowers, and unethical lending practices on the part of lenders (and repackagers)? A bailout encourages these sorts of lenders to keep on making these loans, which are irresponsible at best and criminally predatory at worst, under the assumption that we taxpayers are on the hook.

The housing market has begun a process of correction, and in addition to needing to pay my own mortgage, the loss of value of my home and real wages makes me even less able to pay more taxes to try to redress others' negligent and/or criminal behavior. I'd rather see my tax dollars go towards fundamentally more important things, like health care and education.

Or, if Congress wants to bail people out, don't bail out speculators, charlatans, and the irresponsible. Instead, bail-out young home buyers like me who were pinched by speculation-driven high property values, but who still worked hard, planned right, and spent time researching an "as affordable as possible in our area" home in order to buy under sensible, fixed-rate terms.

Despite my own resultant financial losses from this financial crisis, I do realize that a correction is necessary in order to keep housing values stable in the long-term. Let the market correct so we as a country can achieve stability and begin the process of rebuilding a housing market with sensible practices and realistic, not speculative, pricing.

If you feel the same way, in addition to checking out the Nobailout.org folks, this page can help you write your congresspersons and tell them.

Steve Kurtz: Tactical Art

Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble spoke at Berkeley last night, and it was a very interesting, engaging lecture titled "Art and Discipline." If you have the opportunity to see Kurtz deliver this lecture, I highly recommend doing so.

Kurtz only briefly mentioned his four year ordeal with the Department of Justice (this is also a good article about it), and only as a single exemplar of his overall thesis that the role of art is to push back against the social mechanisms of what he's termed "expression management."

Expression management is the Foucaultian "discipline" in the talk's title, and includes not only the obvious external forces such as censorship and persecution, but also the more subtle external and internal "microfascisms" of socially emergent behavior stimulated by mass inculcation of accepted "dos" and "do-nots" that leads to self-censorship and autogenous persecution.

Kurtz gives interesting examples such as a harmless performance art prank designed to attract the local constabulary: a grown man playing with Hot Wheels and Green Army Men and listening to a boom box with relevant sounds. Doing this in any tourist or commercial district never failed to attract the Police within five minutes, but at Daytona Beach led to outrage amongst citizens that the Police were planning to arrest the guy that CAE had to terminate the performance before someone assaulted an officer.

To me, that was the most successful instance of that series of performances in that it caused average people to realize, without any propaganda or guidance from the CAE performer (who remained silent), that the power of the Police to arrest someone for being inoffensive (but abnormal) is both absurd and dangerous. It was heartening that the polity responded to the persecution of someone on the grounds of harmless "weirdness" with outrage rather than approval.

He went on to describe the results of some of CAE's more deliberately provocative projects, including inadvertently causing Halifax Police to believe it was under terrorist attack by placing digital readouts on the ferries which apologized for the raw sewage in the harbor as part of the Halifax Begs Your Pardon project.

The most interesting example he gave, however, was the response of the city of Leipzig to the Marching Plague performance. Kurtz uses this experience as an example of both autogenous persecution and the possibility of a different social response to threat than the one prevalent in the U.S.

In staging this mock bioweapon release in front of the U.S. Embassy, what Kurtz found was that his own internal microfascisms were causing him to attempt to derail his own project by listing things he was sure they wouldn't be allowed to do: march and then assemble in front of the embassy, then use a city tower to release the smoke with the (harmless) biological sample in it, and then bring skin samples from the participants to a lab for testing.

What he found instead was that the Leipzigers, despite Germany's decades longer ordeal with terrorism (from not just Islamists, but also neo-Nazis and Communists), were quite willing to support the project. When the sponsoring Leipzig arts institution asked, the city gave them use of the tower, and permission to march to and in-front of the embassy, with no fuss. The biological laboratory in the city was equally obliging.

Certainly nobody sane would say Europe is some kind of utopia, but the interesting thing is that the Leipzig response to these "threats" is more sensible than even Kurtz' own internalized initial responses. By being rational and using sensible metrics for threat assessment, the Leipzigers correctly judged that this was a free-speech performance, not a security threat, and responded accordingly. The Leipzigers figured out what Kurtz pointed out to the audience: terrorism is real, but statistically uncommon. Most people, even the socially provocative ones, are not terrorists.

Here in the U.S., we rely on security theater, and over-response, such as erroneously clamping-down on photography. I myself have been literally run out of town in Rodeo, CA, with a Police cruiser less than 5 feet from my bumper, for taking photos of the local refinery. Yet, construction permit filing requirements mean that blueprints of the facility, much more useful to an actual terrorist, are likely publicly available (though perhaps not fully up-to-date).

These responses aren't just ineffective, they are very dangerous to core freedoms such as those of expression, inquiry, association, and privacy. Kurtz' work asks people to consider this, and to do what little they can do at an individual level to find a way to preserve freedom in the face of expression management both internal and external.

David Maisel: Library of Dust

A friend of Anu and I, David Maisel, has a great show up at Haines Gallery, San Francisco . The series is called Library of Dust, and there is also a book available from Chronicle Books.



This amazing photo series reflects upon death, material nature, and the ongoing dichotomy between forgetting and remembrance through images of copper canisters containing the cremains of mentally ill patients of the Oregon State Mental Hospital whose remains went unclaimed after their deaths.

Over 5000 such canisters exist, dating back as far as 1913. Exposure to the elements, and chemical interaction with their contents, has caused a number of the canisters to corrode in often very aesthetically pleasing ways. The corrosion not only reflects the decay and demise of the former person resting within, but reminds the viewer of the relationship between ourselves and the material chemistry of nature.

The patterns that emerge on these canisters are intriguing natural shapes, which often hint at one of Maisel's other major bodies of work: aerial photographs. The corrosion on these canisters exhibits similar geometries to the earth, whether it be a natural coastal formation, or a strip-mined pit. Comparative aesthetics helps link the canisters to Maisel's prior works, and to the larger relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Simply taken at face value, the photos are stunning and evocative. Anyone with an interest in materials will be instantly enthralled. However, once you discover the contents and history of these canisters, the work takes on whole new dimensions of meaning -- making this a wholly successful project at every level of artistic practice. All of Maisel's work is excellent, but for me Library of Dust is a marquee series that evokes a litany of both personal and political philosophical musings, but which also succeeds simply as technically and aesthetically masterful photography.

If you get a chance to see the work in-person, I highly recommend doing so. Otherwise, or in addition to doing so, I also highly recommend the beautifully produced book of the series.

Back To School?

For the eleventh time, I'm thinking of making a stab at finishing my Bachelor's degree. I have over 120 credits, but I've never quite finished due to being easily distracted by paying work, and the fact that every transfer I've made has either required two years of classes (which, until recently, I never was even in the same city long enough to complete) or finishing a thesis at Simon's Rock (which I almost did, but my thesis was tied to my work at Webmind, and when Webmind went kaput so did my desire to work on that particular thesis). However, I figure that since I've done Masters or PhD level work in at least four disciplines (Artificial Intelligence, Multimedia / CG R&D and Production, Systems Engineering, and Screenwriting), perhaps it's high time I had anything other than an Associates' Degree.

I am looking at Thomas Edison State College, Ohio University, and now (thanks to Taj Moore) University of Maryland, University College (I could beg to be given another chance to finish my thesis at Simon's Rock, which would be my first choice given that I actually like and respect SRC, but my topic exhausted any interest it had a while ago and my thesis adviser retired justifiably pissed off at me that I'd not finished it during the Webmind days). So my only enrollment criteria at this point is minimum amount of time until graduation. I've got over 120 credits, and both institutions offer "portfolio review" of prior work experience towards credit, so in theory I should be able to graduate in 1 semester. However, I doubt that will happen, because all schools want more of your money, so they almost never transfer more than 2 years worth of credits. I have no interest in 2 years of undergraduate work, so if neither TESC nor OU will graduate me in 1-2 semesters, I'll have to go back to Simon's Rock on hands and knees.

At this point, I shouldn't even care about the degree. After all, I've always found school boring (and, often, insultingly patronizing), and excelled in the workplace rather than academia. I have plenty of projects of my own, and not enough time to do them all. However, there is a faction at work which is opposed to promotions for people who do not have degrees, and indeed advanced degrees. Plus, if I ever wanted to go back into research (short of getting rich and paying myself to do it), the glory days of being a wunderkind who can get a job at Bell Labs with no Bachelor's are long past. There also seems to be some value to having a degree when trying to raise money for projects. So this could just be a precursor to grad school -- something I'm quite ambivalent about, as that seems like it could be a huge waste of time and money. But, alas, given the end of the Internet boom glory days, and my being young enough to be a "wunderkind," it seems that I have failed to completely avoid (as I'd hoped I had) the need to finish the Bachelor's, if not also then going to get a Masters' or PhD.

Up The Punx

I've been on a mini-hiatus from Industrial, Goth, Electro and Metal to get back to my punk and postpunk roots. Here's a pile of what I've had on heavy rotation lately:

Poison Idea
Fucked Up
Career Suicide
The Restarts
A.F.I.
The Casualties
The Locust
Das Oath
Ampere
Dezerter
Riistetyt
Mindless Self Indulgence
The Business
The Distillers
Subhumans / Citizen Fish
The Skulls
Adolescents
Gogol Bordello
The World/Inferno Friendship Society
Pixies / Frank Black
The Prids (the best post-punk band around)
The Faint
Defunct Finnish shredders Hiljainen Kevaet
Defunct New York art punks False Prophets
Defunct SoCal staples The Dils
Defunct Seattlites The Gits / Dancing French Liberals of '48
Obscure (and possibly defunct) Japanese punx The Abnormals
And, of course, the late, great post-punk legends Joy Division

Happy Birthday Mach Kobayashi

I just found out that this weekend was also the birthday weekend of my friend Mach Kobayashi. Mach is not only a VFX whiz and a heck of a nice guy, he's also an all-around talented artist, writer and programmer. If you haven't seen his iPhone application Mach Dice, you should -- especially if you're a gamer nerd.

David Foster Wallace

Brilliant writer David Foster Wallace, an inspiration to a whole generation of emerging writers, took his life Sept. 12th, 2008.



The choice of Sept. 12th certainly resonates. Each Sept. 12th, after the numbness of another Sept. 11th of remembrance wears off, I am left contemplating a whole host of personal and political quandaries, a pile of vexing questions about the whys of the world and the seemingly ever-failing quest for mutual understanding between both persons and people. I didn't know him, but I can imagine the possibility that Wallace had similar feelings conjured up by this inauspicious date. Wallace's desperate portrayals of the world in his work, commented upon already by others such as Salon's Laura Miller who noted the "increasing darkness" of Wallace's writing, was a perfectly reasonable response to observing the society around him.

It's even understandable to me that someone with so much to offer could have possibly felt quite the opposite. Feeling that way is pretty much par for the course in an overpopulated, overstimulated world. The profound lack of understanding and compassion displayed by too many people makes it simple to feel like an insignificant voice, one which conveys nothing but one's own failure and fraudulence, particularly when one has chosen to dedicate themselves to communicating emotions and ideas to others.

There is conjecture that Wallace felt this way, based particularly on Wallace's "Good ol' Neon," -- as well as the opposite feeling that to believe this is to deny the ability of Wallace to look beyond himself in his writing. People are complex, the trite observation goes. Writers put a bit of themselves into everything they write. I can fully understand the uncertainty about where the observation about the world ends, and the observation about oneself begins.

What I can't understand, because to do so could bring disastrous consequences, is making that final choice to accept as real whatever form of imagined defeat he must have been feeling. It is even sadder than the world in which nonexistence can seem -- even for a fleeting moment -- to be a superior option to existence, that a single instant can be so irreversible, can so easily turn a glorious hero into a tragic one, and thus deprive the world of someone with so much left to give to it.

Happy 40th Birthday Mark Andrews

Happy Birthday to my boisterous, prolific friend, Pixar Director Mark Andrews. His birthday roast in honor of his hitting the big four-oh was hilarious good fun. If you haven't read his graphic novel "Tales of Colossus," you should check it out:

Totoro Forest Project

The Totoro Forest Project is a fund raising effort being spearheaded by Pixar artists Dice Tsutsumi, Enrico Casarosa, and Ronnie Del Carmen. The goal is to raise money to help preserve Sayama Forest near Tokyo, Miyazaki's inspiration for Totoro's forest in his classic film My Neighbor Totoro. I was lucky enough to win, in the online auction, this work, "Blind to Fear" by Clayton Stillwell:



This work, along with many others from the auction, will be on display at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum from Sept 20th, 2008 through February 8th, 2009.

Though the auction is now long over, there is a book of the work available. Proceeds from the book will also go to the forest fund. Keep an eye on The Totoro Forest Project Blog for information on how to purchase the book when it becomes publically available.

Fucked Up

A few days ago I saw one of my favorite punk bands, Toronto's Fucked Up. Aside from FU's third guitarist, the twelve-year-old-looking Ben Cook, making me feel about a hundred years old, the show was non-stop awesomeness (actually, to be honest, it was once-delayed, once-stopped awesomeness -- delayed by the late arrival of vocalist Damien Abraham, and stopped by a triple guitar string blowout two songs in).

The raw energy level displayed by FU harkens back to earlier days of punk, before Green Day and their ilk made punk into a subgenre of radio pop. People moshed. The Hemlock is a tiny venue (the bar area is at least ten times the size of the live music room). You can drink beer from a glass bottle there. It was sort-of like CBGBs back in the day, only cleaner. Much like many a show at CBGBs, the openers were an odd choice. Strange Boys and Crystal Antlers, with their blues, funk and classic rock inspired brands of punk, were really not the best fit for tour mates, but they were decent enough to sit through.

If you enjoy punk, and haven't heard Fucked Up, you really ought to (and also drummer Jonah Falco's other band, Career Suicide). FU is often compared to Portland greats Poison Idea, and the comparison is definitely apt, especially when talking about their live sets. But, mainly in their recordings, FU also throw in a bit of downtempo, Fugazi-esque material as well. Not downtempo as in redundant, verse-chorus-verse pop punk, but more sophisticated intros, bridges and breaks that add interesting layers on top of what is otherwise an all-out sonic assault.

Since NY, LA and SF have nearly completely succumbed to the all-hip-hop, all-the-time wave of the present, now is the time for unassuming Toronto, Canada to reign over the world of punk. If you haven't checked out FU and their peers in the Toronto punk scene, pogo on over to your nearest record shop and rediscover punk as it was meant to be.

The History of Murder

Those of you who are familiar with my obsession with reading about science, philosophy, the arts, and World War Two may find it surprising that my guilty non-fiction reading pleasure is true crime books.

Unfortunately, the true crime genre is filled with badly written tripe ranging from the mountains of mediocre Mafia books to the truly pathetic "From The X-Files of Murder" (which I read over a couple lunchtimes recently, and was sorely disappointed with). There are also the comprehensive, yet somewhat perfunctory, case files such as "Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of The Cali Cartel" (which was actually pretty good for that style of book), interesting pop-tech books like John Douglas' "The Anatomy of Motive," and even the occasional gripping personal narrative like William Queen's "Under And Alone" (which I desperately wanted to adapt as a screenplay when I read it, but unfortunately Daniel Barnz and Ned Zeman had the same idea first). What is generally lacking in the genre, however, are any sort of well written, engaging histories (ideally, of the quality of a Richard Rhodes or Martin Gilbert).

Enter Colin Wilson and the deceptively titled "The Mammoth Book of the History of Murder." Having been unfamiliar with Wilson, and given that title, I had expected its 500+ pages to be filled with typical true crime historiography: titillating anecdotes listed in chronological order, with no premise, no analysis, and no historical grounding.

I was pleasantly surprised. Wilson, a largely self-taught philosopher, is a literate writer. And while it turns out he is better known in the U.S. for his books on mysticism, this book sticks to the subject without any real digressions into that territory. It is sadly not a masterpiece in the vein of Rhodes or Gilbert, but it is a very readable, egaging tract that actually bothers to have a thesis.

Though it is indeed rooted in a series of titillating anecdotes listed in chronological order, Wilson ties these together with historical grounding, sociological analysis, and, most surprisingly, literary and artistic reference to both describe the times he's writing about and root some of his social premises in contemporary interpretations. Some of the historical grounding is light, as the focus is on the crimes themselves, but there is enough to draw a basic picture of an era for an otherwise historically uninformed reader.

Wilson does build-up a premise: that contemporary murder, particularly thrill killing and sex murder, was once the privilege of the upper classes (such as Gilles de Rais) for the particular reason that they were comfortable enough to eschew common crimes for material gain or to avenge one's "honor." Being spoiled, Wilson demonstrates through numerous cases, is a necessary precursor for this kind of psychopathology. Prior to our modern era, the working classes did not generally have enough resources to become spoiled and thus their crimes, no matter how copious and gruesome, were nearly always rooted in personal material gain or vengeance (such as Sweeney Todd). It is an interesting idea, and while this is not a scholarly work of criminology or psychology, Wilson does a credible job of making this point.

Though there are also a few dubious or underdeveloped ideas in this book (particularly his thinly drawn premise that rape stems from a different psychological basis among the pre-industrial poor), ultimately it is an interesting popular history that holds together rather well against many of its genre peers. It is particularly good as an overview, providing the reader with a slew of historical people, cases and literature to pursue on their own. I've read other reviews which claim that Wilson's two-book "The Killers Among Us" is a superior work, and given that "The History of Murder" is itself a surprisingly good work in a genre that too often embraces simply awful writing, I look forward to finding out whether or not those reviews are correct.