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Drown Out Ashcroft

I have too many harebrained schemes, especially late at night.

Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 01:49:26 -0500

Subject: Drown Out Ashcroft’s Song

From: GUS

I just can’t stand it anymore. That godawful song John Ashcroft sang on the news the other day won’t stop running through my head. (If you didn’t hear it, it’s here.) It’s full of empty sentimental patriotism, it completely ignores the separation of church and state, and now the man is trying to force his staff to sing it. The insipid melody is harder to wash out of your brain than “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

Could anyone who gets this message please send me an audio clip, preferably you singing something (anything!) else in your own American (or Un-American) voice — about the U.S., or a response to Ashcroft’s song, or just whatever’s running through your head (the tune with words you can’t remember, the riff your band is practicing right now, your favorite hip-hop song — heck, why not your grocery list, or the parody of Come On Baby Light My Fire your friends wrote in seventh grade?). I’d like to compile them on my website as a way of showing we’re not all crooning along with Ashcroft.

Hook up your computer’s mic and record something — just a few bars is fine, won’t clog the mailpipes — and email it to me. It’s going to take a lot to drown out Ashcroft’s overstuffed, fuggy, authoritarian voice. Feel free to forward this to anyone else with vocal chords in any condition (or ASL signers / interpretive dancers with video cameras!)

love all

Gus

By the way, the lyrics, if you can’t go to that link, run like this:

Let the mighty eagle soar

Like she’s never soared before…

Soar with healing in her wings

Only God, no other kings

From rocky coast to golden shore

Let the mighty eagle soar.

and if you don’t believe me that Ashcroft’s making his staff sing, I refer you to the BBC.

Posted 06 March 2002 † gus | Academic | Culture Jam | Pa'lante La Dada | Comments (0)

Nothing. We have seen *nothing.*

There’s a DDR seventh mix. I didn’t know there was a 6th, even. You know, we’re not going to be able to convince future generations that the United States is the greatest country in the world if the Japanese keep getting games before we do. We’re going to see a rise in the number of Americans under 18 seeking Japanese citizenship. Mark my words.

The music is still just as plastic. The announcer is new, and more annoying. If I continue my loyalty to to a product long after the camp value is gone, is there any way I can justify it?

Oh yeah, and it’s only for PS2. Damn you, Konami!

Posted 04 March 2002 † gus | Academic | Dance | Comments (0)

Stuck Together Like A Ready-Made

LED posters. Sylvie alerted me to their existence. She’s right — they’re tacky. I would recommend them to an updated Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, should one be produced. (Dad gave me the book upon my graduation from eighth grade; I don’t think he had any idea what a seminal — pardon me, germinal — influence it would prove to be in my life. Since moving to New York and under the wing of Kim Edel and other self-styled defenders of the people, I’ve started thinking about how classist the book is. Still a hoot, though.)

The whole Rental Decorating site is rather strange. There’s a certain home-improvement feel to it, but it’s home improvement for people who are going to have to scrap it all and move in a few months, and know it. Bathroom fixtures and shelves are all mounted on suction cups. The water filtration systems are not the kind you install under your sink.

The rugs look like the kind they sell draped over cyclone fences by the freeway, and the bathroom accessories are all bland frosted plastic stuff of the sort you could easily pick up at K-Mart (well… if K-Mart wasn’t a sinking ship). Who’s their audience? College kids, sure (notice all the sheets are twin, extra-long), but going off campus is one of the great reliefs of college life, so why buy online?

One curious redeeming quality: the “Americana” LED posters all have to do with diners, not flags and soldiers and Norman fscking Rockwell.

Posted 27 February 2002 † gus | Academic | Product Displacement | Comments (0)

Step

Listening to Frankie Ruiz, La Leyenda, disc 1. As “La Rueda” unrolls, I find myself thinking that salsa is really an ingenious dance, really perfect for the music it goes with. In its “street” form (as opposed to its performance form), it’s so subtle — step and center, step and center. No big strutting steps, very subtle sexual hooks put into your partner… well, this is as I’ve danced it with kids my age who’ve mostly learned it from friends, which is what I take to be the street form, and I haven’t spent as much time in salsa clubs as I have doing swing or tango… I’m going on a hunch here; bear with me.

Think about it: if you danced to follow those flamboyant horns, or with the vocals, the dance would be totally over the top. But you usually dance with the drums, which tend to move forward with the piano and bass at a casual walking pace beneath the horns. It keeps the dance from becoming something ridiculous, like, say, ballroom quickstep. Or cheerleading moves.

And this is why the steps produced by Dance Dance Revolution are so garish and awkward as a dance form (while making for a really good video game). I can’t think of any other dance, actually, where you dance to the vocals, and yet DDR asks you to do it regularly, especially at the higher levels. Witness:

etc. I wonder if there’s a study of social dance which specifies rules like this (don’t dance to the vocals) the way linguistics does.

Posted 01 December 2001 † gus | Academic | Dance Revolution | Comments (0)

Letter: To Know Is Not Enough, We Must Dance

Maybe things are exactly as they do not seem: Out with the dog on his last walk of the evening, just before one a.m. As I approach the bare face of the school, a hulking figure shambles into the sidewalk in front of me. He’s all hunched, and I’m a little concerned for my safety… then I steel myself, and then I’m more concerned that he just not make comments at me or leer… and as I jockey around the sidewalk, trying to maintain a distance and keep the dog from lurching into him, he mumbles something incoherent, which in a moment becomes clear: Take care of yourself. Get home safe.

I went out to Central Park today and talked with S.K. Thoth (I am not going to link to him yet, I’m feeling a little posessive in this pre-pitch period). I’m ashamed. From the other end of the tunnel, seen through a swirl of Lindy Hoppers, yeah, he had looked like a yodelling weirdo with a fiddle and leg bells, and I don’t think any of us enjoyed giving our lungs a workout in a rogue cloud of incense. And yes, while I’m giggling behind the duck blind of my computer, this guy who sings about an imaginary continent in a made-up language makes an easy target. When am I one to ostracize, though?

I didn’t really have to ask many questions. A solid-built weekending Latino with a couple of kids squirreling around his knees was asking him plenty. First, what was his performance about? Something about the Hero’s Journey, a search for self. Thoth explained, as he would again later, that the fantasy world he writes about is a metaphor for his own life. I got the impression he’s not as immersed in his fantasy world as the website implies.

“I call this a school,” Thoth said. “I’m learning much.” Well, what had he learned today? “It was a musical thing, this time.” Since he has long since abandoned formal schooling on the violin, and never had any in voice, it’s up to him to make progress. “There’s nobody to ask, how do you do this next?”

I don’t brook any of this bullshit about cleansing spaces with sage smoke, or feng shui, or ancestors speaking to you directly. I grew up with a father who took us to Caltech parties thrown for Mars flybys and put a plaque on the door telling proselytizers and salesmen we were happy the way we were, thanks, we’d seek them out if that changed. I trust very few things which haven’t been affirmed by scientific inquiry — love, for example. Yet here was this gold-loincloth-clad guy I’d taken for a lunatic, who had my trust by the end of an afternoon because he left formal learning behind.

One thing I should tell you about myself: yes, I love my high school and everything it gave me, love good teachers and academic communities, knowing which ideas build upon older ideas and how; I’m proud of how I did, still puff up over my AP and SAT scores and the A given to me by a gruff old English teacher who never gave ’em out to anyone. But I have great respect for autodidactry. I went to Hampshire because I thought I might miss something important if I didn’t try to stake my life on it. In my first year there I invested a lot of my energy and self-worth in this idea, Non Satis Scire. (That’s our motto.) The poem the line comes from says, “To know is not enough/ we must do.” The president of the college likes to jaw on about questioning being the necessary compliment to knowing. Passion, compassion, moral rectitude, or rejecting everything completely out of hand based on paranoia or utopianism are other possibilities suggested in the actions of Hampshire’s student body.

I still don’t know what makes enough. Creation maybe. Juxtaposing completely unrelated ideas and seeing what happens. I just wanted you to know that love of autodidactry and loyalty to the academic establishment are having an ongoing fistfight in my head. (Maybe I’ve already made this clear to you. I don’t know why I feel like I need to defend myself to you. aside from the obvious, I guess.)

Watching Thoth I can see what he has taught himself. His body knows how to draw a single long note out of a violin while spinning in a circle. Not something that comes without practice. His feet know, like a tap dancer’s, that when you strike your heel or toe or whole foot against the ground, they make different sounds. I could see him experimenting with the bellied-out drain cover, trying out the effects of an unintended crinkle noise its corner made as he stomped on it.

And no, this is not going to make him a lion of Wall Street — not something you care for anyway, nor do I — or untangle the mystery of the Big Bang. I’ll tell you this much: he knows when he’s about to fall over, and can stop himself. The man has turned his mental powers towards knowing how much space his voice can fill, how many steps he has to take to get to the other side of a room. I watched him and listened to him and wondered if maybe we’re wrong, maybe we’re not supposed to be solving all these problems that go on outside ourselves. Maybe we’re just supposed to figure out exactly what these bodies which our brains are stuffed into can do.

Posted 06 August 2001 † gus | Academic | Dance Revolution | Comments (1)