is isn't should be, nor can isn't should do

foaming at the gams to chart

nina simone = i put a spell on you

tyler, the creator - see yy agua'

simon and garfunkel - sound of silence

nice biscuit - in space today

khruangbin - maria tambien

frank sinatra - jingle bells

The Problem with Muzak

The avant-punk four-piece Deerhoof’s 2016 single “Plastic Thrills” is featured on “Nike Running Tempo Mix,” which boasts over five hundred thousand followers. The playlist is featured prominently on the “Workout” sub-page within Spotify’s Browse feature, along with a few other Nike playlists, which is considerably rare—not many playlists found through Browse are currently curated by brands other than Spotify itself or the major labels.

In conversation with Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier about the Nike playlist, he recalls a time in 2007 when a group of artists filed a class action lawsuit against Camel cigarettes and Rolling Stone for publishing an advertorial on the history of indie rock, one that used more than one hundred artist names without permission. The band was happy to be included and inspired to see their peers push back against corporate exploitation. “The difference now is that, if you don’t bow down to Spotify, you might as well tell whoever runs the guillotine that’s above your neck to just let her rip,” Saunier says, as the band sits in their van, on tour, en route from Grand Rapids to Detroit. “These streaming services are literally the only option for a music career nowadays.”

Deerhoof is in a unique position: the band formed in 1994, and it has released more than a dozen albums since. Their career began well over a decade before streaming became the norm. Deerhoof’s members have generally proceeded on their own terms over the years, steadily putting out records and touring with support from indie labels like Joyful Noise, Polyvinyl, and Kill Rock Stars. But as collaborators in a DIY-minded group who tours with young and underground acts, they’ve seen their friends struggle in this new environment, and they’ve experienced first-hand how streaming services generally make it harder for musicians to navigate their world with a sense of agency.

“It is compulsory in our system, with the absolute commodification of everything, that [artists] become their own brand,” Saunier says. “The musician is more and more similar to the Instagram Star in that sense. Or a gambler. Someone who just creates something from their imagination, from their time and energy and hard work, and money . . . and then just, posts it, basically, and hopes for the best.

But who’s to blame? Saunier recognizes the tough spot so many artists and labels are in, where they’re unable to outwardly criticize their corporate overlords without risking total irrelevance. “The people I would blame the most are the greedy chauvinists in charge of companies like Spotify and [those] who own Google,” he goes on:“And so, if some absolutely infamous Sweatshop-Owning Shoe Company decides to include you in their playlist to make them look hip, are you going to complain? No. What a joke . . . And if Nike is the one putting the song on their playlist, then well, your lips are now touching their Nike shoes. Because that’s your ticket to something other than absolute oblivion.” He goes on:

These are the companies that have presented themselves as hip, huge, harmless . . . In fact, they are ruthless and as hungry for profit . . . They’re shark-like. Just eat up everything, take all of the world’s creations. Digitize them and offer them back to humanity either for free or for an incredibly low price. And don’t pay, or massively underpay the creators, and just kick back and put your feet up, and know that if Greg from Deerhoof doesn’t like it, well that’s fine, because there are a million other people lined up behind Greg who are perfectly happy to volunteer their music to exactly such a scheme in hopes of doing something besides being a barista their whole life.

violents and monica martin - unravelling

dvorak cello concerto MVM III

gareth liddiard - blondin makes an omelette

anderson paak - come down

weyes blood - seven words

daggy man - what you desire

david foster wallace - this is water

There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously fluorescently lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts. Eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end of the day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college. You finally get to the checkout’s front line, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams, and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think. And if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me; about my hunger, and my fatigue and my desire to just get home. And it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people who are in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and non-human they seem in the checkout line. Or how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on a cell phone in the checkout line. And look how deeply personally unfair this is. Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious, liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time at the end of the day in traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and hummers and v12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish 40 gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that patriotic or religious bumper stickers, always seem to be on the biggest, most disgusting vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for probably screwing up the climate, and for how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society. If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It is the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life, when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is of course that there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of the people in SUVs have been auto accidents at some time, and now find driving do terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to buy the biggest, heaviest SUV so that they feel safe enough to drive. Or that the hummer who just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am. It is actually I that is in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line are just as bored and frustrated as I am. And that some of these people have more painful or tedious lives than I do. Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights who’s been holding the hand of her husband who’s dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicles department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important, if you want to operate under the default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. If you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred. On fire with the same force that lit the stars; love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

anticipatisms

daniel johnston - dream scream

tuneyards

jacob collier - hideaway

nai palm - have you ever been (to electric ladyland)

charles manson - look at your game girl

alan watts

Society at the moment is mutual mistrust. Therefore it becomes increasingly difficult to do anything. Business is inhibited by the lack of free enterprise. that sounds very right wing. But actually, fascist states, corporate states, totalitarian states are utterly against free enterprise. so let's push this a little further. St Paul said that the labourer is worthy of their hire. I, as a mere philosopher, dealing in higher things, always insist that I be paid for my work, and I get the highest fee I can get. People say "you're just out for money", and I tell them it's none of their business, because I give most of it away; my own needs being extremely simple. Although I enjoy good food, I don't even own a TV. It's a very simple life, but I've got enough, and enough is as good as a feast. You see, a lot of people don't feel happy unless they have another thing beyond money, called status. And status to a very large extent in our economy exists in conspicuous consumption; in having this thing, and that thing and the other thing, and having a swimming pool, having a ferrari, a certain kind of clothes, a certain kind of house, and so on and so on and so on. And we think we need all that because we've been persuaded by a certain kind of propaganda, that that's how we ought to live. Because we haven't asked ourselves whether that's what we really wanted. In other words, we've been propagandised. I remember when my daughter was in high school, insisted that she had to have a certain number of cashmere sweaters. In those days I couldn't afford them. I said, my dear do you really want these? Or have you just been reading ads in the magazine, or listening to the other children? Because, you see, schools are places where you send your child to be brought up by other children.

ray charles ft mary ann fisher - what kind of man are you

st vincent - year of the tiger

misbehaving - labrynth

king gizzard etc etc etc - countdown

michael hurley - the tea song

Consumerist cooking with Stephen Fry

You are not a person, you are an algorithmic assumption, a mould into which hot selling-jelly may be poured.

new thangs

Husky cut the air

Kool A.D. electrum

tim heidecker cocaine

nilla pizzi mua

tom waits tango til they're sore

Grace lightman repair repair

department of eagles phantom other

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       the westerlies .- A NEARER SUN

       fugazi -.. GLUE MAN

       black keys . NEXT GIRL

       joanna newsom .-.. en gallop

       KG&TLW .. sketches of brunswick east I

       uppalapu srinivas -. siddhivanayakam

       tiger lillies .- the story of cruel frederick

Eisenstein

Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically works, and that the progressive deterioration of everything from ecology to economy is a temporary deviation from the evolutionary imperative of progress.

A Clinton Presidency would have offered four more years of that pretense. A woman President following a black President would have meant to many that things are getting better. It would have obscured the reality of continued neoliberal economics, imperial wars, and resource extraction behind a veil of faux-progressive feminism. Now that we have, in the words of my friend Kelly Brogan, rejected a wolf in sheep’s clothing in favour of a wolf in wolf’s clothing, that illusion will be impossible to maintain.

The wolf, Donald Trump (and I’m not sure he’d be offended by that moniker) will not provide the usual sugarcoating on the poison pills the policy elites have foisted on us for the last forty years. The prison-industrial complex, the endless wars, the surveillance state, the pipelines, the nuclear weapons expansion were easier for liberals to swallow when they came with a dose, albeit grudging, of LGBTQ rights under an African-American President.

I am willing to suspend my judgement of Trump and (very skeptically) hold the possibility that he will disrupt the elite policy consensus of free trade and military confrontation – major themes of his campaign. One might always hope for miracles. However, because he apparently lacks any robust political ideology of his own, it is more likely that he will fill his cabinet with neocon war hawks, Wall Street insiders, and corporate reavers, trampling the wellbeing of the working class whites who elected him while providing them their own sugar-coating of social conservatism.

The social and environmental horrors likely to be committed under President Trump are likely to incite massive civil disobedience and possibly disorder. For Clinton supporters, many of whom were halfhearted to begin with, the Trump administration could mark the end of their loyalty to our present institutions of government. For Trump supporters, the initial celebration will collide with gritty reality when Trump proves as unable or unwilling as his predecessors to challenge the entrenched systems that continually degrade their lives: global finance capital, the deep state, and their programming ideologies. Add to this the likelihood of a major economic crisis, and the public’s frayed loyalty to the existing system could snap.

We are entering a time of great uncertainty. Institutions so enduring as to seem identical to reality itself may lose their legitimacy and dissolve. It may seem that the world is falling apart. For many, that process started on election night, when Trump’s victory provoked incredulity, shock, even vertigo. “I can’t believe this is happening!”

At such moments, it is a normal response to find someone to blame, as if identifying fault could restore the lost normality, and to lash out in anger. Hate and blame are convenient ways of making meaning out of a bewildering situation. Anyone who disputes the blame narrative may receive more hostility than the opponents themselves, as in wartime when pacifists are more reviled than the enemy.

Racism and misogyny are devastatingly real in this country, but to blame bigotry and sexism for voters’ repudiation of the Establishment is to deny the validity of their deep sense of betrayal and alienation. The vast majority of Trump voters were expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the system in the way most readily available to them. Millions of Obama voters voted for Trump (six states who went for Obama twice switched to Trump). Did they suddenly become racists in the last four years? The blame-the-racists (the fools, the yokels...) narrative generates a clear demarcation between good (us) and evil (them), but it does violence to the truth. It also obscures an important root of racism – anger displaced away from an oppressive system and its elites and onto other victims of that system. Finally, it employs the same dehumanization of the other that is the essence of racism and the precondition for war. Such is the cost of preserving a dying story. That is one reason why paroxysms of violence so often accompany a culture-defining story’s demise.

The dissolution of the old order that is now officially in progress is going to intensify. That presents a tremendous opportunity and danger, because when normal falls apart the ensuing vacuum draws in formerly unthinkable ideas from the margins. Unthinkable ideas range from rounding up the Muslims in concentration camps, to dismantling the military-industrial complex and closing down overseas military bases. They range from nationwide stop-and-frisk to replacing criminal punishment with restorative justice. Anything becomes possible with the collapse of dominant institutions. When the animating force behind these new ideas is hate or fear, all manner of fascistic and totalitarian nightmares can ensue, whether enacted by existing powers or those that arise in revolution against them.

That is why, as we enter a period of intensifying disorder, it is important to introduce a different kind of force to animate the structures that might appear after the old ones crumble. I would call it love if it weren’t for the risk of triggering your New Age bullshit detector, and besides, how does one practically bring love into the world in the realm of politics? So let’s start with empathy. Politically, empathy is akin to solidarity, born of the understanding that we are all in this together. In what together? For starters, we are in the uncertainty together.

We are entering a space between stories. After various retrograde versions of a new story rise and fall and we enter a period of true unknowing, an authentic next story will emerge. What would it take for it to embody love, compassion, and interbeing? I see its lineaments in those marginal structures and practices that we call holistic, alternative, regenerative, and restorative. All of them source from empathy, the result of the compassionate inquiry: What is it like to be you?

a meditation on any Person Who Outwardly Defines Themself As Nihilistic

You might find yourself in contact with on a Person Who Outwardly Defines Themself As Nihilistic. You might know someone like this, or even sometwo. You will have no trouble identifying a PWODTAN in circumstances where all textbook symptoms are on display. Be wary, however, as symptoms may subtly and suddenly manifest at any stage of adulthood. A PWODTAN will inevitably find themselves being labelled as  'acquired taste' at the banquet of social interaction. Many who wear their apathetic affectation as a badge of honour often use this personality-signifier as an exclusive means to define themselves. The inescapable irony remains, though; a PWODTAN continues to live in orbit of the very same principles they [I presume superficially] oppose. In such instances, the gravitational pull of passion, compassion, belonging and respect reveal PWODTANs to be obedient servants of such values. It would be a lazy to ascribe a narcissistic tag to most PWODTANs, though. There are elements of egotism, but my preliminary diagnosis, conducted prior to a thorough full-body examination, is that of deep-seated insecurity, likely stemming from psychological trauma incurred during childhood and adolescence.

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