Majestic Yellow Swans

The dynamic duo of Gabe Saloman and Pete Swanson have released dozens of albums under the "Yellow Swans" name, exploring the outer boundaries of improvisational noise. Some improv artists sit in one place, however. Not Yellow Swans. The two YS releases at the end of 2007, At All Ends and Drowner Yellow Swans, sound majestic, like a symphony orchestra playing Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. This video, entitled "I Woke Up," is from 2006's Psychic Secessions album. Imagine this genre updated for 2007 with an expanded sense of grace.

Red World, Blue World

A former aide to Sen. Daniel Moynihan, Joshua Brook, has written a fascinating article in the Summer 2007 World Policy Journal, called "Red World, Blue World." (Understand, WPJ staff are slightly slacker, so their summer issue did not hit the stands until December.) No, this is not Brook trying to describe which nations and groups in the world are more or less like Democrats and Republicans. Rather, he starts from the red-state/blue-state model to show how most cultures have certain character types that either fit into the blue notion of belief systems that are malleable based on facts on the ground, or red notions of strict political, cultural, or religious beliefs that are adhered to, regardless of what visible evidence may suggest.
Brook's analysis helps to explain why blue people may assume red people are lying, when in reality they are accepting their faith as a higher truth that somehow negates what happens right in front of their eyes (and notice the similarities between religious folks' "higher truth" and Leninists' "revolutionary truth.") For example, he said, Wahhabists who supported the 9/11 attacks could simultaneously say "Islam is the religion of peace" while supporting the attacks as the will of Allah, without experiencing cognitive dissonance.
Similarly, when President Bush says, "We do not torture," he is neither in traditional denial, nor lying as bald-facedly as some progressive may believe. Instead, he has internalized the belief that the U.S. is inherently the home of democracy and human rights, and therefore the government does not torture by definition, regardless of what visible evidence may tell us.
What this suggests is that red people simply cannot be swayed by facts, because they do not care about facts. The question for those of us who lean toward blue, and believe that belief systems should adapt to what our world experiences tell us, is how can we reach people when their core belief systems go terribly wrong? Will devout Christians, Jews, Muslims, Marxists, simply follow the core belief off the edge of a cliff? Are blue people so squishy in their "moral relativity" that they cannot make a case for abandoning strict faith-based belief? I don't want to be like Richard Dawkins and the militant atheists who make fun of anyone harboring strong spirituality. I want to find a way to promote militant Enlightenment thought without offending people of faith (though I still insist that blasphemy cannot and should not be a crime in any nation).
Oddly, I'll give some kudos here to the Mormon Church. When recent DNA evidence proved the Mormon belief on American Indian origins to be wrong, Church elders got together and changed the doctrine to accommodate the evidence. How many "red" people would be willing to do such a thing?

Intolerance in the Anti-Religious Community, Too

It's hard not to believe in conspiracy theories when two evangelical organizations in Colorado get hit in the same day by gunmen apparently picking random victims. Is this some new militant death squad spurred on by Richard Dawkins and other militant atheists? Probably not. But the assaults that took place in Arvada, Colo. at the Faith Bible Chapel early Sunday morning, as well as the random shootings in the parking lot of New Life Church in Colorado Springs six hours later, sure can make one feel like it's open season on conservative Christians. Evangelicals have enough of a victimization complex already, when they are often the ones dishing out the prejudice. But those of us who are secular, or question where the evangelicals are going, should not hesitate to offer sympathy and shock when church members are violently attacked, as in these two incidents.

Putin Says He's Got a Mandate; Chavez Says "Mellow Out, Dudes"

Two questionable elections Dec. 2 reached opposite conclusions. Vladimir Putin claimed to no great surprise that a rigged electoral process had given him a "mandate" to do whatever the hell he wanted. Meanwhile, after losing a narrow squeaker on changing the constitution, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela did not blame the CIA and cancel the results, but accepted them with dignity. For now at least.

Is it fair to even lump these two events together? Yes, because of the process of mobilizing the grass roots. Putin's Russia remains capitalist, but he's been convinced for some time that the Russian people have a soft spot for authoritarianism and the personality cult - witness Stalin's continued popularity. Why waste time with messy democracy when Putin gets adorned on T-shirts whenever he cracks heads? The results say as much about Russian people not being very appreciative of democracy or multiculturalism (witness the crackdown on gays and foreigners) as it does about Putin's siloviki friends from the KGB and FSB.

Chavez knows he can mobilize similar forces, since the urban poor he relies on would rather be whipped up into violence than follow the nonviolent land-seizure methods of Bolivia and other Latin American countries. (It was funny to see some left-bloggers who were so anxious to see a Chavez victory, they gave us some "Dewey Defeats Truman" headlines Sunday night.) My gripe with Hugo all along has not been his Bolivarian economic models, but his demagogic tendencies and his intention to whip up violence. Maybe his response to his electoral loss indicates he's realizing the price he pays for being a provocative loudmouth. The first test will be to see if he can restrain Chavistas seeking revenge. The second test will be whether he avoids the temptation to slowly adopt centralized socialist models through what Matyas Rakosi of Hungary used to call "salami tactics" during the Cold War. Venezuela would do a lot better following the Evo Morales model of radical alternative economics.

The Limits of Teddy Tolerance

I was trying to avoid comment on the Gillian Gibbons case, since it goes without saying that (a) she was a decent person with an innocent intent, and (b) Sudan is one of the most reprehensible nation-states on the planet, and it's difficult to think of Sudanese leaders ever doing good.

But the Islamic conservatives who protested independently on Nov. 30, demanding Gibbons' execution, raised my ire further. Regardless of her innocence in naming a teddy bear, blasphemy is a basic, integral part of freedom of speech that must be accepted by people that intend to live on this planet in this century. You hear that, religious fundamentalists? I'm all for mutual respect, but the Enlightenment took place 300 years ago, and it is not being revoked by morons referencing their God or Allah or Yahweh. I'm back on my Salman Rushdie high horse of 20 years ago. Death to those who call for fatwas! If you're ready to kill others for their perceived blasphemy, get the hell off my planet.

Bob's Not All There

I'm not frantic to see Todd Haynes' mystical/mythical movie on Dylan, with Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, and Heath Ledger portraying Zimmerman at various points in his life, but in the meantime, the wonderful soundtrack to I'm Not There will serve as a placeholder. What irks me is the number of movie reviews that generate the mythical image of Dylan, in which each act is loaded with layers of hidden meaning.

This is why I find David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street book on Dylan's life with Baez, Farina, et. al. to be far more interesting. Hajdu raises the legitimate complaint that Dylan acted like a prick to Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and others, because he had a very calculated sense of what he wanted to do. That calculation, sometimes with a rather superficial intent, has remained in place throughout his career. Right now, Dylan is not touring the state-fair circuit with Willie Nelson in some mystical effort to dissect Americana. He's touring middle America to milk an audience who loves to hear All Along the Watchtower from the dastardly caballero with the pencil-thin moustache. Not that much different from the Eagles doing a sales exclusive at Wal-Mart, really.

Don't get me wrong, I am neither condemning Dylan as a sellout nor dismissing his act as worthless. His calculation is as self-evident as Woody Guthrie's, when Woody chose to do the American hobo trip with a wife who gave up Martha Graham's dance company for folk-dancing. Dylan was brilliant in the political talking-blues period, in the hallucinogenic Blonde on Blonde period, and even tolerable in the Self-Portrait and Christian periods. But many of our cultural icons choose to make calculated shifts in image in a very transparent way. We can point to Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Norman Mailer, and thousands of others (to say nothing of every punk-rocker and every poseur). To be truly mystical in personas, one must dance on the edge of total madness like Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. Anything else is just calculated marketing. Critics who put artists on pedestals and treat calculated images as mysticism do no one a favor. We do not need icons to be puffed up to several times larger than life.

Labor and Content-Free Entertainment

There've been plenty of observations of the unusual resurgence of a certain type of labor union activity in 2007: except for the fleeting UAW strikes of GM and Chrysler, most strikes have involved the media and entertainment businesses - the Hollywood writers' strike, the NY stagehands' strike, the CBS News writers' strike. It says a lot about the shift from heavy industry and manufacturing to a culture driven by entertainment.

What hasn't been touched upon outside of Rafiki's (Jared Bradshaw's) speech in Forbidden Broadway (picture above), is the extent to which Broadway audiences consciously choose content-free spectacle as the preferred form of entertainment - the dumber and more childish, the better. How else to explain the rash of musicals being struck, like Tarzan, Little Mermaid, Mary Poppins, Grinch, Lion King, Hairspray, Jersey Boys, Xanadu, Chorus Line, Mama Mia... What isn't a Disney corporate product (a lower and lower percentage of live theatre these days) is moronic enough to please a five-year-old. The point, according to Rafiki, is not just to substitute special effects and spectacle for content, but to make sure there is as little content as possible in the entertainment to disturb the audience.

This lesson should not be lost on journalists wondering what 21st century infotainment will look like. Rafiki's Rules are twofold: (1) If you have to feed the public any information whatsoever, coat it with enough entertainment to make it fluffy, not stuffy; and (2) remember that content really isn't king -- the public wants as little memorable content as possible, just enough colors and lights and sounds to satisfy the minds of toddlers. Most media consumers of today certainly act as if they were toddlers.