i'm taking a break from syllabus-writing to watch youtube clips, and came across these two which, while not the same performance that i saw in eugene last spring, capture the essence of that performance quite well. the sound is a little wonky halfway through the second one, but if you like guitar, you owe it to yourself to at least watch the first one.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Saturday, December 26, 2009
best response to copenhagen...
...i've seen thus far is from ben stewart (greenpeace). it's a sign of the times, i think, that i'm looking to greenpeace for reason, but there it is:
"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.’
a downer of a first blog for after christmas, but there it is.
"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.’
a downer of a first blog for after christmas, but there it is.
Friday, December 11, 2009
MIXTAPE: yankee hotel foxtrot demos compilation
okay, so i know i promised a new mixtape this week. and i got piled on by work and lack of sleep and i haven't listened to anything new or started piecing tracks together. but one thing i did do was dig into the demo sessions for wilco's yankee hotel foxtrot for the umpteenth time. for some reason, though, this was the first time it really struck me that within the two or three readily available sessions from the recording of the album, there are nine songs that ended up on the cutting room floor. not only is this an album-length number of songs in and of itself, but the quality of the songs all the way around are good enough that, though they might not stand up to the version of YHF that we actually got, they make a solid "album" on their own.
so i figured i'd pick what i thought was the best version of each of these tracks, put them in the order most beseeming a cohesive album, and upload them. this collection actually includes a few of my all-time favorite wilco tracks: "cars can't escape" and "venus stop the train". i also really, really like "not for the season" and "magazine called sunset". to my ears, a lot of these songs actually strike a better balance between pop sensibility and sonic experimentation than the tracks that actually comprise YHF do, which is funny since that's what that album is known for. then there's "venus stop the train", which just stomps on your guts at the end. i included an alternate version of "alone" as a bonus track just because there are three or four versions, and while the one i included earlier in the playlist is most reminiscent of that YHF sound, the other version is also pretty great.
if you're a fan of YHF and haven't heard any of these demos before, i highly recommend getting both sets of demos (one is a 21-track set and i believe the other is an 18-track set). a lot of the tracks that actually ended up on the album are on these demos in multiple incarnations and some are pretty incredibly different ("poor places" comes to mind).
note: the reason i'm making an exception to my usual rule here and uploading more than one song by an artist is because i've seen the sessions these songs are pulled from all over the place online, including a few very well-known wilco trading sites. so i'm assuming this is kosher. if it's not, of course let me know and i'll remove the link to the files right away.
here's the tracklist:
01. Not For the Season (l/k/a Laminated Cat)
02. Magazine Called Sunset
03. Nothing Up My Sleeve
04. Alone
05. Cars Can't Escape
06. Let Me Come Home
07. The Good Part
08. Won't Let You Down
09. Venus Stop the Train
10. Alone (Alternate Version)
here's the tracks.
so i figured i'd pick what i thought was the best version of each of these tracks, put them in the order most beseeming a cohesive album, and upload them. this collection actually includes a few of my all-time favorite wilco tracks: "cars can't escape" and "venus stop the train". i also really, really like "not for the season" and "magazine called sunset". to my ears, a lot of these songs actually strike a better balance between pop sensibility and sonic experimentation than the tracks that actually comprise YHF do, which is funny since that's what that album is known for. then there's "venus stop the train", which just stomps on your guts at the end. i included an alternate version of "alone" as a bonus track just because there are three or four versions, and while the one i included earlier in the playlist is most reminiscent of that YHF sound, the other version is also pretty great.
if you're a fan of YHF and haven't heard any of these demos before, i highly recommend getting both sets of demos (one is a 21-track set and i believe the other is an 18-track set). a lot of the tracks that actually ended up on the album are on these demos in multiple incarnations and some are pretty incredibly different ("poor places" comes to mind).
note: the reason i'm making an exception to my usual rule here and uploading more than one song by an artist is because i've seen the sessions these songs are pulled from all over the place online, including a few very well-known wilco trading sites. so i'm assuming this is kosher. if it's not, of course let me know and i'll remove the link to the files right away.
here's the tracklist:
01. Not For the Season (l/k/a Laminated Cat)
02. Magazine Called Sunset
03. Nothing Up My Sleeve
04. Alone
05. Cars Can't Escape
06. Let Me Come Home
07. The Good Part
08. Won't Let You Down
09. Venus Stop the Train
10. Alone (Alternate Version)
here's the tracks.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
end of more teaching
today is a weird day: the last day of teaching for me for the semester. usually (and especially my first few semesters of teaching) the last day is sort of momentous. i usually feel (even if my students don't, and most could probably likely care less) like we've all sort of come through this long, complicated, unique journey together and it feels sort of awesome to me to reach the end of it. it helps too that all my classes thus far have been portfolio-based, so even the students who participate the least and miss tons of classes or whatever still end up turning in a hefty, significantly involved packet of papers they've written. it's a nice sort of landmark moment in a way and (i'd like to think) even for them it's sort of an encapsulation of everything that they've gone through to get to the end of the class.
as such, usually at the end of a class, as i leave the classroom for the last time, it's a little hard not to reflect a bit on what i've learned and how things have gone. this probably hearkens back to the first time i finished teaching a class for the semester, in 402 bryan hall, and after i turned the lights off i just stood there in the room for about five minutes, just amazed that i'd actually survived. increasingly, though, and especially today, my inclination was to just speed out of the room and get back to my office to start working on the newest project, or paper, or whatever. and, i'll be honest, i find that depressing.
one of the best things about my "year off" two years ago teaching just comp as an instructor here as WSU was the fact that i actually got to experience teaching. it wasn't something that i had to muscle through while taking seminars and worrying about publication and dissertations and theses and, you know, real-life stuff like relationships and making time to cook food. all throughout my master's program, i had enjoyed teaching, but i was also acutely aware that every moment i spent on teaching was a moment taken away from time i could have been working on my own papers. so it was a really great experience to be able to just teach and know that giving a student an extra ten minutes was just cutting into my TV-watching time (which is, obviously, a pretty easy decision to make if you like your job, which i do) and nothing else. i felt the same way about my summer class this past summer...i had some trouble fitting 15 weeks of class into six weeks for sure, but teaching that class was fucking fun. those experiences gave me the evidence to be able to honestly say that yes, i like teaching and i'm extremely lucky to be able to do it as a job. i could not have said that during my master's program. i never had a chance to think about it.
now, as much as i'm loving the ph.d experience, my one great regret is the backstep i've taken from teaching-as-profession back to student-first-work-second. i'm really looking forward to this changing next semester when i have a little bit more time in general. not less work, of course, but at least more freedom to shift that workload around more.
as such, usually at the end of a class, as i leave the classroom for the last time, it's a little hard not to reflect a bit on what i've learned and how things have gone. this probably hearkens back to the first time i finished teaching a class for the semester, in 402 bryan hall, and after i turned the lights off i just stood there in the room for about five minutes, just amazed that i'd actually survived. increasingly, though, and especially today, my inclination was to just speed out of the room and get back to my office to start working on the newest project, or paper, or whatever. and, i'll be honest, i find that depressing.
one of the best things about my "year off" two years ago teaching just comp as an instructor here as WSU was the fact that i actually got to experience teaching. it wasn't something that i had to muscle through while taking seminars and worrying about publication and dissertations and theses and, you know, real-life stuff like relationships and making time to cook food. all throughout my master's program, i had enjoyed teaching, but i was also acutely aware that every moment i spent on teaching was a moment taken away from time i could have been working on my own papers. so it was a really great experience to be able to just teach and know that giving a student an extra ten minutes was just cutting into my TV-watching time (which is, obviously, a pretty easy decision to make if you like your job, which i do) and nothing else. i felt the same way about my summer class this past summer...i had some trouble fitting 15 weeks of class into six weeks for sure, but teaching that class was fucking fun. those experiences gave me the evidence to be able to honestly say that yes, i like teaching and i'm extremely lucky to be able to do it as a job. i could not have said that during my master's program. i never had a chance to think about it.
now, as much as i'm loving the ph.d experience, my one great regret is the backstep i've taken from teaching-as-profession back to student-first-work-second. i'm really looking forward to this changing next semester when i have a little bit more time in general. not less work, of course, but at least more freedom to shift that workload around more.
Monday, December 7, 2009
lots of music is available for listening in the world
it's true.
i've been so enmeshed in phish- and wilco-land since early summer (tackling wilco's catalog and live shows with a voracity near that of my once-Cardinals obsession, and geeking out on phish after that transcendent Gorge experience) that i think it's ruining my music life. lately i've hardly been listening to music at all. which is pretty much the opposite of every day of my life for the last 15 years. part of it, of course, is just the business of this semester and the fact that now that i have a lot of friends, i don't spend a lot of time alone in my office. i'm often in my office, but there are also usually seventeen other people in here as well. which is generally awesome. but i feel more bad about blaring music in that case.
i've also realized, though, that i'm in a bit of a musical rut. i haven't been writing, i haven't been listening to anything new, i haven't had (or haven't been making) the time for either. so here i sit, day after day, spinning the same wilco and phish discs over and over again and though they are generally all awesome, admittedly, it's all starting to bleed together. the new mason jennings was a good distraction, and i also actually really like the new norah jones record. the new live gogol bordello disc is great, and all the phish shows from the summer tour are interesting. but i want to hear something i haven't heard before. i'm hoping that over christmas i can spread out a little bit, find out about some new bands. how do you find out about new, unique bands now that "indie" has become mainstream? i don't want to listen to the newest grizzly bear impersonator, i want to hear new, interesting stuff, even if it was written in the 70s.
i'm listening to loose fur right now. it's helping a little. maybe i'll throw on some minus 5 next...
i've been so enmeshed in phish- and wilco-land since early summer (tackling wilco's catalog and live shows with a voracity near that of my once-Cardinals obsession, and geeking out on phish after that transcendent Gorge experience) that i think it's ruining my music life. lately i've hardly been listening to music at all. which is pretty much the opposite of every day of my life for the last 15 years. part of it, of course, is just the business of this semester and the fact that now that i have a lot of friends, i don't spend a lot of time alone in my office. i'm often in my office, but there are also usually seventeen other people in here as well. which is generally awesome. but i feel more bad about blaring music in that case.
i've also realized, though, that i'm in a bit of a musical rut. i haven't been writing, i haven't been listening to anything new, i haven't had (or haven't been making) the time for either. so here i sit, day after day, spinning the same wilco and phish discs over and over again and though they are generally all awesome, admittedly, it's all starting to bleed together. the new mason jennings was a good distraction, and i also actually really like the new norah jones record. the new live gogol bordello disc is great, and all the phish shows from the summer tour are interesting. but i want to hear something i haven't heard before. i'm hoping that over christmas i can spread out a little bit, find out about some new bands. how do you find out about new, unique bands now that "indie" has become mainstream? i don't want to listen to the newest grizzly bear impersonator, i want to hear new, interesting stuff, even if it was written in the 70s.
i'm listening to loose fur right now. it's helping a little. maybe i'll throw on some minus 5 next...
Saturday, December 5, 2009
it's christmas time, bitches!
so, i have a new grain of sand to add to the beach of shameful pop culture admissions i've made on this blog throughout the years. every year i listen to a shitload of new christmas albums in the hope of finding sparkles of brilliance. sure, christmas is a huge, mean, nasty, soulless commercial enterprise, but we all have those warm, fuzzy moments of one christmas or another, either as a child or an adult, or else we wouldn't spend years and money and travel thousands of miles at the most dangerous travelling time of the year every year in hopes of resurrecting those warm, fuzzy moments. right? RIGHT?!
well, most of my warm, fuzzy moments involve christmas music, whether it was the listening to, or the caroling of. and even in the 21st century, sometimes hundreds of years after many of these songs were made, occasionally a version of an old song or even more rarely a completely new christmas song ("all i want for christmas is you", anyone?) comes along that is actually worth listening to. besides, i need something to prop up the leaning tower of my sanity come the end of fall semester each year, and what better way than to listen to a shitload of relaxing christmas music?
so this year, i've listened once again to a decent amount (yes, including bob dylan's christmas album, but i'm not ready emotionally to talk about that yet). not as much as i usually do, but that's okay because early in my survey, i've discovered what is undoubtedly 2009's christmas music masterpiece.
even better, you can download it for free.
this. is. so. awesome.
sure, it's christmas tunes rendered as if through a midi synthesizer or an old NES sound chip, but there are tons of brilliant little moments in here that deserve discovery. this wasn't just thrown together as a sheer gimmick; each song shows a lot of interesting touches and more brilliant little details come out with each listen. check out "god rest ye merry gentlemen" if nothing else. it's ridiculously cool (note for young people: the voice isn't auto-tuned, now get off my lawn!).
also, there's a great, moody version of "greensleeves", which is my favorite christmas song. so that doesn't hurt.
well, most of my warm, fuzzy moments involve christmas music, whether it was the listening to, or the caroling of. and even in the 21st century, sometimes hundreds of years after many of these songs were made, occasionally a version of an old song or even more rarely a completely new christmas song ("all i want for christmas is you", anyone?) comes along that is actually worth listening to. besides, i need something to prop up the leaning tower of my sanity come the end of fall semester each year, and what better way than to listen to a shitload of relaxing christmas music?
so this year, i've listened once again to a decent amount (yes, including bob dylan's christmas album, but i'm not ready emotionally to talk about that yet). not as much as i usually do, but that's okay because early in my survey, i've discovered what is undoubtedly 2009's christmas music masterpiece.
even better, you can download it for free.
this. is. so. awesome.
sure, it's christmas tunes rendered as if through a midi synthesizer or an old NES sound chip, but there are tons of brilliant little moments in here that deserve discovery. this wasn't just thrown together as a sheer gimmick; each song shows a lot of interesting touches and more brilliant little details come out with each listen. check out "god rest ye merry gentlemen" if nothing else. it's ridiculously cool (note for young people: the voice isn't auto-tuned, now get off my lawn!).
also, there's a great, moody version of "greensleeves", which is my favorite christmas song. so that doesn't hurt.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
mother(fucking) nature!
so it's been a really nice, mild winter so far in pullman. and for that, i'm grateful. however, in the last three days, the sudden massive drop in temperature has coincided perfectly with the hours and hours i've been spending outside scouting locations for University of Death...and it's freaking cold. it was coincidental enough that i felt compelled to whine about it. in other news, working on the game is way more fun than working on my other papers/projects. in fact, it's quite possibly my favorite thing i've ever done in grad school. it's going to be fun. hopefully it'll be fun for people to play, too. that's sort of the point.
if you want to check it out, click here.
if you want to check it out, click here.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
tweetblog!
it's oddly foggy tonight. i forgot that happens in winter in pullman. i have sad feelings. mike prewett clone is following me home.
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