Thursday, May 27, 2004 11:18 AM | Matthew Jeanes Okay, I'll admit that I haven't gotten really up-in-arms about the whole Iraq and Afghanistan situation. I never thought we should be there, especially not Iraq, but I never got into a vehement anti-war mode. I think some of the anti-war protesters are what turned me off from that. Seeing people with Peace Signs and NO WAR signs and just rabidly fighting any and all war universally--it just turns me off because it seems like the obvious and equally blind opposite end of the war/no war polemic. As with most things, there's some room in the middle that makes more sense. Without getting involved in World War II, who knows how far the Germans would have taken their regime and genocide? There are clearly reasons to go to war, so blanketly just saying all war is bad seems naive. On the other hand, there are times and situations like what we are dealing with now that are so much more ambiguous that it requires a bit of subtlety and panache to really get at the root of why some wars should be supported and others reviled. There's no doubt in my mind that the military action in Afghanistan and Iraq is unneccessary and unproductive. It takes a grave lack of understanding of the terrorists' mindset and modus operandi to think that they will be intimidated or stopped by military force. This is an ideological war--a war of ideas and beliefs, and we've brought little more thank tanks and bombs to the party. I watched The Fog of War last night and it made clear all of the really distubring parallels between what is going on now and what American military intervention has looked like in the past. At the bottom of all of it are a few complicated questions that have no easy answers, but that appear to be the kinds of questions our leaders are not used to asking. How do the ends justify the means? There will be all sorts of pragmatists who tell you that the goal is what is important, and that the path to the goal is not. This is easy to philosophize and theorize about, but much more difficult to act on when thousands upon thousands of human lives are at stake. The use of the atomic bomb on Japan during WWII was an amazingly disproportionate act of force against civilians designed to keep American troops from dying on the ground. It worked, it won the war, and how could it not? But was that a reasonable way to do it? Is there not a sort of honor in war that says that the tactics you use to defeat your enemy should be somehow 'fair'? If we think about the appalling situation with Iraqi prison abuse, people get very upset about that because it seems inhumane, unfair, and unjust. It's not something we like to imagine people doing, even if they are doing it for a cause with which we agree. So it's not okay to sexually humiliate prisoners in order to get information that might lead to the capture of terrorists and killers, but there is no legal repercussion of annihilating hundreds of thousands of people with a single bomb in order to stop a war? Robert McNamara mentions in the film that if the Allies had lost the war, that he and others would have been tried as war criminals. Is it always the case that we look the other way during a war? Why is there this ambiguity? Where does it end? Another great point from McNamara came from his discussion with a former Vietnamese foreign minister who told him that the Vietnamese people were prepared to fight to the last surviving person to keep Americans out of their country. They would have rather died and been completely wiped off the face of the earth as a people than be ruled by what they saw as an American Imperialist power. This doesn't seem so terribly different than the attitude of radical Islamic terrorists or other people with violent, disparaging views of our form of democracy. Where do you stop? How do you stop hunting and killing when every new death, especially those of innocents and bystanders, breeds ten new extremists? The desired outcome of this war is the safety of the United States people and interests, but there just ins't a way to force the entire planet into agreement. We are already the most advanced military power on Earth, and yet terrorists are not intimidated in the least. They attack sporadically and sometimes successfully, and what logic dictates that killing some of them, more of them, or most all of them will stop this? You have to kill ALL of them, and then all of the people who might become them, and then pray that no one else gets angry about all that killing... it's an endless loop. I don't have the answers, and no one does. It's not easy to approach these subjects, and it's even harder for people whose decisions and thoughts about these things actually matter--the ones who actually lead to action and thus death. We're all armchair generals here, and it's easy to hold a sign and argue against killing--just as easy as it is to wave a flag and support a President no matter what he says. The hard thing, I think, is asking the right questions and spending the amount of time and brainpower thinking about them. There's no soul-searching needed to shout, but it takes a great deal of thinking to convince. {0} Comments Monday, May 17, 2004 4:56 PM | Matthew Jeanes Einstürzende Neubauten still have it. Of all the bands I obsessed over in my youth, Neubauten was the one I still had not seen live until this past Saturday. I was lucky enough to catch Skinny Puppy and Front 242 and Meat Beat Manifesto in their heyday. I caught Curve well after their prime, but still holding it down. I saw Pop Will Eat Itself just before they broke up and of course there was Ministry, Front Line Assembly, Consolidated, KMFDM, Godflesh, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, and so on and so on. But EN has been the elusive group that just honestly doesn't tour much over here, and never came close enough for me to catch them until now. I hope that when I'm 40, I'm half as cool as these guys. I know I wasn't half as cool as the 22 year old Blixa Bargeld when I was 22 so hoping to be half as cool as he is when I'm 40 is still a stretch. But honestly, there aren't many people left that are older than me that are still doing things I like. Most of what's grabbing me musically now is done by relative kids, or contemporaries, or people of a similar age who are just now making a name. But EN goes way, way back. From the time I first started learning about this new subculture called 'industrial.' There were the RESearch books, the indie magazines like B-Side and the connections to this wonderful world of absurdity and revolution in DaDa. That stuff and EN in particular hit like a ton of bricks when I was an impressionable teenager. Luckily, Neubauten has only aged for the better. Their new material is such a direct descendant of the old, but it's more refined, more mature, and more varied. There's a time for banging wantonly on a trash can with a metal pipe because that's the fury of a voice trying to be heard. But once the voice has been heard, then what? Einstürzende Neubauten seem to have the answer: you keep banging, but you stretch it out. You make the noise mean something, you counter-weight it with soft sounds, beautiful sounds, and careful composition. I remember being so enamoured with old EN songs whose lyrics would be a single word or set of syllables repeated over and over until they lost meaning. The directness of that idea was just right. Now, I'm equally in love with Blixa's esoteric poetry. He seems to be channelling the same basic source of truth that Bjork hits on occassion--absurd seeming non-sequiters that somehow seem absolutely like the most honest, true expressions you've ever heard. Combine that sense of wordcraft with ingenious and creative instrumentation and you have a live show that is really unparalleled. I know Nicolas said that the group seemed uninspired at a recent show in Germany, but they were anything but here. Blixa Bargeld is happily playing a new(ish) role onstage, that of the anarchistic elder statesman. He has an aire about him that is aloof and detached but he is at the same time very focused in what he's doing. I loved it. The deadpan humor between songs, the cocked head that looked dismissive of everything other than the moment the band was in--it was all perfect. Watching N.U. Unruh run around onstage like a mad scientist was awesome. He spent one song holding up a thin emergency blanket that wasn't directly mic'd so it was impossibly quiet, but the fact that he held it up over his head for the good 5-6 minutes of the song knowing that it was adding very little sonically to the otherwise boisterous mix--it was like a statement of dedication to expression that I found inspiring. All of it was. We need more things like that. {0} Comments Monday, May 10, 2004 10:53 AM | Matthew Jeanes With all of the recent travel, I've been noticing a few kind of strange things about the way people communicate when their voice is coming over a PA system. I've noticed these phenomena before, but I've never tried to spell out exactly what I think is going on until now. The first curiosity is the tendancy for people who repeat a phrase over a PA to use the same intonation pattern no matter who or where they are, or what they are saying. Consider this: "Electric cart needed at gate 12," will be said once with a rising tone on the last word. It will then be repeated "Electric cart needed at gate 12." with a lower tone used on the word 'twelve'. I guess you could surmize that this is done (unconsciously) to draw attention to the specific bit of information at the end of the sentence, in this case accentuating 'gate twelve'. But, the same pattern works when someone is paging a manager in a store, or announcing that the store is closing, or just about anything else that is said or repeated. I think this is just a learned behavior that serves no purpose really, but is just something that people do because they've heard other people do it and they unconsciously immitate. A similar phenomenon, although one that I actually find considerably more annoying is the tendancy of flight attendants to over-accentuate the helping verb in each sentence. There's REALLY no need for this, and yet, it has been a universal occurrance on the many flights I've been on recently. "Please remain seated until the pilot DOES turn off the fasten seatbelt light." Now, in that sentence, there's not even a need for the helping verb, it's just extraneous. You could easily say 'until the pilot turns off' but the 'does' creeps in there somehow. This happens an awful lot, and it's another thing that seems to be passed on from one speaker to another. It's not a tremendous abuse of the english language and I don't think these flight attendants should be strung up by their toenails and poked with a cattle prod, but it would be nice if there was a way to stop this from happening. You'll meet people sometimes who have what I am now dubbing 'flight attendant helping verb syndrome'; people who can't help but add helping verbs and accentuate them in speech when they are particularly unneccessary. Imagine if everything you DID read had extra helping verbs? Adding emphasis to the helping verb actually implies something too, in most cases. It gives the impression that the opposite of the action the verb is describing is specifically not the case. Maybe this is all a lot to fuss about, but please, can't we all DO try to get this right? {0} Comments

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