And they saw that it was hideously flawed: The Day God Died (a very short story with dissolves and flash-forwards)

In the beginning, there were six-packs and microwaveable meals, and they were good, or at least better than nothing at all, so quit yer bitchin'. Nobody ever got hurt--muchly--and all mimsy were the Borogroves, not even a mouse. There was something I was going to write, about some "City on a Hill," but they say the place has fallen into disrepair...you really don't want to go there, trust me on this one (worse than Detroit).

And the Lord spake far too often when there were no people around to hear it, then silence for thousands of years when there were and spake again saying, "Let there be light...oh shit. Did I pay the electric bill for last month? Oh boy. There I go again!" Yet somehow, there was light, and it too was good for a time until the bill collectors came. Six thousand years passed, somehow missing the dinosaurs and several ice ages by a mile, and then it was time to go to bed again, day-in, day-out, I tell ya'...

And they found that God's all about non-sequiturs, so he must be a Libertarian: One day in the 21st century (because you can do flash-forwards and even dissolves in allegory), a corporate executive belatedly died of a heart attack in his very posh home office in upper state New York. Like most CEOs, he was a criminal asshole and nobody cared when his time came, but you have to put these people somewhere after they're six feet under, so he made his way to the afterlife. No, the streets aren't paved in gold there either, so quit asking! "What idiot would believe such bullshit?" shrugged St. Peter. No one knew.

"I'm here to win!" said the CEO to the beleaguered bureaucrat manning the Gates of Heaven. Peter grinned.

"It appears that you have lost, schlub, but I got an idea a week ago I want to try out, so come with me." He took the CEO by the hand like fathers do with their drooling children at Wal-Mart and they ambled down the crumbling halls of a crappy Ministry in a dank, smelly corner of the afterlife. The stink of piss was everywhere, and the walls of Heaven were covered with obscene graffiti. Worst-of-all, someone had written "J.D. Salinger," which confused the executive since he'd never read a book after high school, or even that much during it.

"What's that?" said the CEO as they were looking at a hole in reality into a flat plane below. Tiny dots appeared to be moving on the surface, and it reminded the executive of his many flights over Ohio--the sprawl, with capillaries and arteries of commerce spreading out like a bubbling cancer, eating-away at the surface of the plan.

"That's limbo, also known as suburbs. No actual life takes place there."St. Peter retched while the suited Golem looked down at the scene below wishing he had a piece of the action.

"Right," said the CEO with that absolute certainty all the ladies love. They kept on further down the labyrinth of halls, endless halls, all growing darker and more disintegrated as they went. At times the walls seemed to exist merely as rapidly vibrating vapor and the CEO was able to stick his arm through them. "Nifty," he said, and shrugged.

"Keep talking kid, keep talking," said his divine escort laughing softly as old men often do.

Finally, they reached an enormous set of double-doors, bronzed and festoomed with lavishes of spirals, eyes, and flora. At the heart of the door was the design of a man who was in the center of a circle, his arms and legs endtended-out in the shape of a rightside-up Pentagram. All was silent and even the pair themselves were completely immobile. There is no movement in the presence of the divine, no action...but suddenly, there was. A deep moan pervaded the hallway and seemed to emanate from everywhere, then abruptly faded away as a sickly gurgle.

"What's that? the executive asked nervously.

"That was the death of God," St. Peter said, laughing and nodding wisely.

"What killed God?" he asked. St. Peter looked at the executive sadly.

" 'What'? You mean 'who.' Why, you did. Your very existence accomplished it."

"That doesn't make any sense to me. What do you mean? I've done everything right in life, been successful, did what I had to do to get ahead, and..."

"All fine and well, but did you ever consider the beauty of a Beethoven symphony, or the divinity in children laughing and playing in peace? Did you ever see the worth in all human beings, that every life is sacred in the end? Have you ever pondered in your life why mankind yearns for more, the loneliness, the angst that created the great works of art? Did you ever try to control your animal-impulses and be the better man? Did you ever try to improve yourself? Have you ever taken a stand in your life for what was the right thing to do for others?"

"Nope, none of those--hey, are you communist or something.?"

"Yes, I thought not, and that's why you were brought here. You see, you're lack, the temporal evidence that God created something imperfect, and therefore, was imperfect himself. Your mere proximity was enough to finish the job of an already dying deity that was in the denial stage of the grieving process. I can sleep the sleep of ages now, but first..."

Someone started hacking their way through the double-doors. With an abrupt kick, a man with wild, greasy hair and a thick-mustache crashed through. He was wearing a beautiful red robe studded with Hermetic symbols on a gold-red lame background, clutching a staff, wearing jack-boots. His eyes were both of the darkest night and the brightest day.

"Who's that? said the executive.

"That's Nietzsche, here to fix some shoddy craftsmanship."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Nothing, you are lack, you never existed."

Nietzsche spake, "The last man has come...and where's the nearest bar anyway?"

"Can I finally sleep?" said St. Peter.

"Soon, but there's a universe to fix! We're off!"

As well all know, such an allegory is preposterous, impossible. Nothing so absurd has ever been contended by any religion at any time in human history, except at lunchtime and before bed.

The Bug-London Zoo (2008) album review

Kevin Martin almost never fails to surprise, and this new-installment of "The Bug" project featuring several Jamaican and UK dancehall and dub poetry artists is just another example of his prowess at creating something new and astonishing musically.

The differences between his first "Tapping the Conversation" (1997, with DJ Vadim), 2003's "Pressure," various EPs and 2005's "Killing Sound" compilation of hardcore electronic reggae, are vast here. The reason? A bigger budget, meaning Martin had more time to refine and actually be in the same room with the vocalists rather than through tape/disc-trading and internet transmissions, then pasting it all together at the end. Face-to-face collaborations tend to work best.

"London Zoo" edges more towards a dub sound without as much of the extreme hardness of earlier "Bug" releases, and vocals take more of a center stage role. Also different is how melodic and more expressive the vocals by the singer/MCs are, which makes for a very lively sound that must be heard to be appreciated. Still, to many this is going to sound very hard-edged and extreme. For the initiated, it's a new direction with a lot of dub layering and subtlety that could very well snag more mainstream reggae and dub fans.

"Murder We," already very popular in underground listening-circles as a single has vocalist Ricky Ranking very close to singing a mix of reggae and American R&B. While this isn't necessarily new in other contexts, it is here in a decidedly electronic environment. Ranking's vocal on the superb "Judgment" has an energy and a power that could quiet any remaining doubters and skeptics. But it's Warrior Queen who steals the show here with cuts like "Insane," and "Poison Dart," both of which can be marked as some of the more subversive cuts on the album for all the right reasons. When she raps, "What's wrong with the world? ...Has the world gone mad?," and when Ricky Ranking sings "...People killing themselves over [it]," they're both spot-on about the present state of things internationally.

The music production here is much warmer and inviting than on previous releases which could open things up more for this project of extreme electronics melded with the organic singing of authentic Jamaican and British dub and reggae vocal talent. Holding-up the UK side is the return of dub poet Roger Robinson whose wordplay is a real treasure to behold. His voice and delivery have a very powerful emotional side to them, existing comfortably within the musical environments Martin creates. Robinson's words and delivery are transcendent as always.

You have to admit, it's a good time for dubstep and hardcore dub and dancehall fans these days. These could be the outlines of the next big thing, the new punk, the new psychedelia. Get it before the final crash comes, it's good end-times (for Western capitalism anyway) music. Now, let's get Lee Perry on some sides before Babylon falls!

Thank you God: Hurricane Gustav underscores Republican inaction since Katrina

The Gulf Coast--The Industrial Canal's levee is overtopping again. Once again, we're seeing damages in the billions. Nearly 2 million people living in and around New Orleans and the neighboring parishes have fled. There appears to be no substantial government reaction. John McCain and the Republican National Committee have suspended nearly all activities at their convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. It seems that God has retained its sense of humor.

Almost never failing to say the wrong thing at the right time, candidate McCain stuck his foot in his mouth stating, "We must take off our Republican hat[s], and put on our American hat[s]." Or something like that, since the media doesn't appear to agree on the exact wording.

Well, right: "We can be heroes, just for one day," stated David Bowie so eloquently. And that's about as far as it's ever going to go. McCain and the GOP lack such eloquence, which comes from being on the wrong side of history. After all, besides being the un-American party, the GOP represents what's inhuman about humanity. The greed, the corruption, the venality, the vanity, the ignorance--and of course--temerity.

Three-years-ago, John McCain was eating cake with President George W. Bush while tens-of-thousands of Americans were left stranded in New Orleans, it's environs, and much of the rest of the Gulf Coast hit by hurricane Katrina. Very little has changed, and one can imagine the sighs of relief that were exhaled when the Bush canceled his speech before the Republican convention to cover his ass.

What's bizarre is that he went to Texas to do it, but he likes it there. We like it when he goes there, just not when he comes back. Americans are waiting with bated breath for him to never return from there to Washington D.C. ever again. God doesn't like the Democrats anymore than the Republicans, incidentally--he just hates Republicans more.

And now we're hearing that Senator McCain is working to "lead a humanitarian effort" to help down in the Gulf. That's great, but it's not really noble when you contributed to the incompetence, neglect, and corruption that created the mess that still exists down in New Orleans and the neighboring parishes 3 years and 3 days to the day of Katrina's landfall and the overtopping and breaching of the levee system there. That's a failure of government shared by both parties, but the majority of the responsibility resides with the antisocial GOP.

The GOP tends to play their hand too often (they suck at poker): now they're harping over a joke that a former DNC Chairman (Don Fowler, who was Chairman one year, from 1995-1996) made on an air-flight, seizing on it in their pathetic desperation to avoid any-and-all responsibility for their actions. The majority of Americans are used to this, and it's become tiresome. Fowler's comments aren't significantly different from that of religious lunatic James Dobson's bait-and-switch for the GOP when he commanded his zombie followers to pray for rain at the Democratic convention in Denver so that Obama couldn't give his speech--except that Fowler was kidding. Those "oogah-boogah" folks would be funny if they had no effect on the rest of us.

The writing's on the wall: if the business community keeps getting its way (greased by dirty politicians in both parties, but even worse with the GOP), then nature's going to strike-back and correct things. Nobody on earth can change this fact. It really is a very religious and spiritual-themed moment, isn't it? Nature has struck-back once again at a ridiculous economic order that overdeveloped in the region surrounding New Orleans, cutting-away precious marshland barriers that prevented such flooding for countless centuries, long before Europeans ever settled here in North America. That's not just stupidity, it's lower than animal behavior, and headed for the dustbin of history. Thank God for that.

The GOP Convention: Hurricane Gustav is coming! Hurricane Gustav is coming! Hurricane Gustav is coming!

Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota--God, this is my own little humble prayer (and curse) on the Republican Party, perhaps the most violent, exploitative, criminal enterprise the world has ever known: may NOT ONE human being die in New Orleans or along the Gulf Coast, but make it clear that the Bush administration has done NOTHING to properly repair things in New Orleans, because that's the fact.

Make the Republican obstructionism of aid to the Gulf Coast loud-and-clear while Vice President George W. Bush and President Dick Cheney are attempting speech during the convention. Make-it-plain that Karl Rove is not a "genius," but a catastrophe with lots of money behind him, expediting chaos for America in a way only a monkey could manage.

And let this--God--wreck the GOP, let it bring-about their demise as a criminal party. And God, splinter the Democratic Party after that, because they're hardly any better. German soldiers of during WWI and WWII wore "Gott mitt uns" on their belt-buckles, just as the GOP claims that you are on their side. This is doubtful.

Now we're hearing that John McCain is altering the program at the convention in-response to the hurricane that is bearing-down on New Orleans once again, just three-years from the time that a GOP-led government failed us all. And they have kept doing so ever since with all the other disasters that have happened since then. And now, we're hearing that Vice President Bush isn't going to speak at the GOP's convention and is heading down to the Gulf--that must be a relief!

The GOP is right: government doesn't work...when they're in office.

Kevin Martin's "The Bug" Drags Reggae into the 21st Century, Kicking and Screaming!

Who is "The Bug"? Who is this Kevin Martin? To say that Kevin Martin is a remarkable UK musician and producer who has worn many hats would be an understatement. Beginning with his Noise-Jazz combo, "God" in the late 80s, early 1990s, he cut an impressive musical-swath, even enjoying an LP produced by the legendary John Zorn. Martin has often been a favorite of Britain's edgy music periodical The Wire, a daring publication without any North American analog.

Going from God to ICE--a dub-themed project with former members of Head of David and Terminal Cheesecake--Martin kept very close to the roots of reggae, ragga, soca, dancehall, but with the addition of elements of the hard rock, techno and industrial genres.

Eventually, ICE and the related Techno Animal projects with Justin K. Broadrick (Napalm Death, Godflesh, Jesu) went in the direction of a very controversial and iconoclastic hip-hop. But all-along, there were those interesting elements of Caribbean music, especially in the decidedly psychedelic mixing usually associated with dub-reggae. Musical hybrids are one of those last routes towards innovation and the new, and it's frequently been the road to poverty. But tastes have changed dramatically in the last few years, and so have the fortunes of people like Martin, Broadrick, and even the "isolationist" Mick Harris. Dub is finally having its day.

Martin wasn't alone in his dub obsession during the 1990s, and he went as far as to compile two volumes of contemporary dub-mixing for Virgin Records under the moniker of "Macro Dub Infection," which included mixes by Tricky, Broadrick, Prince Paul, and Mick Harris of Scorn. Dub and dancehall are musical genres that never truly die, and this can be seen in the growing "dubstep" scene based in London, the worthy successor to drum-n'-bass (minimalist funk beats played at 45 RPM only hold the attention for so long).
With the demise of Techno Animal, Martin resurrected a little side-project called "The Bug," which began with a 1997 Wordsound LP with DJ Vadim titled "Tapping the Conversation," an ostensible replacement-score for Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film "The Conversation," a meditation on surveillance culture. Unlike the recent releases, this was an ominous instrumental work of looming, monolithic and apocalyptic hip-hop. In 2003, Martin released "," an incredible collection of what can only be called a radical reworking of dub, dancehall, ragga & soca, melded with extremely dramatic and intense techno-stylings and genuine Jamaican and UK MCs.
Since that second Bug LP, Kevin Martin has been releasing an almost constant stream of singles (and compilations of them) with Jamaican and UK reggae/dancehall/dubstep MCs like Warrior Queen, Mexican, Ras B, Daddy Freddy, Roger Robinson, Cutty Ranks, and even the extraordinary Toastie Taylor of UK hip-hop group New Flesh. It just gets better-and-better with every release, and it's sure to scare the neighbors (always worthwhile), if not your parents (and animals within earshot).
The sound? Imagine listening to reggae in a free-fire zone, that should make sense. The only real analogy I can make with "The Bug" and his collaborators is that this is the kind of decadent, apocalyptic music you'd expect to hear in a bar scene from something like Blade Runner (yup, like Techno Animal's "Re-entry"). It's a kind of future music that can only be heard to be believed, but you can almost hear within it those sea shanties and old pirate songs that surely kicked-off Jamaican and Caribbean musics.

On June 30th, Ninja Tune releases the new LP, "London Zoo" in the UK, and it's expected in North America either simultaneously or shortly afterwards (Ninja Tune is a Canadian-based label founded by remixers Coldcut). It ain't exactly a dub purist's dream, but it'll do in a pinch. For that, check Mick Harris's Scorn. This would have made great music for the barricades in 1968. Check the singles of The Bug, there are several already available online, and they kill. Grace Jones has given a thumbs-up on the Bug. A collaboration is in order.

Track-list:

01 Angry

02 Murder We

03 Skeng

04 Too Much Pain

05 Insane

06 Jah War

07 Fuckaz

08 You & Me

09 Freak Freak

10 Warning

11 Poison Dart

12 Judgement

06.28.2008 Postscript: The American release on CD, MP-3 (which is a degraded and compressed form of audio), and WAXXX.

Pasolini's Teorema (1968) review

I cannot get this man out of my system, our era's ephemeral Socrates. Pier Paolo Pasolini haunts the modern mind, reminding us of the terminal crisis (ironically brought on by the human desire for freedom), in this, our common era of human society. The Italy of his lifetime passed from a preindustrial to a modern state in less than one generation and it was a shock to the WWII generation of Italians who had previously been very provincial, isolated, and basically an agrarian nation of peasants.

This would be like taking American history from 1877-1920, when we became an industrialized nation, and cramming it into roughly 30 years. The effects on the culture could only be devastating and genocidal, as Pasolini astutely described the Americanization of the Italian peninsula. Other nations fared far worse under the effects of modernization: We know the results in Russia under Stalin with the tens-of-millions dead. But the damage to Italy during the "economic miracle" of the 1950s, and passing into the 1970s, was almost unique: traditional Italian culture was slipping-away, and changing into an empty, bourgeois consumerism. This mindless industrialized technological consumerism now spans the globe. Pasolini saw the writing on the wall: the bourgeois revolutions were culminating in the destruction of the natural environment and human civilization.

Like many authors, artists, and intellectuals of (t)his era, he was doing what most artists do, namely questioning the social order around him. Like Philip K. Dick and Werner Herzog, Pasolini was concerned that this reality we are now surrounded by would strip people of their humanity, their symbols, and of any authentic qualities and spirit, and that we cannot continue along such a path, that the end was near if we did. We would lose our myths and we would lose our souls. Today, the damage is pretty obvious with movies that say nothing, music that makes the listener feel nothing, television that only seems to lie to us more than ever, devouring our creativity and our souls...a runaway consumerism that is literally metabolizing nature and a scientific and economic order that continually tells us that there is no meaning to anything, no truth.

Global warming and an impending ecological catastrophe are the realities that these artists and intellectuals warned us all of during the Cold War, and some still are. Pasolini didn't wax-nostalgic for some sentimentalized remote past, but he saw things as getting worse and that an apocalyptic calamity was waiting at the end of it all. In 2007, this doesn't seem so far-fetched, but one should realize that the alarms were already being sounded over 40-years-ago. So little has changed. Into the bloody fray of 1968 politics and culture came Pasolini's "Teorema," or "theorem." There really isn't another film like it in any director's canon, yet he would top it with Salo at the end of his short life. The film begins with what appears to be a newsreel story taking place at the gates of a factory called "Paolo." Is it a strike? Why are all the workers there, milling-about? The journalist (probably Pasolini, off-camera) with the film crew asks them what's going on, and we find that the owner of the factory has given it to the workers, lock-stock-and-barrel. You'll never see a scene like this in any American movie. But most slaves want to remain slaves.

Pasolini goes on by taking a swipe at the Italian Communist Party (PCI), by having a worker dismissing the miracle as "part of a trend." (!) It's the end of the story, and a lesson on how the Left--and most all of modern humanity--had lost contact with the divine and the ability to recognize it in life and within each other. Much to his credit, Pasolini scandalized all. Barth David Schwarz's biography on Pier Paolo Pasolini "Pasolini Requiem" (1992) illuminates the film's premise:

People expected Pasolini to deliver a straightforward if scathing attack on the bourgeoisie and its lack of religion. His apparently simple premise, the "theorem" of the film's title, was that when one family was faced with a power that constituted real liberation (by necessity sexual) and their values were revealed as bankrupt, its members would spin into "madness."
(Schwarz, pg. 519. Pantheon, 1992)

And so, the story "begins" where it began, the home of the industrialist bourgeois--a Milanese "borghesa"--and his family, in this antiseptic villa that seems almost empty (of belief? of values?). As in life, the bourgeois characters reside in their own social space, alone, living in virtual solitude without meaning. There is the daughter, the wife, the son, and the devout peasant maid who dream of some kind of a release from their life, some transcendence. Be careful what you wish for.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a kind of salvation announces its coming. A herald in the form of young Italian boy announces his arrival in a note to the maid. In time, the "stranger" (played by a 28-year-old Terence Stamp) appears, and quite abruptly without any explanation. Pasolini had this to say about the stranger in his film:

Originally, I had intended this visitor to be a fertility god, the typical god of preindustrial religion, the sun-god, the Biblical-god, God the Father. Naturally, when confronted with things as they were, I had to abandon my original idea and so I made Terence Stamp into a generically ultraterrestrial and metaphysical apparition: he could be the Devil, or a mixture of God and the Devil. The important thing is that he is something authentic and unstoppable. (ibid, pg. 521)

Inautheticity withers in the presence of truth. Like all the great tragedies of Greece and Rome, the family passively accepts his presence as a symbol of their fate. The stranger rarely speaks, but he brings every family member love and a direct contact with the divine through sex. He fills the void in their lives of isolation and emptiness. Again: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

The maid (Laura Betti) is first: he rescues her from a suicide-attempt, and makes tender love to her. Shortly afterward, she leaves the villa and the bourgeois reality itself to return to her village. She begins a fast of contrition and eventually seems headed towards some kind of beatification or sainthood, even levitating at one point towards the latter-half of the film. Her fate is the best one, although that of the son points to the interior life of artists and the authentic everywhere, and he is the next to be seduced by the stranger. Then comes the daughter Odette (played by Godard's wife at the time), who appears in some respects to be the most sexually-fulfilled. The mother and father, finally, end the seduction. For a time, they all seem to have lost that feeling of "loneliness" and incompleteness that comes with modern life...and then the stranger leaves, just as abruptly as he came, a hallmark of the divine. With his absence comes the fall, and a reminder that the void never left, a stunning metaphor for the limits of sexual-release and escapism. No, the void in life never leaves, and is made all-the-more lonely after coitus.

The once sexually repressed mother (the sultry Silvana Mangano) becomes a nymphomaniac, and begins to seduce young men in the nearby city, repeatedly trying to recreate her experience with the stranger, but to no avail. The son becomes totally immersed in creativity and contemplation, showing the dissatisfaction and longings of the artist that can never truly be achieved. Like Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave," he can never touch the true forms (the stranger) ever again. His fate is preferable to the rest of the family since he appears to at least have an outlet for his obsession. The daughter Odette lapses into a comatose state that seems permanent. After an illness that's healed by the stranger, the father becomes a sexual deviant who exposes himself at a train station by film's end. Throughout the movie, we see images of a desolate, gray landscape shot at Mt. Etna. It's meant to reflect the inner-loneliness of the characters and ourselves. This dead landscape is the modern worl, the empty space in all of our lives, and what's waiting at the end of this social order. By the end of the film the father is seen running naked through this volcanic wasteland, finally letting-out an almost inhuman scream of existential despair. From this, you can tell that Pasolini actually felt sorry for most of the bourgeoisie, something that I don't share with him.

Teorema is available through Koch/Lorber video on DVD, and is perhaps one of the greatest films of the entire 1960s. It won a special award from the International Catholic Film Office at the Venice film festival that year, but elements within the Vatican had it withdrawn. The students in the Paris, Rome, and Berlin of 1968 adored the movie, yet Pasolini tended to heap scorn on many of them, calling them "bourgeois," and that the New Left's fight with the establishment in France and Italy was a "battle between the haves and the haves...an internecine struggle." Once again, he was correct. One can see and hear Salo (1975) coming in this film, a work that probably got Pasolin killed before his time in a field at Ostia, a place where human sacrifices were once held. Salo is a dark chocolate, while Teorema is a truffle, the appetizer before the meal.

Revised, 11.27.2009