The Wily Filipino

Brian Eno on Propaganda.

Here's Brian Eno (yeah, that Brian Eno) in an essay in The Guardian called "Lessons in how to lie about Iraq":

How exactly did it come about that, in a world of Aids, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big a problem?

(This month, by the way, is the 30th anniversary of Eno's album Here Come The Warm Jets; read M. Ace's blog entry on "a Jackson Pollock painting rendered as a sculpture in motion." And in a couple of years it'll be Another Green World's turn!)

Thin-Skinned.

Sometimes "tyrannical dictators" speak the truth:

KCNA, North Korea's official news agency, said... that Rumsfeld's "outbursts ... can not be construed (other) than a desperate shrill cry of a psychopath on his death bed."

KCNA accused Rumsfeld and other "neo-conservatives"... of "wantonly harassing peace and security in different parts of the world and igniting wars."

"He is cursed and hated worldwide for this," KCNA said in North Korea's harshest personal attack on a U.S. official since it called Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton "human scum" in August for calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a "tyrannical dictator."

"Rumsfeld, whose political faith is to establish the U.S.-style world order by strength, is known to be a typical stupid man for professing 'neo-conservatism' censured and mocked at worldwide," the KCNA's official English translation said.

I certainly can't disagree. My favorite part, though, is the AP reporter's sentence the quotation above:

North Korea, whose media regularly churn out anti-American vituperations, is especially thin-skinned when outsiders attack its political leadership.

How about: "The United States, whose media regularly churn out anti-North Korean vituperations, is especially thin-skinned when outsiders attack its political leadership?" (Substitute "Iraqi," "Libyan," "Palestinian," "Chinese," "Afghani," "Cuban," etc. for "North Korean" as needed.)

Sad Dad Bad Had.

"Poor sad Dad. What a bad day Dad had" -- or something to that effect, from Dr. Seuss's Hop On Pop.

Or more precisely, a bad week: to add to my general state of anxiety, a pile of ungraded ethnographic description papers, unprepared assignments and quizzes, an unwritten speech, a looming deadline for a grant proposal that will never be funded, another impending deadline for a paper proposal for a conference I'm almost 99% sure I'm not attending, a bout with a cough and a cold, and having to tend to a sick child (Izzy obviously got sick too), my poor clunker of a car failed its smog test for the first time. Right after I already spent good money on a new muffler too. (The adventure isn't over: I still have to get it tested next week -- and I'm already accruing late fees on my registration renewal -- after getting a new catalytic converter and thermostat.) Most of my non-teaching days this week were then spent either sitting on a bus or waiting in a coffee shop.

On the bright side, my Califone (see below) arrived this week, and so did a little slew of records, including a 45 by the Dynasouls (or the Pinoy Beatles), with Tagalog versions of "Ticket to Ride" and "She Loves You." Rock!

Survivor.

Forget the snide comments -- sorry, Happy, but I had to use you as an example -- forget her ultra-privileged background, forget the kikayness, forget the fact that we don't have all the information yet. The salient fact, at least to me, is this: that Kris Aquino walked away from an abusive relationship.

Here's the transcript from the infamous interview with Korina Sanchez, as well as her own comments on her blog.

As she said in her interview:

Ako handa akong panagutan ang mga pangyayari. Ako handang tumayo, handa akong humarap, handa akong sabihin ang katotohanan kahit na mawala na sa akin ang lahat. You keep saying you are prepared to lose everything Joey, but you don’t have the balls to say the truth.

Books for Bush.

The other day I received, via the Flips list, a mass e-mail message from E.R. Escober, author of Not My Bowl of Rice, a book I still have yet to read. Included in the thank you note (which I'm posting here without permission) -- it was for a reading at the SF Public Library, which I didn't get to attend -- was this:

Special thanks to Pres. and Mrs. Bush who requestedfor a copy of the book (& sent mea nice,personalized thank you note for it) . Perhaps they requested copies of all exisiting Filipino/ Fil-Am books to acquaint themselve with our culture, etc for their forthcoming visit to the Philippines.

We-hell.

Mr. Bush, may I suggest, as first on your list, The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance, edited by Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Shalom? The title will put you off, I know, but it has short pieces in it -- perfect for bedtime reading just before you nod off to sleep. And perfect for people with short attention spans like you! (I'd bet, though, that you'll probably read Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines instead -- it's a lot more reassuring of America's "good motives" regarding its colonial empire.)

But there's always Raymond Bonner's Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy, or maybe James Hamilton-Paterson's America's Boy: A Century of Colonialism in the Philippines, just to bring you up to speed on the feller your dad praised for his "adherence to democratic principles."

And these are just books you can get pretty easily in the U.S. via Amazon.com -- no need to send your flunkies on a hunt for Filipino bookstores in the U.S. (though it's probably a lot easier than, say, finding WMDs in Iraq).

And if non-fiction isn't your thing -- it might be a little too heavy, and too close to, um, reality -- then maybe some poetry instead? Here's the last stanza from the late Alfrredo Navarro Salanga's "War, Like Fever," found in Luis Francia and Eric Gamalinda's Flippin': Filipinos on America:

So must you clinic the world
and make us patients of your peace,
a strange love that breeds sanitation
but without sanity, the last physic
gulped by the physician, the majesty
of his cure more fearful
   than the pox itself.

Anyone else have any recommendations for George Bush? (And make the readings simple, folks -- we're talking a C-average here!) (No offense to E.R. Escober, by the way.)

Call for Papers: This Magic Moment.

Too busy to write anything right now -- an entry on Friendster and Filipino class boundaries will have to be postponed -- so I thought I'd post this:

CALL FOR PAPERS: This Magic Moment: Capturing the Spirit and Impact of Music The 2004 Experience Music Project Pop Conference Seattle, Washington April 15 - 18, 2004

It might be a song, an album, or a performance, the flowering of a vision or the eruption of a scene. Music often seems to come to us in a kind of burst, leaving behind the sense of a mystery that needs deciphering. But what's the best approach? Musicians can be frustrated by attempts to categorize rather than delve into their work. Journalists often find that their deepest take on a subject comes long after their piece has been turned in. Academics grapple with how to bring issues of emotion, affect, and meaning into their analyses.

For the 2004 EMP Pop Conference, we invite papers and other kinds of presentations that closely examine specific musical moments, past and present, across any genre. The idea is to bring to the surface aspects of musical experience that often get subsumed in tidier accounts. All perspectives are welcome: political, literary, musicological, historical, sociological, aesthetic, identity-based, and beyond.

Participants are urged to treat the way they write about music as seriously as what they write about. This year's conference will serve as the basis of a future special issue of Popular Music devoted to questions of style and perspective in music writing. To that end, and beginning with the abstracts that are submitted, we'd like to see work (however scholarly, engaged, or experimental) whose sense of language rises to the challenge of the music under examination.

The Pop Conference, now entering its third year, is an annual event, hosted by Seattle's interactive music museum, Experience Music Project. This gathering connects an unusually broad range of academics, journalists, musicians, industry figures, and anyone else interested in ambitious music writing that crosses disciplinary walls. The 2002 conference inspired a book, "This is Pop," due out in 2004 on Harvard University Press. A second book, based around the 2003 and current conference, is under development. For more information, go to: http://www.emplive.com/visit/education/popConf.asp

This year's program committee includes: Gage Averill (NYU), David Brackett (McGill), Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney), Michelle Habell-Pallan (University of Washington), Margo Jefferson (New York Times), writer Greil Marcus, Ann Powers (EMP), Oliver Wang (UC Berkeley), Eric Weisbard (EMP), and writer Douglas Wolk. The conference is sponsored by the Seattle Partnership for American Popular Music: EMP, KEXP, and the University of Washington School of Music.

We welcome maverick suggestions, encourage performance ideas, and can accommodate nearly any form of technological presentation. Proposals should include a roughly 250 word abstract of the paper, a brief biography of the presenter, preferred affiliation/title, and complete contact info. Please send all proposals by December 15, 2003, to Eric Weisbard at EricW@emplive.com.

Denial.

The lies are coming fast and furious here, and why people aren't up in arms about it isn't clear. But perhaps more disturbing is that this administration isn't even bothering to lie anymore, or even pretend to stand by the integrity (or lack of it) of its previous statements.

Take, for instance, the transcript of an interview with Bush last September 17:

Q Mr. President, Dr. Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld both said yesterday that they have seen no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with September 11th. Yet, on Meet the Press, Sunday, the Vice President said Iraq was a geographic base for the terrorists and he also said, I don't know, or we don't know, when asked if there was any involvement. Your critics say that this is some effort -- deliberate effort to blur the line and confuse people. How would you answer that?

THE PRESIDENT: We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th.

Well, how would one answer that? Is it going to be about semantics now?

Dick Cheney denies it. Condoleeza Rice denies it. Donald Rumsfeld recently denied it too:

...Rumsfeld was asked about a poll that indicated nearly 70 percent of respondents believed the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved.

"I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that," Rumsfeld said.

He added: "We know he was giving $25,000 a family for anyone who would go out and kill innocent men, women and children," referring to suicide bombers targeting Israelis. "And we know of various other activities. But on that specific one, no, not to my knowledge."

(Well, we knew Rumsfeld had "no sense:" "...no one with any sense would want to go to war, war is a last resort, not a first resort," he told Jim Lehrer in September 2002.)

When Bush says: "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on" (this in his infamous USS Abraham Lincoln speech), are we not supposed to make that connection?

When Bush says, in his state of the nation address last January, that "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents and lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained," are we not supposed to make that connection?

When Bush says, in a press conference last March:

If the world fails to confront the threat posed by the Iraqi regime, refusing to use force, even as a last resort, free nations would assume immense and unacceptable risks. The attacks of September the 11th, 2001 showed what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction.

Are we not supposed to make that connection either?

And later on, during the interviews:

Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. September the 11th changed the strategic thinking, at least, as far as I was concerned, for how to protect our country. My job is to protect the American people. It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11th should say to the American people that we're now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.

Are we not supposed to make that connection?

And earlier, in excerpts from a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002:

Tonight I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace, and America's determination to lead the world in confronting that threat.

The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions -- its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror...

We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability -- even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.
Members of the Congress of both political parties, and members of the United Nations Security Council, agree that Saddam Hussein is a threat to peace and must disarm....

...we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.

...Some citizens wonder, after 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now? And there's a reason. We've experienced the horror of September the 11th.

...The attacks of September the 11th showed our country that vast oceans no longer protect us from danger. Before that tragic date, we had only hints of al Qaeda's plans and designs. Today in Iraq, we see a threat whose outlines are far more clearly defined, and whose consequences could be far more deadly. Saddam Hussein's actions have put us on notice, and there is no refuge from our responsibilities.

And we're not supposed to make that connection between Hussein and September 11 either?

Cheney did say -- ah, those poor, stupid American chumps -- that "it's not surprising that people make that connection." I wonder why. But Hussein is, of course, the real wily fox here, as Rumsfeld once said:

The truth is that Saddam Hussein has been about four times as clever as the United States, the U.N., and the Western world in managing public opinion. They're just masters at manipulating the press, and putting out disinformation.

How many more fucking lies is the public going to take? On the economy? (Bush: "Our first goal is clear: We must have an economy that grows fast enough to employ every man and woman who seeks a job.") On the weapons of mass destruction? (Rumsfeld: "We know they have weapons of mass destruction. We know they have active programs. There isn't any debate about it.")

The former general (and new Presidential contender) Wesley Clark was interviewed by NBC'S Meet The Press back in June, and says what many of us (or maybe too few) already know:

CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."

RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"

CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."

I love the way almost all of the speech transcripts end, so I'll end it in a blockquote too:

May God bless America. (Applause.)

The Policy of No Policy.

Here's a link to a rather silly article on the Philippines by Paul Krugman, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, (I always see him and Maureen Dowd and Bob Herbert as the foil to the three-headed hydra that is William Safire). Some of you may know that he was all over NPR and the New York Times Sunday Magazine last weekend promoting his book The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. (Krugman was part of a UNDP team sent to the Philippines in 1990. He says he "should write more about the experience someday," and he should. Maybe a little less condescendingly next time, but I liked his description of Jose Concepcion. And he also has a short piece on Bush's "crony capitalism".)

But the more important quotation is the one below, from a recent interview on Buzzflash:

BUZZFLASH: As a professor, if you were giving a lecture and you had to define the economic policy of the Bush administration, could you get your arms around it? How would you define it?

KRUGMAN: There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do.

Check out his book; check out his "blog". (Better yet, buy his book through Buzzflash; I'm about to put my order in myself.)

"Security Detainees."

Is there something wrong with this picture? Something... fishy, perhaps? Six people being held in Iraq are identifying themselves as Americans. And who are these people being held in Iraq?

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who is in charge of prisoners in Iraq, provided no details on the men, except to say they are among 4,400 "security detainees," a category distinct from prisoners of war or common criminals. She said the "security detainees" were suspected of carrying out or planning attacks on American or other troops in Iraq...

Her reference to the men, the first mention of possible Westerners among some 10,000 prisoners, was made during a tour of Abu Ghraib prison, where they are being held.

Wow -- almost 4500 "security detainees." 10,000 prisoners. Why, that's almost like San Quentin!

And who were these Americans?

"The truth is that the folks that we've scooped up have, on a number of occasions, multiple identifications from different countries," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said... "They're quite skilled at confusing people as to what their real nationality is or where they came from or what they're doing."

Well, we knew Rumsfeld was easily confused.

But wait -- "security detainees?"

Agence France-Presse quoted General Karpinski as saying the detainees "didn't fit into any category" and that Secretary Rumsfeld had ordered her to "categorize" them about a month ago. She said classifying the prisoners as security detainees gave the military a right to interview them that it did not have with prisoners of war...

"It's not that they don't have rights," General Karpinski said. "They have fewer rights" than prisoners of war.

Why, that's almost like Guantanamo Bay, except that there are about 4,000 more! And how many farmers, taxi drivers, and cobblers are at Abu Ghraib, particularly considering that law enforcement officials admit that "there was little certainty about the men's identities, nationalities or even what they were doing in Iraq?"

And what did Rumsfeld have to say about these "security detainees?" Here it is, short and sweet:

Mr. Rumsfeld said he could not explain what she meant by "security detainees."

And there's even more proof of Rumsfeld's confusion:

New intelligence assessments are warning that the United States' most formidable foe in Iraq in the months ahead may be the resentment of ordinary Iraqis increasingly hostile to the American military occupation, Defense Department officials said today.

That picture, shared with American military commanders in Iraq, is very different from the public view currently being presented by senior Bush administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who once again today listed only "dead-enders, foreign terrorists and criminal gangs" as opponents of the American occupation.

The defense officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were concerned about retribution for straying from the official line.

Whatever happened to the shiny, happy Iraqi children who were going to wave American flags in the streets?

How to Choke on Your Food.

Well, for comics fans, anyway. Eat your lunch -- doesn't matter what it is -- and then read this, from an article on Vertigo in the New York Times:

...shooting is scheduled to begin this fall on the Warner Brothers movie "Constantine," starring Keanu Reeves and based on Vertigo's "Hellblazer."

Why do I smell something as bad as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

The other piece of bad news was this statement:

Vertigo titles like "Sandman," "Preacher" and "Transmetropolitan" are doing better as backlist graphic novels than they ever did as monthlies, and that is the direction [Vertigo editor] Ms. [Karen] Berger wants to pursue.

This is bad news as well, because it seems rather counter-intuitive: the monthlies surely depend on constant readership to keep them afloat (unless your last name happens to be Ennis or Morrison), and if prospective buyers simply wait until the collected books come out (and they come out within a year or two, it seems), then Vertigo seems to be shooting themselves in the foot.

Speaking of shooting themselves in the foot, or choking on your food -- you folks didn't think I'd let this go without a cheap-labor conservative reference, did you? -- here's Condoleeza Rice in a "Nightline" interview:

"We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein ... had either direction or control of 9/11," Rice said when asked about the public perception of a link.

"What we have said is that this is someone who supported terrorists, helped to train them (and) was a threat in this region that we were not prepared to tolerate."

Defending Saddam's ouster, she said he represented a threat in "a region from which the 9/11 threat emerged."

The Reuters writer reminds us of certain facts:

As they campaigned for support to oust Saddam, Bush and aides accused the former Iraqi president of being linked to al Qaeda, often in ways that recalled the suicide hijackings that killed about 3,000 people.

"You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," Bush said in September 2002.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in congressional testimony, "There have been a number of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda over the years. We know Saddam has ordered acts of terror himself."

Actually, the real answer is "I don't know." Check out Dick Cheney's interview on "Meet The Press:"

MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection.

MR. RUSSERT: But is there a connection?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don’t know.

Two Pinay Poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Barbara Jane Reyes

Spread the word, folks!

Berkeley, CA - Celebrate Filipino American History Month with Two Pinay Poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Barbara Jane Reyes, who will read from their debut poetry collections, Miracle Fruit and Gravities of Center, on Saturday October 4, 2003 at 7:00 pm at Babilonia 1808 - 1808 5th Street in Berkeley, off University Avenue.

This event is co-sponsored by San Francisco State University's Asian American Studies Department, and will be moderated by Professor Benito Vergara.

ABOUT MIRACLE FRUIT:
As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India, and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine.

"When language, sensory experience, and imagination meet and mingle in an inventive and convincing way, we have the ingredients for those moments of grace that characterize important poems. Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Miracle Fruit is rich in such luscious moments. Every line is alive with the excitement of what can be known about the world, every poem bursting with an eagerness to share it."
--Gregory Orr, Judge, Second Annual Tupelo Press Poetry Competition

ABOUT GRAVITIES OF CENTER:
Contained in this collection are poems and prose pieces which exhibit Barbara's oftentimes eclectic style/sensibilities and willingness to experiment with form and language. With serious and playful poems very much rooted in San Francisco Bay Area urban and suburban cultures, settings, and vernaculars, a geographically faraway Philippines is never absent from this Pilipina American writer's consciousness. Consistent throughout Gravities of Center are themes of longing, desire, diaspora, postcoloniality, feminism, and coming of age.

About the poets:

Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago in 1974. She received her B.A. in English and received her M.F.A. in poetry and creative non-fiction from Ohio State University. She is the author of a chapbook, Fishbone, and was the Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin. She is currently an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York, Fredonia. She is the author of Miracle Fruit (Tupelo Press, 2003)

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila and raised in the SF bay Area suburb of Fremont. She received her BA in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where she served as editor-in-chief of Maganda Magazine, and is currently working on her MFA in poetry at SF State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003).

Saturday October 4, 2003 @ 7:00 pm

Babilonia 1808
1808 - 5th Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
510-549-1808
www.bwf.org

For more information, contact Mike Price 510-549-1808.

Babilonia 1808's mission includes promoting dialogue and cultural exchange between communities, while challenging audiences with thought-provoking contemporary art. Babilonia 1808 offers visitors the opportunity to experience diverse local, national, and international art in a casual, non-institutional environment.

Weekly Link Roundup.

Not much time for surfing or writing, especially after a near-computer death scare a couple of days ago. (My computer just wouldn't boot into Windows XP, not even in safe mode, and it took a whole sleepless night, faced with the prospect of losing all my data once again, before the computer repair folks managed to fix it.) Note to everyone: when XP automatically downloads one of those updates, make sure you restart like they ask you to.

There is a whole series of interesting posts and threads on euphony: on languagehat, Kieran Healy's Weblog, The Road to Surfdom, and Jonathan Delacour's blog.

Time-wasting fun with City Creator, via Lockergnome (haven't actually played with it yet, but it looks good).

My brother Happy has a post on the best movie I've seen this year so far: Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale. It's perhaps a little perverse for a college teacher to admit liking the film -- it can probably be read as a horrible teacher revenge fantasy -- but I ate it up anyway. I wanted to see it again the minute it was over. Part William Golding, part Survivor, the film can be read on different levels: an exploration of the inhumanity of corporate culture, or the militarism of high school education, or... just showing how teenagers would resolve their differences if they had scythes and machine guns. Or one can sit back and watch it as a high engrossing action film. Either way, Battle Royale is fantastic, riveting filmmaking, with great acting on the part of mostly unknowns, if plagued with some logical inconsistencies. And it's certainly not going to be released, or remade, in the U.S. anytime soon -- not in post-Columbine times. (Here's another review, on Midnight Eye.)

And there's a funny discussion -- sorry, you'd have to subscribe to read it -- at the Exotica mailing list on Leni Reifenstahl. Sipping tea with Edward Teller. In Hell. And listening to Barry Manilow on the PA system.

The eBay Big Boys.

Funny how naive I sometimes am when bidding on eBay.

The other day, for instance, I very innocently bid (a measly $17, though not to me) on a bumper sticker commemorating the Beatles' July 4, 1966 concert in the Philippines. I thought to myself, who would pay $17 for a scrap of paper?

It went for $290.

Clearly I was playing with the big boys here, and I simply had no idea. (Somehow I naively thought the Beatles memorabilia market would have been exhausted by now.) (I knew to stay away from the psych-folk LP auctions, but...)

I also bid -- around $18, I think -- on the Juan de la Cruz Band's Himig Natin LP, thinking (especially its re-release on Shadoks) that no one would be interested.

It went for $125.

Well, here are more: Beatles pomade, cellophane tape, mothballs... all circa 1966. (I think Ringo himself could use those mothballs.)

Gravities of Center.

I've just finished reading Barbara Jane Reyes's first collection of poetry, Gravities of Center, Reyes, an MFA student here at SF State, has an assured voice that suffuses her impressive debut.

At first glance, there seems to be an uneasy fit between the earlier, more political poems and the poems in the second half about the bass player with the long hair and black jacket -- no, wait: the poems are also about what she feels when he's with him. But what is common to all the poems is the vital, seething, unruly energy simmering underneath the surface. Passion manifests itself as either anger or desire (perhaps they are the same in any case), and this collection is rich with evidence of both kinds. (The lesson of the seeming disjunction between the poems, it seems to me, is that the more explicitly "political" ones, like "Arithmetic" and "Now Showing," for instance, are inherently personal as well, as part of an exploration of the poet's identity, and therefore inextricable from the nakedness of the later poems.)

(It's funny, too; the piece "Delicadeza" is almost -- hopefully she forgives the adjective -- ethnographic in its attention to detail when she describes the Filipino denizens of a casino and the awkward misunderstandings (and shared cultural assumptions) between strangers.)

"Anthropologic" is the poem that made the deepest impression on me: a collage-poem about anthropology and colonialism, inspired by Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy. There's sometimes a tendency, in less capable hands, for a poem like this to become predictably polemical, but that is not the case here. Cinematic, clipped, with truncated and erased captions, "Anthropologic" functions like photographs exhibited -- or butterflies pinned? -- on a wall. The way it looks on the printed page sometimes uncannily brings to mind the acquisitive, classificatory and dissecting impulses of the empire.

Like the skeletons embracing on the cover, Gravities of Center deals with the buried, the repressed, the hidden, the private: "margins always contain undeniable silent worlds," she writes in "Brown Man's Burden." A collection of Pinay postcolonial intimacies. Poems whispered in languorous darkness and secrets sealed with a hiss.

(I should mention too that it's not available on Amazon, alas, which is why I couldn't put it in my All-Consuming box to the right, but it's available through Arkipelago Books.)

The Cost of Eating Pringles.

Nothing really new about this article on teenage abstinence (thanks to my friend Jane for the link) -- weird, though, that it's in the "women" section of The Guardian -- but I did like this passage:

"You don't realise what you are doing until everything has changed," says 16-year-old John Wagster, peering earnestly through round glasses as he explains his decision to embrace chastity. "You are having oral sex, and you don't realise it's wrong. It's like eating Pringles. Once you start, you can't stop."

But that's not the best part, though. Here it is:

...the Bush administration which has allocated $117m (£74m) for abstinence-only education for teenagers this year, and hopes to raise it to $135m.

The Silver Ring Thing folks "received $700,000 (£443,000) from the US government, the largest such grant awarded." Participants -- said to be "gift-wrapped by God" (I wish I was making that phrase up, but I'm not) apparently take a pledge of abstinence and wear a $12 silver ring, which they flush down the toilet out of dishonor if they falter and accidentally have sex somewhere along the line. (Which they apparently do, and they're "one-third less likely than non-pledgers to use contraceptives.")

'On your wedding day you give the ring to your husband or wife and say, "I waited for you, let's get it on", [the SRT leader] tells the audience. Then he leads a short prayer, asking the teens to take Jesus into their lives.

Maybe they can wear these rings instead... (Absolutely not safe for work, but I know you're going to click on the link anyway.)

But I really shouldn't criticize the Bush government's faith-based policies (even though that $700,000 could have been used to maybe buy more chairs for my students, some of who have to sit on the damn floor) -- maybe the last thing I want is to be branded a traitor (thanks to my friend Jeff for the link):

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Monday opposition to the U.S. President was encouraging Washington's enemies and hindering his 'war against terrorism'.

...

He said if Washington's enemies believed Bush might waver or his opponents prevail, that could increase support for their activities.

"They take heart in that and that leads to more money going into these activities or that leads to more recruits or that leads to more encouragement or that leads to more staying power..."

Weekly Link Roundup.

Aargh. A coughing fit around midnight sent Izzy off on a couple of rounds of vomiting what little dinner she had. And she ended up literally coughing for almost another three hours. But I had some free time over the week to look around, so hopefully you folks didn't miss Jessica Hagedorn / Pico Iyer / Monique Truong / Chang-rae Lee / Ved Mehta / and many others writing about home. But I have more music links this time: a non-interview with John Zorn, Skip Heller on Mickey Spillane and John Zorn turning 50, Ron Silliman's stacks of CDs (he listens to Radiohead!), an old article written by Margaret Leng Tan remembering John Cage, and an analysis of Merzbow's sound waves. And there's lots of blogger action as well: there's blog plagiarism, Michelle Bautista will be showing up on some reality dating show (no, she's not the one on the date), Kieran Healy has some conference advice ("Attending an academic conference is like being a teenager again."), and La Filipina fucks some shit up. What else? Some married-couple humor. My favorite R. Crumb Weirdo cover, via MetaFilter. And I'm convinced that the world will now collapse into some imploding black hole if, say, the over-networked Sofia Coppola ever made a film out of a book by the over-networked Dave Eggers. It just might happen. (No, really: we in SF are tired of Dave and Vendela and Michael and Heidi too.)

The Weekend.

The other day I ran into my colleague Dawn Mabalon, who asked if I was going to any of the Pinoise Pop concerts this weekend. I said I wasn't; I didn't think Izzy would be able to handle punk.

This was because Madeline is taking off for a big "girls-only" weekend. Our friends Alice and Margaret are celebrating their birthdays by renting some cabin up at Bolinas. (Somehow I imagined (fantasized?) a dozen naked women downing margaritas and sitting in a jacuzzi, but Madeline says it won't be. Or so she says.)

In any case, I'm taking care of Izzy, and both of us are already eating too-salty crackers and sitting on the sofa watching our reflections in the (turned-off) television. She's derived much entertainment from dancing and watching her reflection on the screen; this is why I try to ply her with music (she really likes Elvises Presley and Costello right now) well before the TV gets turned on.

Here she is (probably in the middle of Elvis Presley's "Burning Love.")

But now she's requested a showing of Barney, of all things, which I detest only a little less than George Bush. I'd rather go out to the beach; the weather is gorgeous in the Outer Richmond for once. I hold firm and say no Barney, and offer her another cracker.

Five minutes later we're watching Barney. It dawns on me that it's not Barney I dislike; it's the creepy kids on it, with their infuriating overacting, that are the very essence of smarm.

Half an hour later we're at the beach and she has her big Elton John sunglasses on and she's hopping and skipping. It's beautiful out on Ocean Beach.

Then we're back home, and she's running up and down the kitchen crying "Hot milky! Hot milky!"

Everything now begins with "my:" my "clothie," my "milky," my rice, my dolly, my keys.

Me: "Izzy, they're Daddy's keys."
Izzy: "My keys!"

The baby books all say this is a natural phase.

Dinner didn't work out very well: she demanded her "hot milky" right before the food was served, which meant that she would be too full for the rice and leftover Costco roast chicken, which she ordinarily loves.

Me: "But even Julia Child serves Costco chicken to her guests!" (This is true, by the way; she admitted it in a New York Times interview.)
Izzy: "Don't like."

So a showing of the first half of Toy Story followed while I tried to eat as fast as I could; this was followed by more milk, a change into her sleeper, a collection of nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss's Hop On Pop, Lucy Cousins' Maisy Takes A Bath, Lucy Cousins' Maisy's Bedtime, a toothbrushing, and finally bed. (Thank goodness she wasn't yelling for her mommy, whom she'd temporarily forgotten.)

SoundRaider

Way back in the '90s, I downloaded a program called SoundRaider, one of the niftiest sound-related software programs I'd ever seen. What it did was to scan your hard disk for .wav files and play them, randomly stretching or compressing pitch and duration. The sound of your computer muttering to itself, as a review once put it, if I remember correctly.

I just happened to find via Google (a little scary, actually), a description of SoundRaider which I posted on the Coil mailing list back then:

Laser beams in outer space... frogs croaking... doors creaking... modems going haywire... the infernal buzzing of insects... rusting industrial machinery... the rush of ocean waves... howling dogs... aerosol cans going "pfft"... clacking typewriters... the moaning of subterranean monsters... drifting shortwave radio stations... power drills and electric saws... video game arcades... humming refrigerators... Just now I very briefly heard the sound of a strangled throat gasping for air (going "kh-kh-kh"), but now it's gone.

Alas, the (now freeware) version you can download from the one I used to own (and even paid for!) before I lost it in my hard drive crash. In the old version you could mute certain channels and let certain sounds loop, or specify the file directory (if for instance you only wanted to hear combinations of selected sounds, and not the entire computer). This new version -- unless it doesn't work with XP, which is what I have -- needs to run on top of all the windows, making it impossible to do other things and listen at the same time.

In any case, do check it out; I guarantee a nice dark ambient industrial experience (though the old version was way better than this one -- if anyone has it, maybe you can send it my way?).

[Update, 9/11: I did finally find an older version of SoundRaider, one with all the trimmings I mentioned -- but unfortunately it kept crashing on XP. It was, after all, made for Windows 95/98.]

Dream Couplet #4.

We are told grit suffuses all.
Endless upon endless, piled in quarters.

Girl on Girl Action!

Now that I have your attention -- and yes, I'm running a thumbnail-sized photo swiped from an AP article because I have no shame -- check out the following story, after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution apologizes to readers for running the same photo on their front page (via Silver Rights):

[Atlanta Journal-Constitution managing editor Hank] Klibanoff compared the Spears picture to graphic images from the war in Iraq.

"We ran images we otherwise might not have run. But that was war, and war was news. The photo we ran Friday was neither, and I wish I had limited its display to the inside of the Living section..."

But enough about celebrities and obscenity. (See also Heriberto Yepez's August 31 post: "She also helps Bush. Madonna’s makes front news. A stupid kiss becomes more important than killing people in Iraq.") (I suppose I should be thankful that the AJC apparently ran photos from the war on Iraq -- we didn't need a war sanitized for our protection.)

On another related note, Brooke Biggs asks:

I have a nagging question: You remember how all the right-wing punditocracy was whinging about celebrities speaking out on political issues, and how being a movie or music star didn't make anyone an expert on world affairs, or their opinions worth more than anyone else's? You remember, all of the foaming about the Dixie Chicks and Janeane Garofalo and Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon?

Aren't all of those people among those championing the campaign of The Terminator for Governor? Playing their Clint Black "I-raq and Roll" and wearing their "Toby Keith for President" T-shirts?

And I'll end with another celebrity apparently on the side of the angels (though he really should move back if he wants to make more of a difference):

"America is dumb, it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive," he said.

...

"I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots," he [said].

eBay Advice.

All right, folks: which one should I bid on? The Fisher-Prices (here and here) or the Califone (here, here and here)?

All I want is a portable record player in my room to play some old vinyl -- the records aren't rare so I don't particularly care if the grooves are worn out somewhere down the line. It has to be portable because I have no space for speakers and an amp in my room, and there's no space for a proper turntable outside where the amp is. (The Califone is obviously the more practical one, but the Fisher-Price has the coolness factor.)

Happy Labor Day.

Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty
And give to all a happier lot.
Each at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.

      - Eugene Pottier, 1871

(But the beginning of the French original is probably more famous:

Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim.)