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schadenfreude
I try not to take undue pleasure in the misfortune of others, but there's something gratifying about learning (via Yale & Columbia) that "virginity pledges" do not reduce STD risk.
Although young adults who take virginity pledges do start having sex later and marry earlier, they're also less likely to use condoms and less likely to seek STD-related health care, "possibly because of increased stigmatization or misperception of infection risk among pledgers."
This strikes me as exactly the sort of results you'd expect when you adopt a panicked, head-in-the-sand attitude towards human sexuality (which increasingly seems to be becoming our national policy).
Via SciScoop, an interesting science blog. |
Friday, March 25, 2005
10:52 AM
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spring "break"
Well, the cold hasn't killed me, although I've had symptoms in one form or another for over fifteen days now.
Despite the cough and fatigue, I've been keeping busy—partially on school stuff (I am snowed under by student papers, as I am every March) but partially on fun projects like finishing up the new Number None album. It's to be entitled Urmerica and we should be sending it off to be pressed sometime around April 1st. We've been working this week on mastering the finished tracks and I'm also working on an intensely complicated Photoshop collage for the cover.
It's a lot of fun to be concentrating on some visual collage-work again, and I hope to do more after the album art is finished. I've been thinking a lot lately about ways that my visual collage-work could be wedded to my linguistic collage-work (of the sort that I wrote about in the previous post). There are all sorts of useful pointers in this direction, not least Geof Huth's fine weblogs dbqp and Visual Poetry Clippings. Offline, I'm reading Figuring the Word, an excellent collection of essays by visual poet and letterpress artist Johanna Drucker, and this Mysticism and Language book I blogged earlier, which has an incredible amount of material on the conception of alphabets as spiritual technologies, not merely because they can express spiritual thoughts, but because the letterforms are holy unto themselves. Labels: personal |
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
9:14 AM
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surfacing
Finally beginning to drag myself out of the other side of a seven-day cold. If I owe you mail, you should expect it soon.
Despite my illness, I've managed, in the past week, to put together a manuscript for the Diagram Chapbook Contest. The chapbook, Devotion Manual, consists of 32 poems, written in states of hypnopompic consciousness. Drop me a line if you want to see a copy.
I haven't written any hypnopompic poems since the New Year turned because I've gone back to spending that time journaling dreams. Which means that my primary poetry project at the moment is the one where I make rapidfire text-assemblages out of Internet language found through rampant Google abuse. Here's one I did today: "Master / Submaster Walkthrough." Enjoy— |
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
8:26 PM
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earth | living in the gleam of an unsheathed sword
Recently, there's been an increasing number of acts that have discovered the fruitful strategy of cross-pollinating the awesome heaviness of amplified electric guitar with the transcendent stasis of drone minimalism. Ambient metal, art metal, crawl metal, drone metal, doom metal, stoner metal—the niche may not have a name that everyone can agree on yet, but already specific albums have been nominated for canonization: my own personal short-list would include Sleep's Dopesmoker, Skullflower's Exquisite Fucking Boredom, and all of the excellent Sunn O))) records. But no attempt to list the records that define this genre would be complete without reference to the back catalog of Earth.
Their second album in particular, Earth 2, is one that people look back on as the album that "did it first" when it comes to the creation of repetitive riffscapes of black-hole gravity. With a release date of 1993, this album has a substantial head-start on most of its imitators, and it's lost none of its glory or power in the intervening decade.
Over its lifespan, Earth's existed in various incarnations (even Kurt Cobain served as an early member), but guitarist Dylan Carlson is the common denominator. Carlson's still with us, but exactly how much interest he still has in the Earth project is difficult to assess—there hasn't been a "proper" Earth studio album since 1996's Pentastar : In the Style of Demons (although rumors have Southern Lord releasing one at some point in the future). Living In the Gleam of an Unsheathed Sword is new material, although inspection of the liner notes reveals that one of these pieces ("Dissolution III") is a piece recorded for WNYU radio in September of 2002, and the other piece is a live set, recorded on the very same date as the radio session.
As far as a day's worth of work goes, Living is impressive—the live set (the album's title track) gives us our money's worth of tidally-ebbing-and-flowing guitar roar (with Adrienne Davies backing on drums). This piece clocks in at nearly an hour, which I think gives it the record for the longest track in the band's official discography (no mean feat), and it sticks close enough to the standard Earth playbook that most fans will be satisfied. Those coming to Living in the hopes of gaining a hint of "what's next" for Earth, some sign that Carlson has a game-plan for the future, may be disappointed, however: the album doesn't break much new ground, and it consequently feels like something of a placeholder, a disc put out not to make a statement, but rather to meet the demand for new material.
Once upon a time, each Earth release was notably distinct from the one that went before, a process which seems to have culminated in Pentastar's provocative failure. Since then, Earth has released nothing but a handful of live albums and demos, which have impressive heft and gravity but which seem to have chosen formula over innovation. Enough of this and it begins to seem like Earth has become an Earth tribute band. That can be a great place to start—look at Sunn O))), who began there and then went on to do awesome things—but it would be an ignoble way to end.
On Troubleman's MegaBlade imprint.
This review cross-posted to ThaumaturgyLabels: music_commentary |
Monday, March 07, 2005
10:50 AM
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geek crochet
After I linked to the Cabinet article about crocheted psuedospheres, someone was kind enough to make me not one but two, which are now hanging over my bed.
It is with this in mind that I now link to the crocheted Lorenz manifold.
The pattern, published in Mathematics Intelligencer, calls for 25,111 stitches, but on the upside the designers have offered a bottle of champagne to anyone else who successfully completes it.
Via Caterina. |
Friday, March 04, 2005
7:06 PM
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the revolution® : quotations from revolution party chairman r. u. sirius
If I were to make a list of books which turned out to have profoundly influenced my sensibilities, one of these books would be the Mondo 2000 book, A User's Guide to the New Edge, edited by Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu. Packed full of weird ideas at a time when I was hungry for weird ideas (1992), this book's ultimate gift to me was the knowledge that information could be psychedelic and that technology could be used for transcendental ends, lessons which set me on a set of investigations that I will probably never tire of conducting.
Partially out of gratitude, and partially out of genuine interest, I've always kept one eye on whatever Rucker and Sirius have been up to in the post-Mondo era (Queen Mu, alas, appears to have vanished into obscurity). Although they rarely tap into anything which gives me the same "whoa" factor that Mondo 2000 gave me, their current exploits are often pretty interesting (Sirius' Neo-Files site, for instance, is usually worth exploring). So when I saw, a few years back, that Sirius had formed a political party and published a little red book of quotations, I was intrigued. I put it on my Amazon wishlist and it finally came this past Christmas, roughly two months after George Bush won (or possibly stole) the 2004 elections.
Perhaps bad timing. Sirius' plan to run for President may have seemed like a giddy long-shot stunt back in 2000, when this book was published, but today it just makes me nostalgic for a time when we felt optimistic enough to try giddy long-shot stunts—aka the Clinton era. The both-parties-are-the-same argument that undergirds a lot of Sirius' rhetoric here—the same argument, you'll remember, that provided for much of Nader's groundswell—has gotten a serious trial-by-fire over the past four years, and no longer really holds much sway with me: if there were ever a time where lesser-evilism looked like an attractive philosophy, it's now.
All the more disappointing, because I mostly find myself in agreement with Sirius' basic political credo. The book opens with a "Nineteen Point Party Platform for National Politics," which nicely codifies that peculiarly Californian blend of beliefs: part anarcho-libertarian, part old-guard Leftist. (Sirius is enough of an idealist to say "we will repeal five times as many laws as we pass" but enough of a realist to say "you can't have the withering away of the State until you've built other defenses against total rape by the multinationals.")
The book is witty, insightful, and occasionally provocative, but there's no getting around the fact that recent political events have made it feel powerfully dated. Sirius exhorts us to fight the right evils—the National Security State, the prison/industrial complex, the global trashing of civil and human rights—but it seems to me that we're officially past the point where the daffy pranksterism of a faux Presidential campaign might qualify as a viable weapon. |
Thursday, March 03, 2005
10:50 AM
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nonsense and paradox
I'm currently reading Mysticism and Language, a collection of essays edited by Steven T. Katz. The first essay, Katz's own "Mystical Speech and Mystical Meaning," is great, and it includes this tidbit on nonsense:
"It is the ability of language to induce 'breakthroughs' of consciousness by being employed 'nonsensically' ... that is fundamental to the traversal of the mystical path, to the movement from consciousness A to consciousness B."
Similarly, Katz on the use of spirtual paradox:
"[T]he conscious construction of paradoxes [is] intended to shock, even shatter, the standard epistemic security of 'disciples,' thereby allowing them to move to new and higher forms of insight/knowledge."
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Wednesday, March 02, 2005
2:39 PM
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