Elephant Talk

This is why I don’t miss American television:

What if Jon never actually had a talking cat named Garfield? Maybe he was just insane all that time. There’s no cat, certainly not one that talks and eats lasagna. Jon may in fact be suffering from schizophrenia born of isolation and possibly drug abuse.

This site is more funny than it should be. It’s also kind of dark, twisted, sad, and somehow makes an interesting commentary on suburban isolation and modern day loneliness.

Oh, heavenly kimchi…

I’ve been looking around the internet to find an answer to one question: Why is Nader running? He’d better have a damned good reason, but I can’t find one, at least not one that jives with basic notions of common sense.

From what I’ve found, he feels the three leading candidates are too close to big business and he wants to shift the balance of power from the few to the many. Fine, that’s a laudable effort. But apparently he feels that he can best empower the few against the many by… running for president? How does getting 2% of a vote in a general election help empower us lowly citizens? Let’s be wildly, irrationally optimistic: let’s say he gets 10% of the popular vote. What does that accomplish?

The answer of course is “nothing.” There is no benefit to a Nader run for the presidency. Zero. Even the idealists would lose out. Let’s say the response is the other end of the spectrum, that he is rendered invisible, a non-entity. That’s a step backward in the hope of reforming the system toward acceptance of independent candidates. What I’m saying is that no matter the outcome of a Nader run, everyone loses. Or rather, anyone progressive-minded loses. Conservatives, libertarians… they can dance a jig.

Nader is not needed or wanted. Not this time. If it was Clinton/McCain, okay, I could understand the rationale. But we have our breath of fresh air in Obama. We have our new voice, our beacon of hope, our outsider.

So if it’s not realistic, and there’s no need, what is the real why? I think we have a man who once accomplished some impressive things, who once held a brief, low wattage spotlight, and now wants to step back on the big stage and speak his mind. I don’t see anything other than ego at work here. Look at his website. The first three tabs are Contribute (your money to him), Volunteer (your time to him), and Take Action (your work to get him on the ballot). You have to get four steps over to find “issues,” and once you click, you only get a list. There’s no substance, no how, no budget. His website is a reflection of the candidate—it’s all about him.

There’s also something delusional going on. If he can’t support the nation’s potentially first female president, or first black president—what most of us would consider monumental progress—what does that say about the progressive rhetoric he speaks? Let’s look at Obama, probably the more liberal of the two. Which president in history comes close to embodying progress as a liberal black man as leader of the country? Anyone? It begs the question, has Nader ever found anyone in U.S. history worthy of the office? If he hasn’t, what country is he living in? What world is he living in?

So I’m still left with “why?”. Why not do charity work, start another foundation, fund independent documentary films, write more books, give lectures. Don’t run for president.

I think people will see through it this time. The problem is that others won’t. There is some undefined number of irrational idealists who will cast their vote away from Obama/Clinton and toward Nader. We have yet to see what kind of impact that will have.

And in case you missed it, Barack Obama won the expatriot vote, with a whopping 65 percent. Could it be that Democrats living in other countries, having a view of things that those inside America may not, feel Obama might be the best hope in repairing our image with the rest of the world?

When I was 25 or so, I had this fear that when I turned 30 I’d run out of music to listen to. That hasn’t happened, and I’m well past 30.

Just when I think I’m in danger of a getting into a rut, I find new things. I was going through an introspective, indie-ish, acoustic singer-songwriter thing for the past year or so (still am to some degree). My new thing is something I can’t quite describe, so I’ll name some bands instead: Hammock, Explosions In The Sky, God Is An Astronaut, Sigur Ros, This Will Destroy You, etc. What do you call that? I’ve been seeing it lumped into the “post-rock” genre, but I don’t hear it. Post-rock is more shifting and varied, with styles and moods borrowed from many genres and crafted into interesting compositions. I’ve also seen it compared to shoegazer music. It’s close, but not as poppy. Space rock? No, that’s not right either. Emo? I still don’t know what the hell that is and I don’t really care to.

I’m going to call it by my own name: Spacegazer music. It’s got qualities of shoegazer, but thematically, it seems to be looking into the heavens rather than down at the floor.

Here are a few juicy tidbits. First, my favorite song in the world right now:

God Is An Astronaut (he is, you know…):

Sigur Ros isn’t my favorite band in the world. Sometimes the singer gets to be a bit much, and his melodies have a kind of sameness to them. But I absolutely love this song:

When we arrived in Seoul, the first thing we did was head to Namdaemun, the “South Gate” that was destroyed by fire. This is Korea’s so-called first national treasure, and probably it’s most recognizable landmark outside the country. There was quite a scene there. Walls had been erected around the site, as workers inside clean up and begin the rebuilding process. One section of the wall was made transparent so that people could look through and see the damage.

There was a good sized crowd there. A lot of people were taking pictures with cell phones, nice cameras, and videocameras. In the back, there seemed to be a protest going on. I asked my friend to translate and she said something along the lines of “throw out all the congressmen.” In the middle, there was a shrine with flowers, some writing, pictures of the original gate pagoda, a place for people to sign their names, and a Buddhist monk watching over it all while ringing a bell.

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Bjork came to play Seoul Saturday. I want to say she kicked ass, but those words are meaningless, even though there was much ass being kicked. So I have to try some other words. She was chilling, enrapturing, transcendent, violent, otherworldly, mad as a fucking loon. It was as if she put her hands on the microphone and sent a shockwave of electricity through the whole arena.

This was the second time I’d seen her. The first time was the Vespertine tour stop in Oakland. My girlfriend at the time used her contacts to score us 10th row seats. That show was pretty mindblowing as well, but it was also tainted by me and her being in the process of a breakup, and we had a brief but highly public fight in the lobby right before the show went on. Anyway, the mood in that performance was ethereal, sensual, and restrained. If memory serves, I believe she had a choir and Matmos (two guys with Macintoshes), and that was it.

The show in Seoul was the opposite. It was all out highly charged energy, even during the slower parts. When the lights came down, out walked a dozen or so brass players in strange, anti-elfin uniforms, with tiny flags perched atop their heads. The rest of the band came out — including a keyboard player, two programmers, and a drummer — and then Bjork herself. I can’t for the life of me figure out what she was wearing, some golden explosion of unearthly fabric. The stage was similarly cosmic. Well, not quite cosmic, but if Tolkien did post-apocalyptic rather than pre-civilization, it might look something like this. It all had a slightly militant quality to it, with brightly colored flags and tapestries depicting icons of unknown culture (no doubt in reference to “Declare Independence”).

During the first song, the lighting was bad, and it seemed the front-of-house mixer was trying to properly place her voice in the room. But when she kicked into “Hunter,” the second song, everything clicked. And then, when she belted out “how Scandinavian of me,” my head almost exploded. She sounded inhuman. No voice in the known world should be able to produce such sound. Some sort of strange vibration hit me and a shudder spread from my spine throughout my whole body. Right in that moment I thought, okay, this isn’t Vespertine. This will be a different experience altogether.

The whole show continued like this, with wave after wave of euphoria. Her band sounded great – except her drummer, but I’m not in the mood to criticize. I really like what she’s doing with brass arrangements, both in the live show and in the new album Volta. Some of my friends weren’t into the computer stuff, but I loved it. She’s a brilliant sound designer, with an equal appreciation for texture and outright noise. But what we all kept talking about after the show was her voice. She sounds great on recordings, but it’s almost as if recording technology is incapable of handling a force that it’s never had to deal with before. Something else entirely was happening here; it was as if she were released from a cage. She was Brahma and Shiva all at once, roaming around simultaneously creating and destroying with that voice of hers. Absolutely incredible.

So yes, the show was… indescribable. But I’m not done describing, because the whole Seoul weekend was interesting. I’ll post a follow-up soon.

If you’re like me and wondering what the hell a “super delegate” is, I have the answer: it’s moronic. That’s the answer.

Apparently, they’re just some dorks whose only distinction is that they’re “current or former elected officeholders and party officials.” In other words, they’re party insiders, cultists, establishment trolls. And somehow, they’re been granted more power than you, the voter.

This could get ugly. If Obama wins Wisconsin and Hawaii next Tuesday, Clinton — who has the majority of these super morons in her pocket — better drop out of the race. Otherwise, the Democratic party is going to be fractured, and Clinton will do nothing more than embarrass herself.

I admit it. I was one of those 600,000 people who went on YouTube to see video of NHL player Richard Zednik getting his throat cut. Like probably half of those trolling around, I remember seeing the Clint Malarchuck video and was expecting something similar.

The Malarchuck video is gruesome. I just saw it again and it’s actually giving me a stomach ache. I won’t embed it here. If you want to see it, you’ll have no trouble finding it. While Zednik’s injury is similar, the video is not, at least the versions I’ve seen. I’m sure there are angles that could be shown, but unless someone steals a tape from the studio, I don’t think we’ll see it.

But what the hell is up with Buffalo? Both incidents happened in the same city. Freaky.

I just hope hockey doesn’t change because of this. It’s a tough game played by tough guys who come from tough parts of the world. That’s the game, and sometimes weird shit just happens. Thankfully, Zednik seems okay, so that’s great news.

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