Samizdata

Brian has commented on a left/right difference in art punditry. I differ with what he said only because I’m uncertain it matches what he does and why he does it. His High Arts (and low!) commentary has been been a breath of fresh air.

Artists, artist wannabees and art students like to write about art because that is what they do. It’s their passion. What they think about when life isn’t messily intruding on those More Important Things.

A few years ago a large part of my writing would have been in the music biz vein. I was playing as near to professionally as I could afford to. At the moment I’m spending all my time with technology and still trying – badly I might add – to make a living. At times I wonder if tech should be the hobby… but then I talk to a friend whose record label is failing and whose tour gigs are falling off and I realize it doesn’t work well either way.

Although I write a lot on technology and policy, catch me at the bar while a Rock gig is on (well, during the break when you can talk anyway – I always stand near the speakers) and I’ll talk your ear off about “the biz”. I drive my business partner up the pub wall at times. I point out the features of the electronic kit the lead guitarist is using, what keyboards they have, the qualities of various amps and speakers and of course the pros and cons of why CF Martin makes the best acoustic guitar, whether a Strat or an SG is a better electric and for what, direct feed versus amp miking etc. etc…

I would posit libertarians are more like the Left when it comes to the arts. It’s the socially liberal side of the equation which we don’t share with the Right. Some who once thought they were Conservative may disagree. I ask them: “Why do you think you were politically homeless before you found us?” It’s because you weren’t Left and you didn’t fit on the Right. The vice-versa thing heppened to me on the Left.

Libertarians are neither Right nor Left: go find a Nolan chart. We’re, well… sort of, you know… UP¹. We’re the new kid on the ideological block and most of the writers in our corner have been philosophers, policy wonks and political pundits.

Samizdata is out to change all that. Libertarians have a life style as open as the philosophy itself. We’re here to show that.

¹ = Extra credit for those who recognize my literary misreference.

Alice Bachini is now taking terrorism seriously. (The blogspotting link refuses to work. Scroll to Monday Oct 22: “Taking Terrorism Seriously”, if you aren’t already there.) So I will now pick up the torch of triviality (importance of) and ask: Madonna, crap actress or what? I’m going to argue for the or what position. At some length, I’m afraid, but what the hell? It’s been a rather slow Samizdata day so far.

BBC 1 showed a Madonna movie last Sunday evening. My Radio Times makes no mention of it, but does mention the movie Black Sunday, which they didn’t show. This is the one where Bruce Dern hijacks the Goodyear Blimp in order to zap a Superbowl crowd with knitting needles, and presumably they cancelled it so as not to give those Arab terrorists any clever ideas, or maybe because, what with the bad guys in this movie actually being Arab terrorists, they didn’t want to show a work of fiction that had now become insufficiently fictional. It’s odd that, isn’t it? – although I’m not disagreeing. Odd also that I settle down to blog about triviality (importance of) and profundity has immediately barged its way back in. That’s terrorism for you.

Anyway, Madonna. The movie BBC1 did show was Body of Evidence. The plot concerns a woman who picks on rich old guys with heart conditions and then shags them (very kinkily and dominatingly) to death, after first ensuring that the will gets changed in her favour. → Continue reading: Madonna: too scary to be a star

In response to a recent Bruce Bartlett column identifying the top forty “conservative” pop songs of all time, blogger Radley “The Agitator” Balko comes up with his own list in a column for TechCentralStation.

My first reaction to Bartlett’s column was: “Ugh! This list reads like Dave Barry’s ‘Book of Bad Songs’.” How can the list be so overwhelmingly dominated by soulless, ham-fisted schlock? Even the handful of great songs seem out of place — James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World” is an all-time R&B masterpiece, but was the Godfather really proffering a conservative worldview, or is Bartlett reading way too much into it? Could it be that statists are just better rockers than us pro-market types? There have to be more hip tunes that carry a conservative message.

Radley Balko’s list is better and fresher, with songs by the Kinks, Vernon Reid and Bob Marley. He also acknowledges the Canadian rock trio Rush, which built an entire concept album around Ayn Rand’s “Anthem”. Good choices, Radley — but there are a handful of classics that both Bartlett and Balko have overlooked.

The finest “conservative” rock song of all time is “Trouble Every Day” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Now, Zappa wasn’t exactly a Goldwater / Reagan conservative, but remember — pro-democracy, pro-capitalism demonstrators in Czechoslovakia made Zappa’s “Plastic People” their anthem.

“Trouble Every Day” originally appeared on the Mothers’ double LP “Freak Out!” in 1965. Written in reaction to television coverage of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, this tune manages to savage the news media, ridicule the “root cause” mantra of left-liberals, and even take a timely swipe at LBJ’s Great Society. Over a bed of wailing harmonica and Frank’s own razor-sharp blues guitar, he ridicules local press coverage of the riot:

You know I watched that rotten box
until my head began to hurt
From checkin’ out the way
the newsmen say they get the dirt
Before the guys on channel so-and-so,
and further they are certain
That any show they’ll interrupt
to bring ya news if it comes up
If the place blows up,
they’ll be the first to tell
Because the boys they got downtown
are workin’ hard and doin’ swell
And if anybody gets the news
before it hits the street
They say that no one blabs it faster!
Their coverage can’t be beat!

Next, he captures the hypocrisy of the rioters (and their apologists) with startling conviction:

Well, I saw the market burning
and the local people turning
On the merchants and the shops
that used to sell their brooms and mops
And every other household item,
watched a mob just turn and bite ’em
And they say it serves ’em right,
because a few of them were white
And it’s the same across the nation,
black and white discrimination
Yelling “you can’t understand me”
and all that other jive they hand me
On the papers and TV,
and all that mass stupidity
That seems to grow more every day …

Finally, Zappa has a few choice words for would-be revolutionaries, three years before John Lennon excoriated those “minds that hate”:

You know we’ve got to sit around at home
and watch this thing begin
But I bet there won’t be many
who live to see it really end
Because a fire in the street
ain’t like a fire in the heart
And in the eyes of all these people,
don’t you know that this could start
On any street, in any town,
in any state, if any clown
Decides that now’s the time to fight
for some ideal he thinks is right
And if a million more agree,
there ain’t no Great Society
As it applies to you and me,
the country isn’t free

This is a conservative jam if ever there was one. Do I have more? Of course I do. How about Leonard Cohen’s “The Future,” a nightmare vision of totalitarianism and the destruction of western culture? How about Ben Harper’s “Oppression,” a stirring reminder that we all hold the power to overthrow tyranny? How about CCR’s “Keep on Chooglin'”? Okay, maybe not that last one.

Do ‘snuff’ movies actually exist or are they merely an urban legend? I use the term ‘snuff’ movie in its traditionally accepted sense i.e. an act of murder which is committed to film or videotape and then replayed in order to provide some warped sexual gratification for the viewer.

I have been prompted to raise this question by a showing of the film “8mm” on British terrestrial television this evening. According to the makes of the film, snuff movies do exist but you have to go to considerable trouble (and expense) to obtain them.

I have never seen a snuff movie but even if I had been shown such a movie how could I know for sure that the ‘grisly murder’ I was witnessing was not, in fact, a very convincing simulation? After all, realistic and gory murders are simulated in mainstream movies all the time so the expertise clearly exists.

Another thing that occurs to me is the problem of marketing such a thing. How (and to whom) do the producers sell their snuff videos when they can hardly be advertised even in the most questionable publications? Furthermore, I am not aware of any criminal convictions (in the UK at any rate) in respect of the making or distribution of snuff movies.

On the other hand, contract killing certainly does exist and if one can pay to have someone murdered surely one can pay a bit extra to have the execution filmed. In the “8mm” film, the snuff movie is made to order at the behest of an extremely wealthy magnate. If they do exist, then perhaps that’s how it works.

I am no nearer to an answer but I am not sure I want to be. I never want to see a snuff movie and I’d like to think they they are, indeed, nothing more than exotic urban fairytales. But sometimes, the world can be a very ugly place.

The other night around Perry’s house after a few cans of beer and the usual chit chat I said that I was thinking of making a “my favourite music CD”. Perry is always trying to get me to post things on Samizdata, so he suggested that I come up with my list, post it on the blog and ask others to do the same. In some way this may give us an insight into the types of people that read this blog. I am not sure what we will get out of this, but it’s worth a go. So please feel free to post your lists as comments to this post. If we get enough, maybe a super list of the favourite music can be compiled.

Now I have put together tapes of my favourite music before, but they have always consisted of music that I was into at the time. What I wanted to do this time was put together a list of songs/tunes that I would take with me to a desert island if I was given the choice (desert island disc’s style). Now I have started to think about it, it is actually harder than you initially think. I had to make one or two rules for my self just to make things easier. I limited the number of songs to 15 (thats about what you can fit on a CD) mainly because I didn’t want to calculate the lengths of the songs and add them together to see if they would fit and the second rule was that you can only take one piece of music by any particular person.

When I was thinking about what to put on it, three tracks came straight to mind. These have always been favourites of mine since first hearing them, and have always been near the top of the pile of CD’s or records that get played, now all I have to do is get another 12 songs and I’m finished. I have been ill for the last week, so I have had plenty of time to contemplate what I was going to choose. The hardest thing to do was to not choose a song because it was a ‘classic’ song, you know the ones that always get chosen even if you don’t particularly like them, they just make you feel comfortable when you hear them. What I was looking for were songs that I really, really liked and could listen to for the next 10 years (or so). Also I do listen to a lot of music, and I have chosen not to put any of the new music I am listening to at the moment into my list. This is purely because it hasn’t survived the test of time yet, I like it now but may not like it in a years time. Anyway, less of my ramblings, here is my list of my most favourite music. If you don’t like my choices, I don’t care because it’s my list. Make one up and post it as a comment.

Walking on Sunshine – Katrina and the waves
Golden Brown – the Stranglers
Norwegian Wood – The Beatles
This Woman’s Work – Kate Bush
Visions of You – Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart with Sinead O’Connor
Mr E’s Beautiful Blues – Eels
Night Boat to Cairo – Madness
Jangle of a Dogs Collar – Butthole Surfers
Ghost Town – The Specials
Sul-E-Stomp – Astralasia & Suns of Arqa
The Rhythm Divine – Yello with Shirley Bassey
59th Street Bridge Song – Simon and Garfunkel
Danse Macabre – Saint-Saens
Stop the Car (12” version) – The Woodentops
Big Noise from Winnetka – Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen

There’s a nice review by blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh of Ayn Rand’s 1940s classic The Fountainhead, and it got me thinking not so much about architecture, where I think Rand’s views were often an uncritical acceptance of Modernist ideology, as about the fact that she missed a key argument for free enterprise – it can be a lot of fun! Let’s face it, the main hero, Howard Roark, doesn’t come across as the kind of guy to let his red hair down at a blogger bash, does he?

I think one of the unacknowledged aspects of liberal capitalism is that it can tap into humans’ need to play and experiment. Paleo-conservatives like David Brooks, author of Bobos In Paradise, which is a mild send up of 1990s America, seems almost offended that geeky tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and elsewhere liked to have fun even as they made – and later lost – their billions. But what’s the problem with that? In fact, one of the most potent memes we can inject into the culture is the idea that not only is collectivism morally and economically bankrupt, it is also bloody boring. For a good and more considered take on this point, Virginia Postrel’s excellent The Future and Its Enemies is highly recommended.

some graffiti: tblives!