British Columbia Welcome U

The great confluence of posts about creativity, class, and the “creative class” continues, though so far circumstance has conspired to keep me too busy to compose a proper reply. In the interim, here’s a mix of music about class tension, the offspring of the obscene embrace between art & commerce. Not insignificantly, a number of the songs most declaratively aligned with the Working Man are by people who’ve assuredly never felt the sting of sweat in their eyes if not under stage-lights. A few of the acts - the JSBX, the Dandies, and of course the Shat - damn near disappear up their own asses in acts of self-satirisation. Meanwhile, for all their Fela-esque anti-capital populism, The 3rd Generation Band were actually the official Ghanaian state police band - but of course, capital adopting anti-establishment postures is as old as the rebel yell itself.

Also occupying my headspace: a couple of recent posts over at I Cite mentioned the difficulty of creating consensus, a difficulty aptly demonstrated by others who smugly self-paralyse with ping-pong rhetoric and infinite regresses. Discussions of the Symbolic with neither the Imaginary nor the Real and a theory of “progressive” tourism aside… One of the problems facing post-modern politics is that there isn’t an ideology, that is neither essentially nihilist nor religious, which accepts that people just don’t get along - that in all likelihood, we hate each other. In spite of this being a fundamental consideration of Enlightenment philosophy, there seems to be not the barest bones of any progressive agenda that incorporates a status quo of everyone hating each other’s guts. This is not a new problem, as I certainly wouldn’t be the lone member of a previously-proposed People Who Hate People Party…

Middle Class Revolt
(click on the title to download)

1. Tricky - “Money Greedy” (00:00)
2. The Fall - “Prole Art Threat” (05:24)
3. The 3rd Generation Band - “Because of Money” (07:18)
4. Pete Wiggins - “I Don’t Work For a Living” (13:07)
5. The Wu-Tang Clan - “C.R.E.A.M.” (16:08)
6. The Constantines - “Working Full-Time” (19:57)
7. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - “Sweat” (23:51)
8. Talking Heads - “Found a Job” (26:51)
9. The Beastie Boys - “Mark On the Bus” (31:42)
10. XTC - “Day In Day Out” (32:36)
11. Public Image Ltd. - “Careering” (35:41)
12. Fugazi - “Five Corporations” (40:09)
13. Buck 65 - “In Every Dream Home There Is a Heartache” (Roxy Music cover; 42:25)
14. Wiliam Shatner feat. Joe Jackson - “Common People” (Pulp cover; 46:55)
15. The Dandy Warhols - “Bohemian Like You” (51:25)
16. Tom Waits - “Heigh Ho” (54:54)

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There’s only so far I can wander into the debate about minimal techno’s lack of a certain sumbitch, because I’m in no way qualified: I don’t dance, I hate clubs, and the last self-advertisedly “electronic” album I bought* was Amon Tobin’s Supermodified. (My one snidely brief salvo: why listen to something labeled “minimal” then complain about its flatness?) But in his reading of minimal techno as a symptom of Berlin’s - and perhaps Germany’s - cultural listlessness, Mark K-Punk nailed it:

Berlin has in many ways become a capital of deterritorialized culture, a base for DJs and curators whose jetsetting lifestyle is indeed a “bizarre phenomenon”. If hauntology depends upon the way that very specific places – Burial’s South London Boroughs, for instance – are stained with particular times, then the affect that underlies minimal might be characterised as nomadalgia: a lack of sense of place, a drift through club or salon spaces that, like franchise coffee bars, could be anywhere.

Quite possibly as he was writing this, a British friend and I were busy slagging off Germany for not incubating any place-specific cultural idiosyncracies; there is nothing being created here that is innately of here, that couldn’t be found in any number of other cities. I’ve met my fair share of creative types around both Berlin and Hamburg, but they’re all either transients or have their ambitions and attentions focused elsewhere. Berlin in particular functions less as an artistic cauldron than a boho crossroads, a city-sized airport lounge where people encounter each other, debate ideas, exchange contacts, and then hustle off to where ever the real action is.

The Berlin mythology that seduces so many (Bowie & Pop, the Birthday Party, Blixa Bargeld, and Bruno Ganz with wings) was founded on an antagonism that no longer exists. Following the collapse of communism, it seems Germany swapped its aphasia for amnesia, forgetting how to speak as Germans, opting instead to speak as Europeans. Combine this erosion of self with the gentrification forced by an influx of “international ‘creatives’,” attracted to Berlin’s cheap rents and scuzzy cachet (now minus any genuine danger) - that makes for one anonymously monochromatic playground. If this could be anywhere, then why be here?

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, an unexpectedly melodramatic exchange over at The End Times has Dan apparently “consider[ing] packing it all in.” I’ll assume the best: that this is a sarcastic jab at the defensive hysteria into which the conversation descended. As self-aware and ludicrously well-read as he is, surely Dan’s not going to close up shop because of one dilettante with all the good grace, objective reason, and eloquence of a teenager who discovered Sylvia Plath and Garden State at the same time.

Nor should my second comment be misread as some P.C. plea for civility & offensensitivity. Wasting as much time I do online, I see way too many comment threads descend into coke-head-aggressive lobotomite name-calling of the “Fuck you!”/”No, fuck you!” variety. Reading Dan’s deletion of the controversial link and denial of an ad hominem attack, it was refreshing to see someone who’ll cool the rhetoric and commit to common courtesy to keep the conversation going while leaving identity out of it, in hopes that it doesn’t come to shrill Stuart Smalley-esque self-affirmation and oblivious hypocrisy (e.g. “I’m hurt!”/”I’m strong!” and “I’m classless!”/”So what if I’m bourgeois?”).

Didn’t work that time, though, did it? Better luck tomorrow, Dan.

(*) Despite being a laptop musician, Tim Hecker’s music is sufficiently vague, degraded, hauntological that I’d shelve him between Philip Jeck and My Bloody Valentine, not alongside Hawtin or RIchard D. James.

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This week brought a rich assortment of “isn’t that amazing” animal stories, including the mother gorilla in a German zoo who continued to carry her dead infant. Mourning (to be anthropomorphic about it) is hardly unknown in the non-human part of the animal kingdom. In 2006 a panda named Ya Ya, living in a zoo in China, seemed inconsolable after accidentally crushing her newborn to death. She wailed and kept searching for the tiny body after a keeper took it away, and when the keeper checked on her she looked at him with teary eyes.

Animals also display compassion, or what looks an awful lot like it. In 2006 scientists reported that after an elephant matriarch—“Eleanor”—living in the Samburu Reserve in northern Kenya collapsed one day, the matriarch of a different family walked over and nudged her to her feet using her tusks. When Eleanor was too shaky to stand, Grace kept at her, pushing Eleanor to walk. When Eleanor fell, Grace appeared “very stressed,” trumpeted loudly and kept nudging Eleanor. She stayed with the dying Eleanor all night.

Scientists argue about whether that kind of behavior means what we humans impute to it, though it’s tough to see how expending time and effort to help an unrelated animal could be a genetically-based instinct.

In any case, this week also brought evidence that animals have an instinct for democracy.

As the British magazine New Scientist reports, macaques have a sense of what constitutes a majority vote. Before a group of Tonkean macaques moves, a single individual takes a few tentative steps, walks off to a distance of 3 to 15 feet, looks back, and waits, reported Odile Petit of the National Centre of Scientific Research in Strasbourg, France. Not surprisingly, the others eventually followed.

What was surprising was how the troop behaved when two monkeys had different ideas about where to go and what to do—forage or stay put, for instance. A few monkeys would line up behind each would-be leader (whose sex, age and status didn’t seem to matter: “Even the children can get the group moving,” Cédric Sueur, a graduate student who worked with Petit, told New Scientist), and once one of them had a clear majority the monkeys backing the losing candidate switched to the winner, avoiding fragmenting the troop.

Democracy in action.

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From last week’s Rocky Mountain News:

Coloradans for Responsible Reform, backed by the Denver Metro Chamber and Defend Our Economy, a group made up largely of service, retail and tourism businesses, said Friday they have joined forces to fight four proposed amendments this fall.

One of them is the union-backed “Employer Responsibility for Health Insurance,” an “initiative requiring employers with 20 or more workers to shoulder 80 percent of health care coverage.” (Amendment 56)

While “defending our economy” can be a worthwhile goal, defending our rights is certainly more important.  The relationship between an employee and employer is a private matter between consenting adults.  No one has a right to interfere with this, that is, mandating or prohibiting terms of the employment relationship.

But I suppose unions think it’s more important to force employers to buy insurance for their employees.  After all, it gives union bosses something to negotiate for on behalf of their members.  And so what if employers pass the cost on to employees by lowering their wages?  It’s not as if union wages are close enough the minimum wage such that these employees lose their jobs.

written by \\ tags: british columbia tourism

From last week’s Rocky Mountain News:

Coloradans for Responsible Reform, backed by the Denver Metro Chamber and Defend Our Economy, a group made up largely of service, retail and tourism businesses, said Friday they have joined forces to fight four proposed amendments this fall.

One of them is the union-backed “Employer Responsibility for Health Insurance,” an “initiative requiring employers with 20 or more workers to shoulder 80 percent of health care coverage.” (Amendment 56)

While “defending our economy” can be a worthwhile goal, defending our rights is certainly more important.  The relationship between an employee and employer is a private matter between consenting adults.  No one has a right to interfere with this, that is, mandating or prohibiting terms of the employment relationship.

But I suppose unions think it’s more important to force employers to buy insurance for their employees.  After all, it gives union bosses something to negotiate for on behalf of their members.  And so what if employers pass the cost on to employees by lowering their wages?  It’s not as if union wages are close enough the minimum wage such that these employees lose their jobs.

written by \\ tags: british columbia tourism

From last week’s Rocky Mountain News:

Coloradans for Responsible Reform, backed by the Denver Metro Chamber and Defend Our Economy, a group made up largely of service, retail and tourism businesses, said Friday they have joined forces to fight four proposed amendments this fall.

One of them is the union-backed “Employer Responsibility for Health Insurance,” an “initiative requiring employers with 20 or more workers to shoulder 80 percent of health care coverage.” (Amendment 56)

While “defending our economy” can be a worthwhile goal, defending our rights is certainly more important.  The relationship between an employee and employer is a private matter between consenting adults.  No one has a right to interfere with this, that is, mandating or prohibiting terms of the employment relationship.

But I suppose unions think it’s more important to force employers to buy insurance for their employees.  After all, it gives union bosses something to negotiate for on behalf of their members.  And so what if employers pass the cost on to employees by lowering their wages?  It’s not as if union wages are close enough the minimum wage such that these employees lose their jobs.

written by \\ tags: british columbia tourism

From last week’s Rocky Mountain News:

Coloradans for Responsible Reform, backed by the Denver Metro Chamber and Defend Our Economy, a group made up largely of service, retail and tourism businesses, said Friday they have joined forces to fight four proposed amendments this fall.

One of them is the union-backed “Employer Responsibility for Health Insurance,” an “initiative requiring employers with 20 or more workers to shoulder 80 percent of health care coverage.” (Amendment 56)

While “defending our economy” can be a worthwhile goal, defending our rights is certainly more important.  The relationship between an employee and employer is a private matter between consenting adults.  No one has a right to interfere with this, that is, mandating or prohibiting terms of the employment relationship.

But I suppose unions think it’s more important to force employers to buy insurance for their employees.  After all, it gives union bosses something to negotiate for on behalf of their members.  And so what if employers pass the cost on to employees by lowering their wages?  It’s not as if union wages are close enough the minimum wage such that these employees lose their jobs.

written by \\ tags: british columbia tourism

Republican
challenger launches attack on Davis

Columbia Daily Herald
Chris
Graham
August
28, 2008

A
Republican Congressional candidate accused incumbent Democrat Congressman
Lincoln Davis of a poor voting record and a disregard for the American people
Tuesday.

Monty
Lankford, who is running for the 4th District U.S. Congressional seat against Davis, made an appearance at a Fast Fuel gas station at 407 W. 7th St., to
talk about the nation’s energy crisis while slamming Davis for his “lack of character.”

“He
is forgetting the issues and the people,” Lankford said. “People are tired of
smoke-and-mirror politics.”

Lankford
stressed the importance of off-shore drilling and a need to find alternative
energy sources, such as nuclear and wind power. He accused Davis of voting for the House of
Representatives to take a five-week recess instead of signing a bill that would
have allowed off-shore drilling.

“By
voting with the most liberal Speaker in history, Davis
has showed the people of this district that he’s lost touch and gone Washington on us,”
Lankford said in a press release after speaking at the gas station. “He’s voted
against senior citizens, farmers, schools, truckers, you name it. Every single
American needs relief from high gasoline prices, and we can’t get it by giving
Congress another vacation.”

Davis’ campaign responded to
Lankford’s statements Tuesday in an e-mail sent to The Daily Herald.

“Congressman
Davis is a pro-drilling Democrat who has fought for common sense solutions to
bring down the price of fuel. He has consistently voted to increase domestic
supplies, including drilling in ANWR and the outer continental shelf, and
supports a comprehensive roadmap to energy independence that includes nuclear,
wind, solar, biomass and other alternative energy supplies,” the e-mail stated.

Davis’ Campaign Manager Jon
Boughtin said Lankford referred to a discharge petition — a procedure done when
a commitee’s chair does not put an item up for vote. He said Davis did not sign the petition.

Lankford
also addressed concerns some environmentalists have about off-shore drilling.

“We
do have to protect the environment,” he said. “Sometimes people protect a tree
and not the people … I believe in envrionmentally safe drilling.”

Columbia was one of eight stops
for Lankford on his tour. On Monday he visited Winchester,
Tullahoma,
McMinnville and Crossville. He also stumped in Pulaski, Lawrenceburg and
Franklin Tuesday.

Lankford
said making an appearance in Maury
County was imperative.

“It’s
the biggest part of our campaign,” he said. “The county has many drivers coming
from rural areas, and these issues are very important to them.”

http://www.columbiadailyherald.com/articles/2008/08/27/top_stories/06davis.txt

written by \\ tags: british columbia tourism

Republican
challenger launches attack on Davis

Columbia Daily Herald
Chris
Graham
August
28, 2008

A
Republican Congressional candidate accused incumbent Democrat Congressman
Lincoln Davis of a poor voting record and a disregard for the American people
Tuesday.

Monty
Lankford, who is running for the 4th District U.S. Congressional seat against Davis, made an appearance at a Fast Fuel gas station at 407 W. 7th St., to
talk about the nation’s energy crisis while slamming Davis for his “lack of character.”

“He
is forgetting the issues and the people,” Lankford said. “People are tired of
smoke-and-mirror politics.”

Lankford
stressed the importance of off-shore drilling and a need to find alternative
energy sources, such as nuclear and wind power. He accused Davis of voting for the House of
Representatives to take a five-week recess instead of signing a bill that would
have allowed off-shore drilling.

“By
voting with the most liberal Speaker in history, Davis
has showed the people of this district that he’s lost touch and gone Washington on us,”
Lankford said in a press release after speaking at the gas station. “He’s voted
against senior citizens, farmers, schools, truckers, you name it. Every single
American needs relief from high gasoline prices, and we can’t get it by giving
Congress another vacation.”

Davis’ campaign responded to
Lankford’s statements Tuesday in an e-mail sent to The Daily Herald.

“Congressman
Davis is a pro-drilling Democrat who has fought for common sense solutions to
bring down the price of fuel. He has consistently voted to increase domestic
supplies, including drilling in ANWR and the outer continental shelf, and
supports a comprehensive roadmap to energy independence that includes nuclear,
wind, solar, biomass and other alternative energy supplies,” the e-mail stated.

Davis’ Campaign Manager Jon
Boughtin said Lankford referred to a discharge petition — a procedure done when
a commitee’s chair does not put an item up for vote. He said Davis did not sign the petition.

Lankford
also addressed concerns some environmentalists have about off-shore drilling.

“We
do have to protect the environment,” he said. “Sometimes people protect a tree
and not the people … I believe in envrionmentally safe drilling.”

Columbia was one of eight stops
for Lankford on his tour. On Monday he visited Winchester,
Tullahoma,
McMinnville and Crossville. He also stumped in Pulaski, Lawrenceburg and
Franklin Tuesday.

Lankford
said making an appearance in Maury
County was imperative.

“It’s
the biggest part of our campaign,” he said. “The county has many drivers coming
from rural areas, and these issues are very important to them.”

http://www.columbiadailyherald.com/articles/2008/08/27/top_stories/06davis.txt

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Luetkemeyer
nabs Farm Bureau endorsement

Columbia Tribune
Jason
Rosenbaum
August
28, 2008

Former
state Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer grabbed the endorsement of the Missouri Farm
Bureau for his congressional bid.

“I
believe Congress is in need of more members like me with an agricultural
perspective, since all Americans – rural, suburban, and urban – rely on
American farmers and ranchers for food, clothing, and increasingly fuel each
and every day,” Luetkemeyer said in a statement. “I will work to protect the
farm safety net, lessen government regulation of American agriculture,
eliminate the death tax and expand opportunities for Missouri goods.”

The
group endorsed U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof’s bid for Missouri governor earlier this month.

The
St. Elizabeth native is facing off against state Rep. Judy Baker, D-Columbia,
and Libertarian candidate Tamara Millay in the race to replace U.S. Rep. Kenny
Hulshof, R-Columbia.

Click
on the link below to read the whole press release.

Farm
Bureau FARM-PAC Endorses Luetkemeyer

JEFFERSON CITY, MO – Trustees of Missouri
Farm Bureau’s 9th Congressional District FARM-PAC announced their endorsement
of Blaine Luetkemeyer (R) for election to the 9th District.

The
endorsement of Luetkemeyer, a Missouri State Representative from 1999-2004,
came after trustees reviewed his responses to the FARM-PAC questionnaire and
his Missouri General Assembly voting record. Both Luetkemeyer and opponent Judy
Baker (D) were interviewed in person during an endorsement session Monday,
August 25.

Chairman
of the regional FARM-PAC is Pike County Farm Bureau member Marcine Niemeyer.
“During his time in the General Assembly, Luetkemeyer had a 100% voting record
on Farm Bureau issues,” Niemeyer said. “He was awarded the Friend of
Agriculture Award three times.

“Luetkemeyer
has a background in agriculture and business and understands the plight of
farmers, ranchers and rural communities,” Niemeyer said. “He is a proponent of
protecting the farm safety net, lessening governmental regulation and expanding
foreign markets through trade agreements.”

Additionally
Luetkemeyer is committed to addressing America’s energy crisis by drilling
and producing oil from the Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge.

Missouri
Farm Bureau’s FARM-PAC is a political action committee consisting of trustees
from each county in the state. The FARM-PAC is divided by congressional
district, giving members the opportunity to voice their views for congressional
and state senate candidates.

http://blogs.columbiatribune.com/politics/2008/08/luetkemeyer_nabs_farm_bureau_e.html

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