8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

I’m Screaming Inside

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Another week, another shooting. Another mass shooting — a horrible, unthinkable, unimaginably terrifying act of inhumanity aided by a fringe-boosted gun culture that thinks banning — or even limiting access to! — assault rifles are, I don’t know, a slippery slope to the Harvesters from The Matrix shoving us all in pods. Little kids — children! — were most of the victims. Once again. Seriously, I just typed “once again.”

I wish I were a more seasoned writer as I want to write about this but I don’t know how. I want to write about the horror that this could happen to my nieces or my friend’s kids at school, or to my wife or mother or me while grocery shopping. It’s unlikely but it sure seems likely.

I want to write about the frustration of knowing nothing’s going to happen to prevent other children or people from being harmed. That the ‘well if we just arm teachers’ line is going to be trotted out again by the same people who won’t allow firearms at their convention. And that those people have paid for indifference from those who could actually do something. Meanwhile, the ones supposedly on our side won’t take hold of the narrative and force some political accountability. It’s infuriating, it’s scary. I don’t have the aptitude to write through this.

Oh, and I want to write about the guns. They are the problem, full stop. The nonsensical culture around them is a part of that problem. The lobbying and money pouring into the political system is a part of that problem. The excuses made in public by those who know better are another part of that problem. But it all stems from guns.

My dad was a gun guy, a lifetime member of that organization I mentioned above that won’t allow firearms at their party. And he thought assault weapons should be banned. Most gun guys do. So why is there a problem? That’s the least of what should happen, what should have happened a long time ago.

Maybe someday I’ll get my writing chops in gear and lay down a moving essay that’ll make me feel a smidgen better. But for now, I’m angry. This is a broken, demolished country and it’s impossible to see it any other way. The fact others don’t get this — or are ‘let’s burn it all down’ psychopaths— is pure gaslighting.

It feels like I’m screaming inside. Like all the time.

Here are a couple of commentaries from two of my favorite newsletter writers that I hope you’ll click and read in full:

todayintabs.com
What Are You Willing To Do?
We all know what happened. Now what?
todayintabs.com
What Are You Willing To Do?
We all know what happened. Now what?

Rusty Foster:

Since at least 2016, I’ve been asking myself: what am I willing to do? So far the answer is protest, when there’s a protest happening. I quit my job, and I encourage others to quit their jobs when I get a chance. I vote, for all the good that does. So in total: I’ve done nothing.
[…]
The truth is, I don’t know what to do. I hugged my own third grader goodbye this morning and sent her off to school. The middle school she’ll attend in three years is remote today because they discovered “threats” in a bathroom. We live in a country where statistically, until age 19, she is most likely to die of a gunshot wound. So what am I willing to do? Anything. 

Tell me what to do.

annehelen.substack.com
This is What Happens When You Live Under Minority Rule
And this continued inaction is how a government loses its legitimacy
annehelen.substack.com
This is What Happens When You Live Under Minority Rule
And this continued inaction is how a government loses its legitimacy

Ann Helen Petersen:

The dilution of votes in cities is the point, and so long as the minority remains in power, it will continue to make laws (and judgments) that protect against its erosion. Voter registration campaigns are not enough. Reciprocal gerrymandering strategies, not enough. If, in a state like Idaho, you go through the initiative process to try and pass legislation (like Medicaid expansion) that’s actually popular, then the legislation will rewrite the laws to prevent it from ever happening again. 

It’s not enough to live in a blue state. It’s not enough to try and send your kids to private school. It’s not enough to donate to an abortion fund. It’s not even enough to have money, or a home, or an education. Privilege can insulate you from the hostility of American society but it cannot ultimately save you from it. Collective and individual action feel impotent. The idea of representative democracy comes to feel like a farce.
[…]
Voting, on its own, will not be enough to change that. We have to decide: what will be?

Kurt Rambus Tackles the Delusion of Genre

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Kurt Rambus is the mischievous studio pseudonym of Nigel John, a longtime staple on Central Florida’s underground DJ scene. Nigel is a purveyor of the unpredictable — his DJ sets veer wide alongside his musical taste and knowledge. He can fit snuggly into a theme, flawlessly programming appropriate but thoughtful music for a gallery opening, an experimental dance company, or opening slots for the likes of DJ Shadow, Kool Keith, and Bonobo. But it’s most interesting when there is no event category or constraint, allowing Nigel to let loose throughout his exhaustive influences.

The Kurt Rambus project is like this. With no heed paid to sonic boundaries, Kurt (as we’ll call Nigel in this guise) mashes up styles and glues together influences that some might find conflicting. “Genre never mattered,” Kurt tells me. He then rattles off some early records from formative years: Ohio Players, KISS, Peter Tosh, Thompson Twins, King Curtis, calypso (his family’s roots are Trinidadian), Run DMC, Art of Noise. John Zorn and Bill Laswell eventually found him, too. 

Kurt then mentions Night Flight, the USA Network cable show that aired overnight on weekends throughout the ’80s. “It made a huge impact on me.” Me, too! Night Flight regularly featured films and programs like New Wave Theater, Urgh! A Music War, and early music videos from weird (for the time) labels like Some Bizarre. Speaking for myself, seeing (and hearing) these from the isolation of Central Louisiana shattered any notions of musical or artistic restraint.

The new EP from Kurt Rambus adds some other influences to the mix: “Bass music DJ mixes from my friend Professor Goat, ’90s hip hop and glitch, and traditional Arabic and Andalusian music.” You can hear these aural references peppered over the EP’s tracks. Not as apparent are the non-musical inspirations for the project. Kurt identifies “history, political philosophy, sociopolitics. The novel Don Quixote. B-movies.” And in case you suspected our current American situation plays a part, Kurt adds, “I realize another major influence is watching that silly fascist ritual of 45 tear-gassing people so he can get a photo of himself in front of a church looking stupid holding a bible.”

Unsurprisingly, the music is urgent. “Hayek and His Black Friend” launches the EP at an ominous 80 beats-per-minute. Bass rhythms and dramatic strings punctuate a flurry of vocal scowls and insinuations. Serious synths appear two-and-a-half-minutes in, and then they’re outta there. “Envy of Thee” sounds like Throbbing Gristle growing up in Miami, and “Entstehung” could inspire revolution from the backroom of a dubstep rave. Then there’s the closing “One Salt, Too Many Swift,” my personal favorite of the set. “It’s inspired by my wife’s background, which is Bedouin Egyptian and Spanish Gypsy,” says Kurt. “I originally scrapped it before reviving it with the ‘Impeach the President’ breakbeat.”

You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the name of Kurt Rambus’s EP. I was saving it until I explained the music, the tension, and the tug-of-war of influences. The title is a curiosity that adds its own significant amount of weight. It hides and reveals the concept at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, The Misadventures of Hayek Von Pinochet and his Men Of Action. I’ll close this piece with Kurt Rambus laying it out:

The title of the EP is the name of an imaginary gothic horror flick. The main character, Hayek, is a combination of two men: Friedrich Von Hayek, a “pioneering” neoliberal economic theorist, and Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator. Friedrich’s economic philosophy revolved around freedom being the highest ideal. Yet he associated, supported, and consulted with Pinochet, a fascist military dictator whose regime was responsible for murdering and torturing.

I incorporated the plot of Don Quixote into this imaginary film. Alonzo Quixano reads so many books about romantic chivalry that he loses his mind. He becomes a knight, aiming to revive chivalry and serve his nation. And Hayek’s claim to fame was that he believed that the only way for society to progress was for human beings to be selfish, to return to the golden age of 19th-century feudalism. These elements are combined because they’re all delusional. At least, to Don Quixano’s credit, his madness was in dedication to a noble cause of chivalry. Hayek was just an elitist asshole who had a very childish world view. Many others hold this view now.

The “men of action” is based on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The concept of a man, or men, who are impulsive and possessed by feelings of revenge — these men don’t think about repercussions. They only act upon irrational thoughts and feelings. That’s who Hayek Von P rolls with. They are all delusional barbarians. 

A Series of P.O. Boxes

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For all the writing I’m suddenly doing about nostalgia and memories, my memory is terrible. I’m amazed by people who instantly recall faces or specific events from their teenage years as I can barely remember any of that. It’s frustrating. This frustration popped up again as my friend Jeff, who drove us the five hours to see the Butthole Surfers, wonders why I didn’t mention the pre-dawn speeding ticket. Simply, I don’t remember it. I mean — I know it happened, especially now that he brings it up. But it’s not a part of my brain cargo. That slot is empty.

That makes writing about events from my past a little tricky. I guess that’s the case for all of us, as, often unintentionally, we tailor our memories to fit a present story. It’s Kris Kelvin‘s dilemma and his downfall (you should watch Solaris, either one will do). I suggest starting a journal to document your days if you haven’t already. I’m bummed I didn’t start until a couple of years ago.

The present story is the post office. I have many memories of the post office. They’re bubbling to the top as I read with frustration about what that institution is going through. Much of the world’s happenings have caused me (and probably you) incredible sadness and distress over the past months. But I have a strong and personal connection with the post office. It’s responsible for much of who I am and how I cultivated that identity. So, yeah, I’m pretty bummed out right now.

I opened my first post office box when I was sixteen. All you needed to get a P.O. Box was a driver’s license, so, in my world, one quickly followed the other. Living in Central Louisiana in the late ’80s, my internet was Factsheet Five and the classifieds in Maximumrocknroll. That’s where I found punk rock pen-pals, weirdos with photocopied zines, mail art deviants defacing postcards, and experimenting artists encoding noise signals on cassette tapes. I needed a place to receive these subversive materials without alarming disapproving parents. The post office came to my rescue. I’ll go as far as to say that the post office saved my life.

I’ve had a P.O. Box ever since. Every time I move, one of the first things I do is visit the post office and fill out that application. It’s like I have a timeline of my life marked by each of those boxes. I still remember the numbers for some old ones (not bad for someone with a shitty memory). Each box had a primary purpose, different from the one before. That P.O. Box timeline becomes a signifier of what was important to me at that point in my personal history. 

The first box was about connecting and ‘finding the others.’ Discovering who I was and if there were people in the world sharing these strange interests. It turns out there were.

I opened my second box at the beginning of college, where I was still connecting and figuring things out. But I also remember The Village Voice appearing in the box weekly. I’d pour over the ads for the live music coming through the NYC area and dreaming about being in a place where I could see all of that. To me, that box was about the future and its dreams.

Things got complicated with the third P.O. Box. I moved to Florida, grabbed a box, and got involved with the college radio station. It’s a long story I’ll write about someday, but I helped lead a protest movement against the corrupt faculty managing the station. As they employed me (I was the music director), I had to do my activism in secret, distributing leaflets and petitions to be returned to an anonymous mailing address. This unidentifiable P.O. Box drove the faculty crazy — I know they suspected I was behind it, but they couldn’t prove it. 

One day, in the heat of the radio station scandal, I checked my mail at the post office. There was a slip for a certified letter. I took this to the counter, and the postman told me I had to print my name and sign to receive this mail. Of course, the sender would receive this form with my name as a receipt. This was obviously sent by the suspecting station management. No thanks, and nice try! 

My fourth P.O. Box was in downtown Orlando. I opened a record store — Bad Mood Records — and the post office was directly across the street. Incredibly convenient. That was also when I co-founded the Eighth Dimension label and started DJ’ing professionally. So this box was all about receiving vinyl — tasty 12″ promos from across the globe. Every couple of weeks, I faxed out a short store newsletter to all my favorite record labels with my Q-BAM top 10 chart. My phone bill was out of control, but it was worth it. Most days, there were at least a couple of records arriving at my P.O. Box.

In the early 2000s, I moved across town, which meant a new post office and P.O. Box. I started my music publishing business, so I was using my P.O. Box to receive contracts, notices, and other legal papers for the first time. Grown-up stuff. This post office also makes me think about the Great Recession, as I helped support myself by selling off my vinyl collection through Discogs. Ten years before, I went to the post office every day to see what records got sent to me. Now my daily visits were about sending records off. 

These days I have a P.O. Box that’s only used for business. You’ll find it listed at the bottom of my email newsletters. I visit it maybe once a week (and even less now due to lockdown). I don’t necessarily think that’s entirely due to the internet and online communication. Yes, this newsletter might be a mailed zine at a different time. But all these trappings of adulthood — the permanent home address, the decreased need to seek new connections, the DJ’ing career that’s now in the past — have made my post office visits infrequent. But I still get a thrill when I open the P.O. Box’s tiny door and there’s something surprising waiting for me.

So, that’s my little love letter to the US Postal Service. I know a lot of people that could write their own. And many of those people also love music.

The chaotic state of our postal system comes at an especially bad time for the music community. Without in-person visits or merch tables on tours, record stores and artists rely on the USPS to get records and other physical paraphernalia to fans. Media Mail is a godsend here — one can send a record anywhere in the USA at a slower pace for a reduced price. Media Mail was how I mailed the vinyl I sold through Discogs, and it was remarkably dependable — I rarely ran into problems with delays or damaged goods. I’m betting Media Mail is a nightmare right now.

The demand for physical music formats — vinyl, CDs, cassettes — has increased alongside growing dissatisfaction with streaming platforms. Artists make more of a profit, and fans feel supportive of their favorite artists. There’s also a desire for something tangible to hold — representing membership in a cultural movement — that’s absent from digital music. The resurgence of ‘legacy formats’ is a compelling narrative in the modern music industry, an unexpected trend that’s welcomed a lot of analysis. In a new interview with Damon Krukowski, Bandcamp’s Ethan Diamond says, “half of the sales on Bandcamp at this point are for physical goods.” That even surprised me.

What happens to this aspect of fandom with a crippled postal service? Without Media Mail? What happens to record stores and Discogs sellers and vinyl labels? Book stores and other indie sellers are in the same boat, too.

It’s essential to consider the impact the US Postal Service has on maintaining small businesses and independent endeavors. I don’t want to live in a world where only corporations can afford to ship using expensive privatized services or, in the case of Amazon, their own shipping infrastructure. That’s one of my fears about what happens when we come out of the pandemic: a lot of the framework that supports independent business will be gone.

Here’s a good Twitter thread on what we can do to help the USPS. Some of the top posts’ info is a little dated as this is a quickly developing situation. Scroll down a little for some concrete things you can do. And here’s a useful page for ‘How You Can Help Save the US Postal Service’ from the fantastic art site Hyperallergic.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

The Dark Side Of ‘Mobilizing Your World’

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The Verge:

AT&T’s zero rating model is pretty much the nightmare scenario that internet advocates and pro-competition observers have been warning us about. That’s because AT&T owns DirecTV, and is now giving DirecTV Now privileged access to AT&T’s wireless internet customers. The corruption is so obvious here that it doesn’t need a fancy net neutrality metaphor — AT&T is clearly favoring a company it now owns over competitors.



The company stands to reap massive tolls on the other end of that “most favored nation” deal with DirecTV, because it also offers something called “sponsored data” to other companies that want the same kind of privileged access to AT&T customers. So, for example, if Netflix wants to compete fairly with DirecTV, it would need to pay AT&T to exempt its video traffic from data caps.



This is what ISPs really want the internet to look like: a bundle of premium services that run up the cost of access to their networks. It’s the same game internet companies have been playing from the beginning, when they got the government to classify them as “information services” instead of “telecommunications services” — the ISPs really don’t want to be “dumb pipes,” because there’s less money to be made when you just give people high-quality internet with no restrictions.



They’re using the same playbook: turn the internet into basic cable, and charge everyone for features and content on top of that. Then, charge competitors to compete with their own vertically integrated video services. It’s a two-way toll that ISPs have been trying to erect forever.



Republicans have been trying to gut the FCC for nearly a decade, and between Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress there’s probably enough support to dismantle net neutrality policy, if not the agency itself. If that happens, zero rating and sponsored data schemes could become completely monstrous.



I wish I could offer some optimism here, but I have the sinking feeling there are tough times ahead for us self-employed citizens who rely on an unvarnished internet for our bread and butter.

Taming Facebook’s Fake News Problem

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The Guardian:

Facebook has been accused of potentially swinging the election … by failing to acknowledge the fact that its algorithm was promoting fake news to millions of users. According to Buzzfeed news, more than 100 pro-Trump fake news sites were being run from a single Balkan town in the run-up to the election.

Cutting off the revenue to such sites by limiting the amount of money they can make from advertising may help limit their proliferation. But Facebook in particular faces a more fundamental issue given the ways in which its algorithm selects posts: if users engage more with fake news than real news, as seems possible, then Facebook’s algorithm will promote the fake news.



Tech2:

Called the B.S. Detector, this Chrome extension claims to identify and flag news that seems to be fake.The new project was released on Tuesday and can identify articles on Facebook that seem to be from a questionable source. When a user scrolls over an article that seems to be fake, a warning appears informing the user that the source of the article may not be from a credible source.



“I built this in about an hour yesterday after reading [Mark Zuckerberg’s] BS about not being able to flag fake news sites. Of course you can. It just takes having a spine to call out nonsense. This is just a proof of concept at this point, but it works well enough,” said {creator of the extension Daniel} Sieradski.

  



Update: via The Verge:

Today, Google announced that its advertising tools will soon be closed to websites that promote fake news, a policy that could cut off revenue streams for publications that peddle hoaxes on platforms like Facebook. The decision comes at a critical time for the tech industry, whose key players have come under fire for not taking neccesary steps to prevent fake news from proliferating across the web during the 2016 US election. It’s thought that, given the viral aspects of fake news, social networks and search engines were gamed by partisan bad actors intending to influence the outcome of the race.




“Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement given to Reuters. This policy includes fake news sites, the spokesperson confirmed. Google already prevents its AdSense program from being used by sites that promote violent videos and imagery, pornography, and hate speech.



Update 2: solid think piece from Slate:

People tend to read, like, and share stories that appeal to their emotions and play to their existing beliefs. Without robust countervailing forces favoring credibility and accuracy, Facebook’s news feed algorithm is bound to spread lies, especially those that serve to bolster people’s preconceived biases. And these falsehoods are bound to influence people’s thinking.




And yet, in the days following the election, as criticisms of the company mounted, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed and denied the issue—a defensiveness that says even more about the company than the fake news scandal itself. Zuckerberg’s response points to a problem deeper than any bogus story, one that won’t be fixed by cutting some shady websites out of its advertising network. The problem is Facebook’s refusal to own up to its increasingly dominant role in the news media. It’s one that is unlikely to go away, even if the fake news does.

“A Battle That Is Primarily Being Conducted By Avatars”

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The Week:

How did we get here? There is always the possibility, suggested by many, that America is sinking into an Idiocracy-style dystopia, but that explanation feels too pat. Rather, the success of Trump’s campaign is at least partly a reflection of the way the news media has changed. In addition to (sometimes literally) providing the candidate with a stage, the media used to act as a filter between candidate and voter, couching the candidate’s unvarnished spiel with context, contrary opinions, facts. This is no longer necessarily the case; instead, the media increasingly tries to collapse the space between the politician and his constituent, thrusting everyone, media included, into a shared chaos known as social media.



You are watching a battle that is primarily being conducted by avatars, in a flattened space about the size of a phone, where everyone, from activists to reporters to campaign flacks to President Obama, is braying for attention. As I type this, dozens of operatives are spinning the debate we just watched, dragging an event from the physical world into the digital realm where we spend more and more of our time, and where every gesture, every upload, every expression of outrage, empathy, kindness, or anger, is simultaneously a performance.