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Published Tuesday, October 16, 2007 by Patrick.
I simply wanted to thank everyone who came out to the show at the Nouveau Casino last Friday. It was a great time and and a privilege to play such a great venue (again). I especially want to thank Alexandre Varlet and Fargo Records for the invite.
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Published Tuesday, September 11, 2007 by Patrick.
It's September 11th, again. The day when the truth of our interconnectedness came bounding through the television set, a flickering and pixelated monster. When the feeling settled around us like ash, like snow, that something fundamental and overlooked had gone horribly wrong. The day when the parade of assumptions about how and why we live, handed down through generations of American experience, packed up and went home, leaving the streets quiet and empty.
We crisscrossed the Great Plains and grew the circumference of our compass beyond the deep forests and their dancing, primordial shadows. We conquered 'need' to build an empire of 'want', then painted it in distraction and set it ablaze in the night sky; fly across the Eastern seaboard at night and you might as well be looking at a microchip laid bare from horizon to horizon. But today, beneath those twinkling lights, in a sinew of cables and silicon, the images of those people splashing against the pavement-humid, carnal, fragile images frozen in the smooth, precise violence of technology-dance again like primordial shadows. Images of people with epitaphs of wet words like 'murder' and 'kill', words that roll around in the mouth like grapes. But what they show us about ourselves, about the whole created comfort of the Great Modern Failing, seems to slip away with each passing year, jetsam over the rail that disappears into the opaque depths.
We once had the supreme confidence of our conquering. Now there's a gap in the New York skyline and the lingering haze of death. But we'll build in its place and bow our heads to the river Lethe, for the rites must continue.
Today is an anniversary. It yearly reminds us, surfacing, cycling, bobbing up and down in our consciousness, like a buoy to mark the strange, underwater topography of our sunken dreams. Who knows the depths we've left to plunge, how far we'll drop from the widening sky? As we quit the continental shelf completely, beyond the deep blue gloom to seek the abyss, we'll slip into the black unknown, leviathans like imploded stars from which no report of meaning can escape.
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Published Friday, September 07, 2007 by Patrick.
Wherefore the term 'blood and treasure'? I've read it repeatedly, it routinely escapes from between John McCain's tensed maw like a dry fart (along with those of other pundits, politicos, etc.) and, as with so many of the disgusting neologisms, euphemisms and cheap turns of phrase that litter our vocabulary for the so called War on Terrorism, it's deeply stupid. That is, of course, unless we're but a bunch of pimpled junior high kids playing Dungeons and Dragons in our parents' basement trying to roll a twenty against a wandering band of orcs. In which case, it's appropriate. So I propose we add Hit Points and Charisma (ours is quite low these days overseas...) to the Terror phrase book as well.
Or maybe we're pirates on the high seas, surveying current geopolitics through a telescoped spyglass.
Blood:
People, men and women, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, next door neighbors and coworkers: liquid. And like any liquid they can be poured into a variety of forms: tanks, Humvees, C-130s, F-16s, foxholes. Poured through the halls of Abu Ghraib or slicked across the streets and dusty highways of Iraq. Or vaporized by IEDs to hang as a red mist, or congeal, harden, flake off and away in the desert wind. They can be spilled.
Treasure:
That's capital. Money. Livelihood. Work. Not found, but made. Created. Over generations. Leveraged, negotiated, innovated, tested, sought after, risked, invested in, constructed, bit by bit, family after family, job after job, father to son, hand to hand, check to check. Lost. Spent. Shifted. Looted. Our treasure, by very powerful corporations, very powerful people with very powerful friends in very high places.
Pirates, surveying current geopolitics through a telescoped spyglass.
The term 'blood and treasure' is only adequate in the sense that its complete vapidity and shallowness reminds us of the vapidity and shallowness of our current Administration, its powerfully evil war, and of our responsibility as citizens to rise above the paltry expectations of impotent public debate.
So yeah, we've lost a lot of blood and treasure in Iraq. Yo ho ho.
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Published Tuesday, July 24, 2007 by Patrick.
Here's an interesting documentary about the evolution of marketing and propaganda through the 20th century. Specifically, the focus is on the influence of the -at the time- emerging field of psychology and psychotherapy.
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Published Thursday, April 26, 2007 by Patrick.
This is a bit delayed, but I owe a big thank you to everyone who came out on the 13th for Americans Against the War at La Regence. I had a great time and was so pleased with the way the night turned out.
Unfortunately I'm currently a touch sick with a dose of whatever it is that's going around. Despite almost three years of living in France my immune system is still trying to catch up...
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Published Wednesday, March 21, 2007 by Patrick.
There are those in government who seek the end of government, who want nothing more than to privatize our public institutions and reduce the richness of our public voice -with its attendant demands, accountabilities and introspections- to the polar choice of a consumer: to buy or not to buy. This is the threat to our democracy. Not a far away islamo-fascism, but a corporate fascism whose aim is to subvert our free-will and render us mindless, infantile consumers.
These green hills rolling Grenoble to Paris bound As serpent roads coiling The morning pastures round
And the early season's color Not yet fallen to the ground Where lingering mud sucks With a hollow lapping sound
(Small yellow flowers Are everywhere blooming beside The track's sloped embankments, Like escorts, Like a buttery parade, Fragments of a springtime bomb Always exploding everywhere From here to paradise).