Waterproof Jacket & Gonna Gay Marry You

Waterproof Jacket

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I’ve been working on this for a while, but I think it’s where I want it to be now. Made mainly from loop manipulations, most of which originally standard garageband loops if I remember correctly. It is contrived, but at least I mean what I’m saying.

21 Feb 2010 by Mark

Lukács on Present Politics

I’m just finishing up Lukács’s brilliant essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and was struck by this passage which seems to describe in perfect detail the present political situation characterized predominantly by the ideological struggle between neoliberalism and social democracy, the latter of which has increasingly become the willing agent of the former. Unfortunately, Lukács’s somewhat optimistic solution to this antinomy in “bourgeois thought”—rooted in the worldview of the early 1920s when a communist world-revolution seemed imminent—is the so-called “standpoint of the proletariat,” which, thanks to its unique position in the capitalist machinery, is capable of transcending the reified dualism through its ability to grasp history as a concrete dialectical totality. But what happens when—to quote Dylan—”the buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down” and “history,” for all intents and purposes, has ended?

11 Feb 2010 by Bryan

Lukács on Self-Narrative

I sort of wish I had written something like this in the opening of my graduate application statement of purpose, taken from Georg Lukács’s 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, which I just started reading tonight (and very much enjoying):

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22 Jan 2010 by Bryan

A Pessimistic Prediction

Contra Matthew Yglesias’s rosy-eyed belief that passing financial reform will somehow prove to be a much easier task for the Democrats than health care was, I offer you these pessimistic reflections on how things will go horribly wrong:

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21 Jan 2010 by Bryan

Pessimism Means Fighting for the Impossible

Like a lot of people who voted for Obama, I’m pretty upset about the election results in Massachusetts tonight. On the one hand, I knew full well that Obama would never meet my expectations, which were considerable, and that he had no desire to do so, with his post-partisan belief in abstract “reform,” and even more troubling faith in the Republican Party as acting in good-faith, having been made clear early on in the campaign. I suppose, then, that I’d have no good explanation for why I feel so betrayed and disappointed, and even guilty for being so, as these sentiments bear witness to some small kernel of hope I had that things might be different this time around.

20 Jan 2010 by Bryan

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20 Jan 2010

Foam Rubber, USA

Chris Frantz thought of the titular chorus after seeing a Parliament-Funkadelic show where the crowd chanted “Burn down the house.” The initial lyrics were considerably different, however. In an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” aired on December 2, 1984, David Byrne played excerpts of early worktapes showing how the song had evolved from an instrumental jam by Tina Weymouth (bass) and Chris Frantz (drums). Once the whole band had reworked the groove into something resembling the final recording, Byrne began chanting and singing nonsense syllables over the music until he had arrived at phrasing that fit with the rhythms— a technique influenced by former Talking Heads producer Brian Eno— “and then I [would] just write words to fit that phrasing… I’d have loads and loads of phrases collected that I thought thematically had something to do with one another, and I’d pick from those.”

The Velvet Howler

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Waterproof Jacket & Gonna Gay Marry You