Sun Spot: Justice League vs. JFK

Greeting, pals of Morphizm. As 2007 dies, we enter the new frontier of 2008, a year that promises to be turbulent as hell. In that sense, the new Justice League movie is a fitting herald of what may come, mashing as it does DC Comics' Silver Age and JFK-era optimism with postmodern animation and impending apocalypse. Filter it through your Election 2008 sifter and see what you come up with:

VIDEO: "JUSTICE LEAGUE: NEW FRONTIER"


This clip and many more can be found on Morphizm's revamped Multimedia page here. New media, new dawn. Thank the Big Bang for the internet.

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Chuck D + DMC = Beyond.FM

Public Enemy architect and political firebrand Chuck D has always been a collaborative animal. From Anthrax to Stephen Stills to DJ Spooky to Air America, he remains a cultural figure to reckon with. So it's nice to see him going deep indie again, this time with Run-DMC rhymer DMC in Las Vegas on January 6. From Morphizm pal Christie Z. Pabon and her Tools of War:

Hip Hop legends Chuck D of Public Enemy, DMC of RUN-DMC and DJ Johnny Juice Rosado team up for one night only at the Hard Rock Hotel to launch BEYOND.FM and to kick off the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) being held from Jan. 7th through the 10th at the Las Vegas Convention Center...BEYOND.FM is a fresh, inspiring and well-timed concept for exposing digital content to the masses and allowing artists, musicians and photographers to create awareness and new-found revenue streams. As the entertainment industry aggravates the consumer, offers discouraging DRM techniques and finds new ways to make the music enthusiast feel like a common criminal, the time is NOW for a paradigm shift bringing the personal, social and meaningful music purchasing experience BACK to the consumer. BEYOND.FM is a destination to discover and purchase (for personal use) or license (for commercial use) music, music videos, photography and podcasts/radio programming.

I haven't checked out Beyond.FM yet, but I plan to now. For those who want to check out more of Chuck, try my interview with him, about this same issue:

Internetwork Yourself: An Interview with Chuck D
[Scott Thill, Morphizm]
the minute they digitized music in 1985-86 from the first CD in '83, it was a double-edged sword. It saved the music business but at the same time it opened up a Pandora's Box. For example, they're making this item that costs very little to manufacture and are saying, "Do we have to price this the same as cassettes and vinyl? No, let's double the price." The accountant, lawyer, bean-counter mentality says, "Fuck it, we can get paid." In retro, they never really paid the artist any more. All it did was pad the salaries for executives...
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And, as always, here's the mighty PE, with "Fight the Power"...

:

Bring the noise!

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Alan Moore's Homeland is Finally Ready for Alan Moore

Good news from Morphizm pal and Top Shelf publisher Chris Staros: Alan Moore's dense sexual tome Lost Girls is finally going to be released in the UK. Which is where Moore has been living since forever. Which is the site of many of his postmodern reimaginations. Which is the country that has been benefiting from his massive reputation as the finest comics writer ever to take a breath. You're welcome, you laggard bastards. Here's Chris:

On January 1st, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s LOST GIRLS will finally be released in the United Kingdom and European Union. FAIR WARNING: Get your copies quick, as the limited supply will most likely disappear within a few weeks.

For more on Alan and Lost Girls, check out my huge Morphizm interview with the brainiac here:

We Are All Complicit: An Interview With Alan Moore
[Scott Thill, Morphizm]
Enter his latest tome Lost Girls, a collaboration with his longtime partner and new spouse Melinda Gebbie. An intertextual erotic tale reimagining the familiar narratives of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wizard of Oz -- with all the sex, loving and otherwise, put back into them where they originated and belong -- Lost Girls promises to stir the family values shit harder and longer than anything Moore has ever written. Mainly because he set out to save pornography from itself, and used Western culture's master narratives of budding maturity to make it happen. No squares allowed...
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Here also is a indie doc on Moore that I dug up on Tube. Anyone have a torrent I can peek at before bothering the director? Send it on!

VIDEO: THE MINDSCAPE OF ALAN MOORE

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A Quechua Christmas Carol

[Still groggy with a holiday hangover, so I'll let Morphizm pal and investigative muckraker Greg Palast take the reins with a tale of oil, greed and Indians. Sound familiar?]

A Quechua Christmas Carol
[Greg Palast, Morphizm]
I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.

I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”

He continued. "I'd never talked about my father before."

Apparently he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

"My mother told us he was working in the States."

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

"We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don't shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador's finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the "agreements" which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I'd met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, "We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?" Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn't. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn't fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela's president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn't done.

I'd returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan's chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it's not just any company he was challenging. Chevron's largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi's corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won't comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there's a verdict in favor of Ecuador's citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No one - NO ONE - has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.

"And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?" Rodrigo Perez, Texaco's top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco caused their kids' deaths. "If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude – which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added, "No one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil." Really? You could swim in the stuff and you'd be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron's Texaco unit came to their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi's men had told me that crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I'm no expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude oil production - benzene, toluene, and xylene, "are well-known carcinogens." Kennedy told me he's seen Chevron-Texaco's ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in the USA.

But it wasn't as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you'd see on country club links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn't get a dime. "What about the chairs in this office?" I asked. Couldn't the Cofan at least get those? "No," they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa's threat to use the power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush Administration. But to this President, it's all about justice, fairness. "You [Americans] wouldn't do this to your own people," he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska's Natives.

Correa's not unique. He's the latest of a new breed in Latin America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All "Leftists," as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blonds.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, "the monkey." Chavez told me proudly, "I am negro e indio" - Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of "monkey." Now, all over Latin America, the "monkeys" are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but every time he lost his money or his investors' money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it's just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who's been good and who's been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan's drinking water.

Or maybe we'll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage done by Exxon's oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega's beaches. It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island's shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as "smart" bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, "Well, I guess we're all Natives now."

Well, maybe we are. But we don't have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn't have to worry that her dad would forget about "the poor children who are cold" on the streets of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

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Zapatista Code Red

[I'm remote all through the Jesus holiday, lost in snow and loving it. So expect a light load on Morphizm and the MorphBlog all the way until Wednesday. But here's some more insight from the best author of the year, Naomi Klein. If you don't have her book The Shock Doctrine yet, you should get it. Fast. -- ST]

Zapatista Code Red
[Naomi Klein, Morphizm]
Nativity scenes are plentiful in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a colonial city in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. But the one that greets visitors at the entrance to the TierrAdentro cultural center has a local twist: figurines on donkeys wear miniature ski masks and carry wooden guns.

It is high season for “Zapatourism,” the industry of international travelers that has sprung up around the indigenous uprising here, and TierrAdentro is ground zero. Zapatista-made weavings, posters and jewelry are selling briskly. In the courtyard restaurant, where the mood at 10 pm is festive verging on fuzzy, college students drink Sol beer. A young man holds up a photograph of Subcomandante Marcos, as always in mask with pipe, and kisses it. His friends snap yet another picture of this most documented of movements.

I am taken through the revelers to a room in the back of the center, closed to the public. The somber mood here seems a world away. Ernesto Ledesma Arronte, a 40-year-old ponytailed researcher, is hunched over military maps and human rights incident reports. “Did you understand what Marcos said?” he asks me. “It was very strong. He hasn’t said anything like that in many years.”

Arronte is referring to a speech Marcos made the night before at a conference outside San Cristóbal. The speech was titled “Feeling Red: The Calendar and the Geography of War.” Because it was Marcos, it was poetic and slightly elliptical. But to Arronte’s ears, it was a code-red alert. “Those of us who have made war know how to recognize the paths by which it is prepared and brought near,” Marcos said. “The signs of war on the horizon are clear. War, like fear, also has a smell. And now we are starting to breathe its fetid odor in our lands.”

Marcos’s assessment supports what Arronte and his fellow researchers at the Center of Political Analysis and Social and Economic Investigations have been tracking with their maps and charts. On the fifty-six permanent military bases that the Mexican state runs on indigenous land in Chiapas, there has been a marked increase in activity. Weapons and equipment are being dramatically upgraded, new battalions are moving in, including special forces—all signs of escalation.

As the Zapatistas became a global symbol for a new model of resistance, it was possible to forget that the war in Chiapas never actually ended. For his part, Marcos—despite his clandestine identity—has been playing a defiantly open role in Mexican politics, most notably during the fiercely contested 2006 presidential elections. Rather than endorsing the center-left candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he spearheaded a parallel “Other Campaign,” holding rallies that called attention to issues ignored by the major candidates.

In this period, Marcos’s role as military leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) seemed to fade into the background. He was Delegate Zero—the anti-candidate. Last night, Marcos had announced that the conference would be his last such appearance for some time. “Look, the EZLN is an army,” he reminded his audience, and he is its “military chief.”

That army faces a grave new threat—one that cuts to the heart of the Zapatistas’ struggle. During the 1994 uprising, the EZLN claimed large stretches of land and collectivized them, its most tangible victory. In the San Andrés Accords, the right to territory was recognized, but the Mexican government has refused to fully ratify the accords. After failing to enshrine these rights, the Zapatistas decided to turn them into facts on the ground. They formed their own government structures—called good-government councils—and stepped up the building of autonomous schools and clinics. As the Zapatistas expand their role as the de facto government in large areas of Chiapas, the federal and state governments’ determination to undermine them is intensifying.

“Now,” says Arronte, “they have their method.” The method is to use the deep desire for land among all peasants in Chiapas against the Zapatistas. Arronte’s organization has documented that, in just one region, the government has spent approximately $16 million expropriating land and giving it to many families linked to the notoriously corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party. Often, the land is already occupied by Zapatista families. Most ominously, many of the new “owners” are linked to thuggish paramilitary groups, which are trying to force the Zapatistas from the newly titled land. Since September there has been a marked escalation of violence: shots fired into the air, brutal beatings, Zapatista families reporting being threatened with death, rape and dismemberment. Soon the soldiers in their barracks may well have the excuse they need to descend: restoring “peace” among feuding indigenous groups. For months the Zapatistas have been resisting violence and trying to expose these provocations. But by choosing not to line up behind Obrador in the 2006 election, the movement made powerful enemies. And now, says Marcos, their calls for help are being met with a deafening silence.

Exactly ten years ago, on December 22, 1997, the Acteal massacre took place. As part of the anti-Zapatista campaign, a paramilitary gang opened fire in a small church in the village of Acteal, killing forty-five indigenous people, sixteen of them children and adolescents. Some bodies were hacked with machetes. The state police heard the gunfire and did nothing. For weeks now, Mexico’s newspapers have been filled with articles marking the tragic ten-year anniversary of the massacre.

In Chiapas, however, many people point out that conditions today feel eerily familiar: the paramilitaries, the rising tensions, the mysterious activities of the soldiers, the renewed isolation from the rest of the country. And they have a plea to those who supported them in the past: don’t just look back. Look forward, and prevent another Acteal massacre before it happens.

This column was first published in The Nation

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Happy 50th Birthday, Mike Watt!

Hope you live as long to be as productive as Mike Watt, legendary punk bassist for The Minutemen, the reincarnated Stooges, fIREHOSE, Banyan, The Missingmen, The Black Gang...just tell me when to stop, OK? The short version is that San Pedro's unassuming, hardworking rocker has made it to 50 years and left us so far with a stunning backlog of work. The long version? I wrote that one a few days ago for my pals at LA Weekly:

Mike Watt: Mr. Engine Driver
[Scott Thill, LA Weekly]

"I’m freaking out, but it’s okay to get into the middle ground, into autumn," he adds. "Black Gang and Missingmen are middle-age records, but that’s natural because I’m there. I can’t make The Punch Line," the Minutemen’s blistering 1981 debut full-length. "I’m in a different place in my life. I wrote all those songs for D. Boon. Now I write for Watt."

Writing for Watt, however, does not mean that there is life without D. Boon and the Minutemen as much as that there is life after them. As the years pass and memories fade, the Pedro art-punk trio only grows in stature, marked for life as influences on those moving units and those making movements. When the music lifers are assembled and counted in the year 3000, the "corndog" Pedro clan that wrote the jagged classic "Cut" will have indeed made the cut. That’s the juice that just keeps on giving.

"To be honest, it is the biggest reason I’m still doing music," Watt confesses. "At the time, it was the movement: We didn’t think it was music, but expression. We had a weird style, but it was empowering. And we met some daring people, like Bad Brains, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth. They weren’t afraid, we figured, so why should we be? And I want others to think that if I can do it, they can too. That’s why I helped those kids put out We Jam Econo."

And from the Fountain of Youth to snapshot sunsets, Mike Watt is stacking his future with expressions to be dissected and discussed by open-minded come-ups in love with everything from Daydream Nation to Ulysses. It’s a remarkably dense body of work, like all of the greats, which starts unassumingly in San Pedro with talented friends trading riffs and ends who knows where. Who knows? All that matters is that he’s working. Hard...

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VIDEO: THE MINUTEMEN, "THIS AIN'T NO PICNIC"

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Drifting Into Dystopia: An Interview with Dahr Jamail

There are those who blather on about Iraq from their comfy chairs, and then there are journos who have actually been there. And then it gets even simpler: There are hacks who bed down with the military and never leave their side, and then there are journos like Dahr Jamail, who venture, as his new book explains, Beyond the Green Zone.

I don't think I need to tell you which one you can trust.

Drifting Into Dystopia: An Interview with Dahr Jamail
[Scott Thill, Morphizm]
Morphizm: What do you think is the chief discrepancy between the armchair journalists who opine on the occupation, and those who have actually gone there?
DJ: I think it is more the difference between those of us who choose not to embed and those who agree to work as hacks for the Pentagon by embedding. Let us not forget, the embedded reporter program that we have today was constructed by the Pentagon to use as a means of information control, and information management. First implemented during the senior Bush's attack on Iraq in 1991, it has been greatly augmented into what we see today. Journalists who choose not to work as hacks for the Pentagon get to see what the occupation is like from the other side of the gun. We go out and talk to Iraqis firsthand, and understand what it's like to live with no potable water, no job, no government, no security, and the constant threat of death. Basically, we get to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what it's like to live under a brutal, failed occupation that has no end in sight, and report on it, as opposed to going around with a military unit and reporting what it's like to occupy someone else's country...

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Peter Jackson Goes Back to the Shire!

For those of you who haven't heard, New Zealand auteur Peter Jackson has finally ended his feud with Bob Shaye and New Line over the billions in Lord of the Rings payouts. Which is a bunch of lame legalese translating to one all-important fact: He will be returning to The Shire to film him some hobbits! Bilbo, namely, in the upcoming screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. From The Hollywood Reporter:

"I think that we all realized that we were getting nowhere, and in some ways it's possible that the lawyers and the accountants and everyone that got in the middle of this were not serving the objective," Shaye said. "We had to start listening to our own conscience and our own objectives, which was to make this happen."

Uh, I think Shaye has that backwards. I think his conscience told him to listen to his accountants, who were telling him to start making some movies that will make money. And make them fast.

Jackson has obliged, and production is set for 2009 for a 2010 release in two parts. That's right, two movies. But Jackson won't be directing, nailed down as he is by screen adaptations of Lovely Bones and Tintin. But hey, Lucas didn't direct The Empire Strikes Back, so there's that.

In any case, if you want Morphizm's take on Lord of the Rings, here's some back data, including a Q&A with Shaye for Wired. Those were the days:

You Can't Go Home Again: Lord of the Rings, Return of the King

"A Religious Moment Where Something Might Happen": An Interview with Viggo Mortensen

Ten Reasons Why American Culture Didn't Suck in 2002

Wired: Hobbit Producer's Hare-Raising Tale

VIDEO: "THE HOBBIT" PART 1

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Morphizm Multimedia. It's Alive.

Those of you who know Morphizm from way back know that it has always been looking for a free television set. Good thing Google gave it one. It's changing the way a Berkeley grad thinks about Stanford. It's a NorCal thing. In any case...

CLICK HERE: MORPHIZM MULTIMEDIA

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What the Fuck, Huckabee?

[Morphizm's guest blogger ZenKat drops by once again with a sordid strand of Mike "The Antichrist" Huckabee's backstory. Pals of PETA might want to cover their eyes.]

If Lakoff is right, and we subconsciously view the president as our national metaparent (in either a "stern father" or "nurturing mother" role), then we should be very scared and creeped out by the prospect of a Huckabee presidency. From Salon:

The latest revelation of GOP dog abuse came from Newsweek, which recently reported that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's son, David Huckabee, lost his job as a Boy Scout camp counselor in 1998, when he was 17, for killing a stray dog by hanging it from a tree. Marcal Young, the camp executive who fired Huckabee, told the Arkansas Times-Gazette that the hanging was a violation of the Scout law, "A Scout is kind." It was also a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to $1,000 and 12 months in prison. John Bailey, then-director of the Arkansas State Police, told Newsweek that a local prosecutor asked him to investigate, but that the governor's chief of staff and personal lawyer both pressured Bailey to keep away. According to Young, David said he was trying to put a sick stray out of its misery. Or, as Mike Huckabee said, "There was a dog that apparently had mange and was absolutely, I guess, emaciated." (Since 1998, David Huckabee has avoided further dog killings, though he was arrested recently for attempting to bring a loaded .40 caliber Glock through airport security.)

I knew families like this when I was growing up ... repressed, authoritarian, successful fathers ... and enraged, twisted, broken sons ...

Not the national metaphor I want to live under, thanks. Bush/Cheney was twisty enough.

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Mr. Dodd Goes to Washington

I've been trying to stay out of the so-called "horse race" aspect of the 2008 election, mostly because it smells like horse ass. But you have got to give someone their due when they go to work for you, and so far only Christopher Dodd has done that. By go to work for you, I mean actually doing something rather than saying, over and over again from state to state, what you are going to do. The difference, to mangle the Bush administration's philosophy of change, is the same as walking down a road map to somewhere rather than agreeing to agree on building a road map to nowhere.

In that sense, Dodd has seized upon a strategy of action over diction. While campaigning hard in Iowa like the rest of the Democratic hopefuls, Dodd actually came back to Congress to do his job and filibuster the hell out of the offensively named Protect America Act. By heckling the halls of government for pretending to protect America while granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms like AT&T and Verizon that have compromised its constitutional freedoms while receiving industry favors for their efforts, Dodd achieved escape velocity back into reality. Those he left in his proactive dust like Biden, Clinton and Obama? Well, they decided that they favored the hyperreality of rhetoric, which is to say flurries of language with no intent to follow it up with substantive action.

Now, I'm not a doddering Dodd-ite, make no mistake about that. I've had my eyes on Obama. But you have to walk the walk if you're going to talk the talk. And as much as I'm not a fan of Dodd's stance on many things, I do remember sighing with happiness and gratitude when I found out he kicked the Protect America Act out on the street where it could freeze until January. Sure, he got help from other Democrats like Russ Feingold, who is really the man that should become president of the United States in 2008. But Dodd took a plane and blew the ears off of noncommittal wafflers for eight full hours, saving all of our asses in the process. And for that, I have to give him his due.

Whether you do is up to you, and there's much time between now and then for Dodd to screw up. But his plan of action should be circulated from one of this nation to the next, by as many millions as possible, to remind the Democratic hopefuls looking to take America out of our new dark ages that you can say anything and you can't do everything. But you should do something, anything, to help Americans enter the post-Bush phase without a sneaking suspicion that they're about to get screwed all over again.

So thanks, Senator Dodd. We needed that. Badly.

VIDEO: MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

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Kim Deal Battles Breeders, Pixies, Pro Tools

Good news for Kim Deal fans: The Breeders have a new album on the way, and Pitchfork has a sweet interview with the diehard rock icon. Bad news, however, for Pixies fans: According to Deal, there's little chance the Pixies will ever release a new disc. Most of us Pixies lifers who were around for their first incarnation thought as much. But there's little doubt Deal just drove a stake into the hearts of all the influential legend's late adopters. Cry out loud:

I thought it was going to be a couple of shows, and it turned out really good. I had a really good time doing it. People were just so happy we were doing it. It was just so nice, like [an] "it's over, thank you, bye," kind of thing. And so there was never any-- I don't know, I think it gets talked about whenever Charles [Thompson, aka Frank Black] has any release, which is often. I have a feeling that's when he talks about it more than anything. Because him and Joe haven't gotten together to write any songs, so I think it's kind of something to bring up whenever he needs press. That's the only time I hear about it. I have no idea, dude.

In other words, cherish those memories, as they are all you'll likely have. Good thing I have a bunch of them, scattered on Morphizm, Salon and AlterNet. Here they are:

A Bit Awkward: loudQUIETloud A Film About the Pixies

Morphizm: The Sublime Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim

Morphizm: Pixies Review

Salon: Interview with the Pixies

AlterNet: Wave of Adoration

VIDEO: THE BREEDERS, "SAFARI"

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Owning Up to Social Nets

Greetings Morphizm-lings. Especially if you arrive here via MySpace. Or Facebook. Or LinkedIn. Or. My latest filing for WireTap explains. -- ST]

Who Owns Whom? Social Networking's Corporate Roots
[Scott Thill, WireTap]
From Howard Dean to Barack Obama, Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton, online social networking has become a treasure trove of connectivity, cash and exposure. But who's buying whom? Whether it's MySpace's cozy relationship with Fox News, Facebook's privacy invasions or LinkedIn's reported quest for corporate funding, the brave new world of online friendship has become, like its real-time partner in the offline world, a tangled web of competing loyalties.

And, as usual, it's consumers, particularly youth, who are caught in the middle.

Take MySpace for example, which started out as an improvement over Friendster, a similar social networking site of the early 2000s that was too clunky to survive its leaner, meaner counterpart. After spending a few years as a property of eUniverse and its founder Brad Greenspan, MySpace was sold in 2005 for $580 million to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., the tabloid empire behind such right-wing phenomena as Fox News, the New York Postand the Weekly Standard, and the third-largest media conglomerate in the world. The buyout placed MySpace, the home of 200 million users, firmly in the grasp of Fox Interactive Media, which also counts entertainment aggregate IGN and Beliefnet, the largest online faith and spirituality network, among its many holdings.

"MySpace.com [is one] of the Web's hottest properties and resonate[s] with the same audiences that are most attracted to Fox's news, sports and entertainment offerings," Murdoch wrote in a press release after the takeover. "We see a great opportunity to combine the popularity of ... MySpace with our existing online assets."

While Murdoch's myriad assets aren't all steeped in propaganda, some of them are, including Fox News which, unlike most other news organizations, makes you dumber the more you watch it. Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism found in May 2007 that of the three major cable networks, including MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, only the latter spent as much or more time on the Anna Nicole Smith scandal than it did on the war in Iraq or even the 2008 presidential race. It spent little to no time on the U.S. attorneys firing scandal, and not just because Fox News' Mara Liasson called Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- who circumvented the Geneva Convention guaranteeing habeas corpus -- "a good choice" for the job that Gonzales eventually lost because of corruption.

As the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy report put it back in 2003, two years before Murdoch acquired MySpace, "Those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions."

But that penchant for confusion didn't stop sociopolitical and environmental justice groups like Greenpeace, American Civil Liberties Union, Food Not Bombs and scores more from logging onto MySpace and setting up proxy sites. Some jokers even set up fake sites for Murdoch himself, which were soon pulled down by Fox Interactive. The best one still resides at Slate.com, where Murdoch's bio ominously but correctly explains: "It's MySpace -- you just lurk in it"...

MORE @ WIRETAP

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Cali Snowboarders Unite!

The way climate crisis is unfolding, those of us who live for snow have to grab nirvana when we can. And we can this week, according to the NOAA:

STORMY WEATHER PATTERN RETURNING TO EASTERN CALIFORNIA AND WESTERN NEVADA THIS WEEK ... A SERIES OF STORMS IN THE PACIFIC WILL MOVE INTO THE WESTERN U.S. STARTING TONIGHT AND CONTINUING THROUGH MUCH OF THE UPCOMING WEEK.

Full stop. Snowboarders, kiss the sky and grab your boards. And if you still have any cash left in this recessive economy, grab that too. You're going to need it.

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Sun Spot: Pink Floyd Echoes in Pompeii

Another Sunday, another Sun Spot. This time around, our weekend feature goes back in time to catch Pink Floyd, live at Pompeii, performing the first half of their epic "Echoes" from Meddle. What more needs to be said?

VIDEO: PINK FLOYD, LIVE AT POMPEII, "ECHOES PART 1A"

VIDEO: PINK FLOYD, LIVE AT POMPEII, "ECHOES PART 1B"

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The End Times Near: Tila Tequila Tops MTV

I have seen ten minutes of this show. I couldn't take much more. Even in minute doses over several weeks. It is a formulaic distraction from things that matter, interested in excess when the world could use more of less. And it has zero to do with music. Which is probably why it is ruling MTV:

Tequila's `Shot at Love' is toast of MTV [AP]
MTV series development guru Tony DiSanto points to the show's original will-she-choose-a-man-or-a-woman format as the main reason for its success.

"It's one of those shows where you never know what's going to happen next," DiSanto says. "I think there's an innate curiosity in wondering what is going to make Tila decide between a man and a woman. It makes for a compelling piece of programming that you just can't take your eyes off of."

Wrong, dude. I can take my eyes off of it pretty easily. And my ears, and fingers.

But, in times of terror and war, it seems I'm somewhat alone in that respect. At least among the youth demographic. And since they're the ones killing and dying in Iraq, I guess I shouldn't complain.

Wait, I just figured it out. Starship Troopers was a documentary. That explains everything.

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Exponology: Con-cen-tra-tion!

The irony is intense. The hotter it gets, the more our distractions mount. Baseball. Steroids. Dude, tell me something I don't know.

What some might not know is that climate change will be the only game in town soon. As a follow-up to our previous Exponology entry, Morphizm has this bit of news from Bali:

2007 data confirms warming trend [BBC]
The UK's Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia conclude that globally, this year ranks as the seventh warmest. The 11 warmest years in this set have all occurred within the last 13 years. For the northern hemisphere alone, 2007 was the second warmest recorded.

That's some concentration. Imagine what happens when those holdout percentages cave in. Now imagine it snowballing. And it might. England might enter another ice age. Cali will enter permanent drought. I can hear the borderlines shifting as I write.

They smell like the future.

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Arctic Summers Ice Free Starting...Tomorrow?

Here's another entry for the exponology files, which I'm compiling for my first book Hyperhighway to Hell. Exponology is basically an invented study dedicated to exponents, mathematical and otherwise. What otherwise, you ask? Well, the exponents of trends, culture or politics, which is to say people who foreground particular data, or party lines, over the exponentially accumulating evidence that contradicts them.

In this case, as in pretty much every case going forward into our dystopian climate crisis, the argument that we've still got time to stop the ravages of global warming.

Previous estimations had the Arctic ocean ice-free sometime in the middle to late 21st century, but for those who know their exponents well, that was mostly optimism and propaganda. Sure, the idea of a total melt felt better pushed decades into the future, to say 2050 or even 2100. But the science already stated otherwise, and those who hew to the carbon party line had no interest in divulging it. And so it gathered force, Newtonian style, until the evidence proliferated so extensively that it could not be ignored.

And now it can't.

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'
[Jonathan Amos, BBC]
Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years. Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

A revelation, to be sure, if you were drinking the IPCC Kool-Aid. But here's a deeper epiphany, especially as it applies to exponential ice loss: Maslowski and his crew haven't even taken into account the most recent years, some of the hottest ever. You'd think that those years would have some numbers worth crunching. But that's if you want the record to accurately reflect reality. Which is about to knock very hard on Earth's door...right about now.

"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. "So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative."

In other words, what we've been hearing from Al Gore, the IPCC, that disaster flick Day After Tomorrow, is coming right for us and it's coming fast. Which is not to say that things will shake out the way the official wisdom believes they will. They might shake out worse. Seriously.

I'm not sure what it's going to take to hip everyone to this, but if you were on the fence about climate change, I'd jump right about now. And yes, these things are coming even if you stop driving your car right now. But you should start figuring out ways to do that anyway. Same goes for factory farming, tar sands extraction, whatever. The bottom line is that we have reached the bottom line as a planet, when it comes to climate change. We're all in this together, whether we like it or not.

Stephen Hawking, no idiot, is worried the planet is going to turn into Venus. Ever been there? It blows. No seriously, blows hard. Clouds of sulfuric acid, an atmosphere of dense carbon dioxide. Its oceans, utterly evaporated. Not a nice place to live. Not even a nice place to visit. That's what the Venus T-shirt reads.

But the point of this revelation is not to panic over global warming, although that would help. It's to note that, whatever the science or the politics, there is always data being ignored or spun within an inch of its life that is not counted in anything approximating a final analysis. Which doesn't mean it's not there. It's just lying in wait, accruing for a spectacular comeback, one operating on full exponential power which will overwhelm even the best of preparations.

Why? Because those preparations are based on incomplete findings. By accident, or on purpose.

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Ike Turner 1931 - 2007

[Ike Turner passed away on December 12, 2007. In honor of his memory, Morphizm is resuscitating Mo's peculiar 2004 interface with the funk pioneer. May his troubled soul rest in peace. -- ST]

Ike Turner: My Private Dancer
[Mo Herms, Morphizm]
Today is my last day at my current position. I'm moving on to a better one (with a touch more money), and one with a whole new set of interesting issues. But let me tell you about some of my misadventures with this job.

Some of what I do during the day is handle phone calls from cracked out songwriters who may have had a hit for about 32 seconds, 18 years ago. And since one of my bosses -- the guy who is supposed to handle these calls -- refuses to talk to them, I get to pass on the good news that they won't be getting a check from us anytime soon.

"How the fuck am I supposed to feed my chilluns, beeyatch?"
"But I'm on the street; can't ya give me a couple thousand?"

Stuff like that.

Now they aren't all crazy -- some of the nice folks I've chatted up are Glenn Frey, Irene Cara, Afrika Bambaata, and Kool (leader of The Gang). From time to time, however, it's a name that I recognize.

On this particular day, it was Ike Turner...

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The Biz Debuts! Dollar Dead, Paulson Dirty

Greetings, money lovers. As you know, Morphizm has been digging with a ferocity into economics over the last couple of years, mostly because we need to make more money. And we haven't been great at it, but we haven't been as bad as Wall Street, which is tanking so hard that it may never regain its superpower stature. In honor of our very educational research, I've christened a new business news section called The Biz, with my favorite graphic of Bush flipping off a crowd he's not doubt boring to death with lies. It's beyond apropos.

For The Biz's auspicious debut, let us consider the possibilities that the dollar may be dead by 2009, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is as dirty as they come. Cash out!

Mortgage Meltdown: Bankers pay lip service to families while scurrying to avert suits, prison
[SF Chronicle]
The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process. And, to be sure, fraud is everywhere. It's in the loan application documents, and it's in the appraisals. There are e-mails and memos floating around showing that many people in banks, investment banks and appraisal companies - all the way up to senior management - knew about it...MORE

Lukoil May Switch to Oil, Gas Sales in Rubles in 2009
[Bloomberg]
Russia's largest independent oil producer, may start selling crude and gas in rubles within two years as the U.S. dollar weakens...The dollar has dropped 10 percent against the euro this year, reducing the value of exports by oil-rich nations. The weakness against the ruble has eaten into profits at Russian companies, whose costs are denominated in the local currency...State-run OAO Gazprom, the world's largest natural-gas producer, has said it's also considering moving to rubles from dollars and euros. The company hasn't given a timeframe.

...Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil supplier, fought off an attempt last month by Iran and Venezuela to get OPEC to discuss pricing oil in different currencies rather than in dollars. Six Gulf Arab states will discuss a proposal this month to revalue their currencies against the U.S. currency, the secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council said in November...MORE

Better start stockpiling those euros!

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Why We Are Totally Screwed

UPDATE: Morphizm's pals at The Huffington Post have syndicated this post there. Dig in, and join the discussion!

I'm not the only one who thinks that the Bush administration has been playing with the markets ever since 9/11, when a series of terrorist attacks destroyed New York's nerve center for international finance, the World Trade Center. And if you think it's suspicious that planes nailed the towers while missing other empty symbols of American power like the Washington Monument or the White House, you're not alone. But that is for another, more controversial essay.

Suffice it to say that the Bush administration may seem incompetent, but they are fundraisers par excellence. It's certainly no mistake that the Fed lowered their funds rate to practically nothing under Bush and Greenspan, paving the way for the Great Hedge Funds Fuckover of the New Millennium, which I covered in depth for AlterNet here and here. And now that Greenspan's successor Ben Bernanke has come out and cut another quarter-point off, expect the trend to continue. The Fed's action and Bush's recent plan to bail out subprimers share something significant in common: They will have zero effect of the problems the American economy faces hurtling into 2008. Just in time for the election!

Of course, I could give a long, Thillian (new word!) spiel on why Bush's subprime plans sucks ass, but why? I've got a stone-cold economist and a brainiac doom prophet to handle that for me. And you. Thank the Big Bang for the internet:

Spirit of the Season
[Jim Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation]
"The Hope Now Alliance is just a political sham. The purpose of it is not to save the hapless occupants of over-leveraged houses, but first to buy a little more time so that the worker bees in the financial industry can justify awarding each other multi-million-dollar Christmas bonus packages, and second, to postpone the 'workout' of all this bad investment as far into the future as possible...Maybe all the players really know that keeping the ship afloat until Christmas is really the best they can hope for. Christmas means a lot in this country. It represents all Americans' old hope that miracles can happen. Bums turn out to be Santa Claus. Old curmudgeons are transformed overnight into loving uncles. Angels save us when we jump despairingly into icey torrents. And Goldman Sachs executives pass out multi-million-dollar checks to the wizards who 'innovated' an ingenious way for the rest of their country to commit financial suicide." MORE

Henry Paulson's Priorities
[Paul Krugman, Common Dreams]
"Mr. Paulson’s attempt to help investors, while doing little or nothing for distressed and defrauded borrowers, might make sense if his plan would reduce investor losses enough to seriously improve the overall financial situation. But only a small fraction of subprime borrowers will qualify for relief, and many of these borrowers will eventually face foreclosure anyway. So the plan is unlikely to reduce overall mortgage-related losses by more than a few percent, at most - not enough to make any real difference to financial stability. Indeed, interest-rate spreads that have been signaling a crisis of confidence in the financial system didn’t narrow at all when the plan was announced. Still, you might say that the Paulson plan is better than nothing. But the relevant alternative isn’t nothing; it’s a plan that - like Barney Frank’s proposal - would actually help working families. And that’s what the administration is trying to avoid." MORE

As long-winded as I am, I am also in love with short answers. And they are always around, even in labyrinthine mechanisms like CDOs and SIVs and other acronyms for upper-class scams. So let's be frank about this: The subprime trend was built to sell heavily structured loans to suckers in order to skim bonuses off the top, buy mansions for the suits who retire comfortably while the rest of the economy, and its suckers, suffered the negative billions in blowback. That is it, that is all.

Bush's plan to fix the problem amounts to little more than dampening the impact for the suits, while screwing their victims. Why would he want to help people without any money to begin with, especially after he asked them to go back to shopping after they saw planes and bodies fall from the sky? He knew then, as many of us did, that the global economy had changed to the extreme, and that the attacks on 9/11 were vast evidence for that transformation.

But the lone gunman theory works nicely when people just want to cruise the mall, and pretend that oil (or ice, for that matter) will be around forever. That those who supply them with "the gas," as it was called in the great sci-fi dysoptia The Road Warrior, are not the same people that bankrolled their doom.

No, Bush and Paulson, once the head of Goldman Sachs -- who managed to escape the subprime collapse with nary a scrape -- are no good at fixing things. They are only good at fucking them up. For the suckers, that is. For everyone else? They're gold, baby. Black and otherwise.

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Slint Metal Replicant Dead Child Attacks

Once upon a time, there was a legendary band named Slint. It influenced everyone from Mogwai to Three Mile Pilot and beyond, but then broke up as soon as it exploded. One of its brainiacs by the name of David Pajo decided to stick with the music, and splintered into any number of experimental strands. His latest one is a beast of metal band called Dead Child. It's loud.

Dead Child's debut effort Attack is out in April 2008 on Quarterstick Records, so keep an ear out for it and a wallet out for their forthcoming spring tour. For now, here's a vid for your eyes. Long live whatever rock.

VIDEO: DEAD CHILD, "NEVER LET THE DEVIL BE YOUR HEAD"

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ACLU: Hold Up, Mukasey

[Got this email from my pal ZenKat this morning, about ACLU's petition for the new attorney general Michael Mukasey to stop the CIA's bullshit erasure of torture tapes. Back in the day, these cover-ups were big news. After eight years of the Bush administration, they're biz as usual. Check ZenKat's spiel below, and click to sign the ACLU's petition. That is, if you're not in the mind to be abducted and spirited off to one our "black sites" for some simulated drowning. -- ST]

Last week, the head of the C.I.A., Michael Hayden, announced the agency destroyed tapes of what he called a "harsh interrogation" and what you and I would call torture. The reason? To protect agency operatives from legal consequences.

Thankfully, members of Congress are already expressing their outrage over this action. Senator Kennedy said, "We haven’t seen anything like this since the 18 and a half minute gap on the tapes of Richard Nixon."

This is a cover-up of epic proportions, but to get Attorney General Mukasey to take action, we need to keep the pressure on. That's why I just signed this petition demanding that Attorney General Mukasey immediately appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate what's been going on at the C.I.A., and prosecute if appropriate. Can you join me?

SIGN THE ACLU'S PETITION HERE

WATCH: WATERBOARDING HOW-TO FROM U.S. MILITARY

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Sun Spot: Gravediggaz vs. Shitty Rap

Welcome back to the Sun Spot, Morphizm's Sunday video feed. This time around, we've got one of the most underrated, overachieving hip-hop collectives of all time, the mighty Gravediggaz. The brainchild of Prince Paul (De La Soul, Stetsasonic), RZA (Wu-Tang Clan), Frukwan (Stetsasonic) and Too Poetic (Brothers Grym) was miles ahead of its time with rhymes filled equally with graphic horror and indomitable humor, a War-on-Terror rap gang that anticipated our post-9/11 clusterfuck with skill and ease. Below is a video for "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide" from their 1994 debut classic Six Feet Deep, with a shorty documentary on the band to begin. Raise up like the undead! They don't make them like they used to.

VIDEO: GRAVEDIGGAZ, "NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE"

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ThunderSnow!

It's not snow. It's not thunder. It's thundersnow. Coming to save my snowboarding ass? Film at 11.

'Thunder snow' in Southern California?
Los Angeles Times
December 9, 2007

After Santa Ana winds and monster-size surf, a blast of cold air overnight Saturday was expected to generate another extreme weather phenomenon in the mountains: thunder snow.

The booming spectacle of thunder snow, the rare combination of heavy snow accompanied by thunder and lightning, was possible as mountain temperatures were expected to dip into the low 20s and teens.

"It's one of the coolest things in the atmosphere," said Mark Moede, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego. Isolated pockets of thunder snow rattle in when atmospheric conditions are both very cold and unstable, Moede said. However, "most areas are just going to see regular old snow," Moede said... MORE

Photo: Mammoth

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Best Music of 2007: El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead

The end of the year is near, and so are the year-end lists. I already wrote mine up for the print music lifer XLR8R, selections of which have been popping up on their revamped website. Anyone who knows me or Morphizm could probably tell that El-P's brilliant, disturbed I'll Sleep When You're Dead was going to top my list. But for those who don't, here's my spiel from XLR8R, followed by the in-depth interview I conducted with Producto earlier this year for both XLR8R and Morphizm. Don't sleep. Seriously.

Best Artists of 2007

Truth is a powerful thing, which is why so many artists and politicians avoid it. But El-P packed so much of it into I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, with the help of so many all-stars, that only those who still want to wave their hands in they air like the just don’t care missed it...
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A Scanner Darkly: An Interview with El-P

"Where are the angry records?" Meline asks me over the phone, sounding like he's trying to kill off the last vestiges of a cold. "I'm fucking angry and upset right now, and I'm also scared and trying to come to grips with balancing this incredible fatalism and the fact that I am still alive, that I am still here. We're not dead yet, but even the violent records aren't angry these days. And that shit fucking annoys me..."
MORE @ XLR8R

I Refuse to Ignore Myself : An Interview with El-P

I think one of the reasons why I didn't want to make I'll Sleep When You're Dead so directly political is that I am trying to make music that lasts. I think the album is really about struggle. Struggle remains, no matter what. In ten years, there will still be struggle. And I think what people will come away with is that idea of trying to keep your head above water during that struggle, trying to make sense of the shit. If you listen to some of the more obscure Curtis Mayfield stuff where he's calling out the actual mayor or comptroller, you'll understand why I didn't make it a direct political statement. Then it's a case of, "Wow, this music is incredible, but who is that guy he just mentioned?" (Laughs) He's been dead for fucking 40 years! And unfortunately, I feel like I'm incredibly in tune with all the fucking stress. It's my fucking curse, and why my music sounds the way it does...
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VIDEO: El-P, "Smithereens"

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The Drive is Wiped

Sorry for the silence, peoples of Morphizm. We're having issues with the site during redesign and holiday pain. But here's some delicious noise from the recently reunited My Bloody Valentine to tide you over:

VIDEO: "YOU MADE ME REALISE," MY BLOODY VALENTINE

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Sun Spot: DJ Shadow vs. Wong Kar-Wai

It's been a couple weeks since I posted a Sun Spot, Morphizm's Sunday tradition of posting a sweet video. But considering that I'm having one of the worst fucking weekends of my life, I didn't have far to go for this one. It's a video for DJ Shadow's hypnotic "Six Days," directed by indie auteur Wong Kar-Wai. It sounds like I feel on the inside. Don't come in here. Stay out there and enjoy the audio and visuals.

VIDEO: DJ SHADOW, "SIX DAYS"

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