Greetings, earthlings! I am a writer, code monkey and hyperreality analyst for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and more. Morphizm celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2011 on the Fourth of July. Want a data feed on Morphizm or myself? [Make Contact].
From My Bloody Valentine’s recently announced reissues and rarities to the April release of Spiritualized’s new sonic spacewalk Sweet Heart Sweet Light, synesthetic rock is returning from orbit. But its best-kept secret still remains Swervedriver, whose muscular guitar atmospherics are also thankfully back in action, starting Monday night on Fallon.
After that, Swervedriver embarks on a U.S. tour, starting Wednesday in Philly and winding down April 7 in Los Angeles. It’s a slim but rewarding launch window for both noobs and old-schoolers crate-digging for last century’s stunners sadly underestimated by those in search of less challenging artistry. That doesn’t include Madonna, who according to Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin, had discerning tastes in so-called shoegaze.
“Many years ago, a sound engineer friend of ours told us that sometime in the mid ’90s, he found himself at a dinner table with Madonna,” Franklin (above, bearded) told me. “He swore that after she asked him which bands he had worked with, and he mentioned Swervedriver, she said, ‘Ah yes, best guitars in the business!’ I really should ask him again about that. Perhaps he was on drugs at the time, or perhaps we were when he told us.”
Elected mayor of New York City two months after 9/11, Michael Bloomberg has changed political affiliations three times in the last decade, made exponential billions by digitizing our lightspeed information economy, evolved beyond a person into an elite corporate personhood, and, after extending his cosmopolis’ term limits, served three historic terms, lately trying to figure out how to dampen down Occupy Wall Street’s populist uprising.
For all those purposes, according to a thinly veiled speech attacking career federal and state politicians, Bloomberg boasts his own army, and he doesn’t seem afraid to use it.
“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world,” the 69-year-old Independent — who used to be a Republican that used to be a Democrat — explained in a late November speech at MIT. “I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have…Unfortunately, people at the federal level or the state level typically spend their whole lives in politics, and they’ve never been an executive and it shows.”
But despite all of the arguably arrogant positives that allegedly place his resume well above that of comparatively inexperienced beltway politicians, Occupy Wall Street has stripped away much of his independent facade and exposed him as an enabling engineer of our current political and economic misery, as well as a controversial civil-rights offender with a taste for panoptic totalitarianism. Which does not bode well for what The Atlantic called last September “not just [a] mayor, but also effectively the head of a de facto city-state.”
Indeed, far from being more experienced than the career federal and state politicians he openly lampoons at MIT, Bloomberg now finds himself in what could be a can’t-win political proposition.
“Bloomberg will be under incredible pressure from downtown bankers to wipe away the protestors by force if they are still hanging around this spring,” Rolling Stone’s excellent muckraker Matt Taibbi told me. “If he doesn’t send in the troops, he’ll lose the financial services industry, and he needs those people to govern New York. But if he becomes the face of a violent move against Occupy Wall Street, it could destroy his national political career. So no matter which door he picks in this Let’s Make a Deal episode, he comes out a loser. It’s kind of awesome.”
A year ago, the geothermal-rich Japan suffered an utterly predictable earthquake, tsunami and nuclear nightmare that is still currently unfurling in terrible ways. The more we know about what happened, one pattern becomes utterly clear: We should have known more about what was happening, as it happened, but were prevented by those whose culpability in such a predictable disaster was no longer safely hidden.
The same goes for the readout and fallout. From wreckage to radiation, Japan, and the rest of the world that its haphazard approach to hazardous waste has subsequently endangered, is still in the danger zone. Like Chernobyl whose shadow it annihilated, the Fukushima clusterfuck will take decades before we can fully apprehend, must less resolve, its technocratic ravages.
And to think, it all could have been stopped cold if TEPCO, and other nuclear industry titans and teat-suckers, would have just screened these cold-sobering reality checks disguised as harrowing films. With that sad fact in mind, I have resuscitated a cultural critique I submitted in those irradiated weeks shortly after the disaster, which was buried by our unhealthy obsessions with lesser matters.
Greetings, earthlings! I am a writer, code monkey and hyperreality analyst for 
