Friday, September 26, 2008

The McCain strategy - Americans are stupid

First, McCain says he's got to postpone today's long-awaited debate and suspend his campaign, so he can fly over to Washington to help save America's economy with a clear and bipartisan mind. But while he sits through a fruitless White House meeting with President Bush, Congressional leaders and Obama, his campaign ads still go on the air. Now, citing "significant progress" in negotiations for the complicated $700 billion bailout proposal that went nowhere yesterday, his campaign is up and running and the debate is going to happen.

All of this for political gain!

"The difference between Barack Obama and John McCain was apparent during the White House meeting yesterday where Barack Obama's priority was political posturing in his opening monologue defending the package as it stands," a press release announcing the resumption of the McCain campaign reads. "John McCain listened to all sides so he could help focus the debate on finding a bipartisan resolution that is in the interest of taxpayers and homeowners."

Here's a strategy: Switch off the presidential race's omnipresent politicking, like a light, so you can put off an important debate and simultaneously demonstrate that you have a "bipartisan" outlook that solves problems. And then pray that voters still on the fence won't notice that you played politics by trying to erase them, and then failed to win the support of your own party to ram a complicated bill through Congress that will have massive effects on these same voters.

McCain must think that most Americans are pretty fucking stupid, huh?

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Raglani - "The horror! The horror!"

After a century of twiddling with the knobs of modular synthesizers, splicing magnetic tape, collecting field recordings, borrowing from foreign musical traditions and doing what we now merely refer to as “sampling,” pioneers of the electroacoustic arts have fundamentally improved music. Now, the world is host to sonic landscapes—turbulent oceans, jagged cliffs overlooking arid savannah, blighted cities reminiscent of Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles. Joe Raglani’s Of Sirens Born, inspired by recordings of Latin American folk and the treacherous jungles depicted in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, takes the listener on what sounds like a voyage through a creek of sludge in a dark sewer of St. Louis, Raglani’s post-industrial home base. Awash in grumbling drones and dissonant harmonies, swollen with a tension that rarely finds release, Of Sirens Born is at once terrifying and sublime. Continued at the Glow...