Tour Diary, day negative three. We play our first show in Montreal on Friday. Paperwork is in hand, merch is being shipped to Boston for us to collect on our 3rd show (sorry, Montreal and Quebec City), and aside from feeling like hell from fighting off a flu, everything’s great.
I’ve got a kickass new live rig:
…and some amazing designs for all my merch (courtesy of graphic designer extraordinaire Robert Nixon):
Lace up your combats and order your earplugs, we’re just about ready to roll.
A post for my brothers, both literal and figurative, trying to stay safe in Toronto:
The anarchist concept of “direct action” has been corrupted- mostly by those who claim the anarchist label- beyond all recognition in recent years, especially in North America, and, of course, beyond all measure in the USA. [...] The classic such act would have been IWW walkouts at a certain hour to enforce a certain working time. What does this mean ? It means that direct action is something that has an immediate effect, or at least the possibility of same. That it corrects an injustice or advances the interests of the oppressed not in some American psychobabble way but in a real material result.
Such actions are totally disconnected from how “militant” or “violent” such actions are. They may be “militant”. They may be violent”. In most cases, however, they are neither. The foundation of an “infoshop” for instance is “direct action”. Bombing a newspaper station because you think they ’support capitalism” is not. The former actually accomplishes something and is a direct response to correct a problem. The latter is (an invariably juvenile) expression of personal frustration that accomplishes nothing.
Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”
Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.
Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 98.
We owe her the only worthwhile public sculpture in the city. I always hoped she might gift us with another.
(Photo by Geekstalt)
From me to Johnny Cash in 5 steps.
Huzzah!
Saturday was my birthday, which capped off a week of the worst pain I have ever felt in my life. I thought ’shingles’ sounded like some weird hilarious skin condition that made you look like a lizard or perhaps the roof of a country home. I am pretty doped up on painkillers at the moment but I believe it is fair to say I was off base there.
Anyway.
Saturday was my birthday! I received very nearly a hundred birthday greetings and well-wishes, which I am totally floored by. Thank you all so much.
Audra got me a present! It is a toothbrush!
Let me tell you about this toothbrush!
It is the ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900, MOTHERFUCKERS.
Do not mock this toothbrush, it is SERIOUS BUSINESS! Witness this FLOSS-ACTION HEAD!
IT MEANS BUSINESS. Does YOUR toothbrush come with this much stuff?
I DON’T THINK SO! Does YOUR toothbrush have a base station that wirelessly monitors your use of the oscillating-rotating technology-enhanced brush using the 2.4 GHz ISM band?
IT IS UNLIKELY! Does YOUR toothbrush include a separate ProWhite polishing brushhead and a massage mode for optimum gum health?
If it does, you are the proud owner of a ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900 and I would like to meet with you regularly to discuss how much better our toothbrushes are than everyone elses! Do you remember life before the ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900? I hardly do. Can you imagine, MANUALLY moving the bristles around on the end of a stick like some kind of barbarian?
Neither can I.
So, thank you, Audra, for this amazing birthday gift! Thank you for elevating me over all of those people I once considered ‘friends’ to the lofty position I now occupy, which I do not think is hyperbolic to describe as ‘godlike’.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately at my (often NSFW) Tumblr. Won’t you join me?
Why record labels will never win the war against free: An experiment.
The whole file sharing phenomenon (and legal music downloading) is largely driven by a powerful psychological aversion to being cheated.
It turns out that free is so powerful not because it’s free, but because it allows us to minimize the risk of being cheated. Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely conducted an interesting experiment to understand “free”, which he writes about in his book Predictably Irrational.
First, he and his colleagues sold random college students two kinds of chocolates. One was Lindt Truffles from Switzerland. The second was Hersheys Kisses. The truffles were 15 cents and the Kisses were 1 cent. The students reasoned that the difference in price between the two chocolates was due to quality. 73% chose the truffles and 27% chose the Kisses.
Then Ariely did something interesting. He introduced free into the experiment. He lowered the price of each chocolate by 1 cent, so the truffles were now 14 cents and the Kisses were free. All of a sudden, preference for the Kisses skyrocketed.
Ariely concluded that free is so enticing because it eliminates the risk of buyer’s remorse, or what I like to call the “Oh, crap!” factor. Nobody wants to buy something and then discover that it’s not what they expected. Even if the price of that thing is just a few cents, the psychological aversion still exists. When something is free, that risk is eliminated entirely. It may still not be what you expected, but at least you didn’t lose anything by paying for it.
restraint.org is a loose collection of writing, links, ravings, photos, news, fiction, and bad poetry by Jairus Khan. This website has been here (off and on) for ten years or so, and was around in various other forms for three or four years before that.
I spend most of my off-hours working (in Ottawa, Canada) to promote underground arts and media, and trying to keep independent music from being smothered by an anachronism popularly known as ‘the industry’. I DJ weekly, promote concerts/festivals regularly, make beep-beep noises in an industrial-metal band, and release CC-licensed albums for my industrial-slash-experimental-electronic project Ad·ver·sary, which sounds something like robots fucking to My Bloody Valentine.
When I’m not working with, promoting, listening to, or writing music, I design very angry websites, flyers, book jackets, and the sort for various arts projects. I supplement my music/design income (roughly enough to buy a pocketful of buttons a month) by developing counter-hacking courses and moonlighting as a web coordinator for the man.
I also bake very tasty cookies.
