Hey, Mr. President, over here!

What's it take to get W to pay attention to domestic concerns? Let me get this straight, Bush waves a $100 billion carrot in front of Turkey to secure a northern command center for war in Iraq, but he says he can't "bail out the states" from their financial woes? And now, as US airline officials are saying a war in Iraq could cost 70,000 jobs in the industry, the administration announces it'll pay the salaries of some two million Iraqi government workers to stabilize the country after an attack? That's some economic incentive package you've got there, Mr. President!

American Values

It was 1976 when France last cast a lone veto in the UN. For the U.S., the history's not so ancient:

For the United States, it was three months ago, over a resolution condemning violence in the Middle East, specifically the killing of U.N. employees by Israeli soldiers and the destruction of a U.N. warehouse filled with food for needy Palestinians.

More...

An open letter to the president

Toby Barlow, writing on AlterNet, is in on Bush's big joke:

Dear President Bush,

Remember back when you were first running for President and you had that interview where you made that joke about the death row inmate who begged you for her life. But then you killed her anyway? Well, some people didn't find that funny, but I found it really funny! I think we sort of have the same sense of humor. It's a little dark, but it's FUNNY, isn't it? Here are some of my favorite jokes of yours:

What I think is really funny is 3,000 cruise missiles being launched into Iraq within the first 48 hours of the war. The idea that you call that "precision bombing," boy, that's funny.

And this is hilarious, the first Gulf War killed 205,500 Iraqis, three-quarters of the dead were civilians, including 74,000 children. More than 100,000 died of postwar adverse health effects. That's so funny. I just look at that line that says "74,000 children" and I'm laughing again, and I bet you're laughing too. Admit it, you're grinning a little. Come on, 74,000 children killed. Do you feel that smile coming on? Yeah.

And you know that's peanuts compared to the can of whoop-ass you're about to unleash on those kids, what do you call it, "Shock and Awe" as in "Awe there just went my baby girl, I'm covered in her blood, awe there just went my legs." See, that's funny.

Now, it's also sort of funny that in the US-Afghan war, the US military killed 3,400 civilians. That's almost equal to the 3,700 civilians killed in the World Trade Center. I admit, it's more of a dry, ironic kind of humor, but come on, killing innocent people to get back at someone for killing innocent people, that's rich. "Killing innocent people is bad, let's go kill innocent people." If someone said that on "Married With Children" it would get a real big laugh.

Now, I know this cracks you up because it cracks me up--the UN sanctions against Iraq, begun by your dad and continued by you, didn't do a thing to Saddam, but they did manage to kill 5,000 children under the age of 5 every month! Every month! 5,000 children dead! It upsets you so much you're launching 3,000 cruise missles and blowing more kids up now. Talk about not leaving a child behind, har, har, har. ("Awe, there goes my mom!")

What's really funny is that Kofi Annan estimates that this new war could swell the number of displaced people in Iraq to 2 million and create a million refugees. A million! It doesn't get any funnier than that! What, are they all gonna have little sticks and bandanas tied up with food in 'em? Oh, that's right, they won't have any food. And the joke's on them, because they didn't even vote for Saddam.

What's really, really funny is that you even use the word "terrorist." Aw, man, you're killing me.

Sincerely,

Toby Barlow

Correcting Coleman:
What Norm didn't say about the Estrada filibuster

Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman wrote a commentary in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune in which he asserted that "In their zeal to inflict political damage on the president, not only do Democrats damage the reputation and character of an outstanding potential jurist. They also want to create a new constitutional standard for assessing judicial nominees." The continuing filibuster of Estrada, Coleman says, is about partisanship, plain and simple. Tossing Bush catchphrases like "litmus test," Coleman writes that (cue the National Anthem) Estrada "represents the American Dream. He is the American dream." God forbid the Democrats get a chance to ask the guy a few probing questions--whether he's privileged, ultra-conservative, and Hispanic or not.

My letter to the editor:

Sen. Norm Coleman is being a bit disingenuous, if not deceptive--and certainly downright partisan himself--in his opinion on the "deadly cloud of partisan gridlock" surrounding the filibuster of US Appeals Court nominee Miguel Estrada.

While I don’t have Senate staffers to help with research, I’d like to correct (and enhance) Coleman’s facts: Miguel Estrada may represent the "American Dream" for folks like Coleman, but Estrada’s background--his father was a successful commercial lawyer and his mother an accountant and bank executive--is conveniently left out of his humble rags-to-riches story. As an attorney at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Estrada worked on the historic Bush vs. Gore case that decided the 2000 presidency--a fact, omitted by Estrada when filling out his questionnaires for the Judiciary Committee, that might give Democrats pause about whether qualifications or political favors guide his nomination. Furthermore, Estrada has no judicial experience; while it’s true he is considered "well qualified" by the American Bar Association, he has never served as a sitting judge.

None of which should disqualify Estrada. Several current federal Appeals Court judges have no prior experience, and many come from well-to-do backgrounds. And contrary to what Coleman and other Republicans would like you to believe, many Latinos have served and continue to serve as federal judges, including Reynaldo Garcia of Texas (the first ever Latino federal judge, appointed by Democratic president John F. Kennedy), Valdemar Cordova of Arizona (appointed by Democratic president Jimmy Carter), the six district court judges and 8 of the 10 current appellate judges appointed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, to name a few. To make this about race, Mr. Coleman, is unfair and wrong.

What should disqualify Estrada--or at least keep his nomination on hold until he coughs up some vital information--is his inability to be forthcoming about his judicial philosophy. While he may have answered more than 100 questions, as Coleman states, many of the answers were evasive, like, when asked about his judicial philosophy, he elliptically answered: "My view of the judicial function, Senator, does not allow me to answer that question." (Is he pleading the Fifth or being interviewed for the second highest court in the land?) Had Estrada previous judicial experience, the Senate could draw from published decisions, law review articles, or peer opinions; but, since he doesn’t, Democrats have asked to see internal memorandums written by Estrada during his years working for the Solicitor General’s Office. There is precedent for this: during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court in 1987, Robert Bork gave the Judiciary Committee access to the same kind of documents from his employment with the Solicitor General during the Nixon administration. Estrada refuses to comply. Without these memos, we only have documents from the handful of cases he argued, as well as his organizational affiliations--including membership in the arch-conservative groups The Federalist Society and the Center for the Community Interest--to go on. If this is all we’ve got, it’s easy to see why Sen. Charles Schumer fears Estrada might be an activist judge and a "far-right stealth nominee," isn’t it?

Coleman’s claim that the filibuster is Democratic "political gamesmanship" ignores the fact that the nomination is opposed by organizations across the political spectrum, from Latino groups (Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Willie C. Velasquez Institute, United Farmworkers of America, the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute) to religious groups (National Council of Jewish Women, The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and the Interfaith Alliance--which expresses "grave concerns" about the nomination) to civil rights, minority, legal, environmental, and labor groups (NAACP, AFL-CIO, Congressional Black Caucus, Sierra Club, National Employment Lawyers Association, the Alliance for Justice), to name but a few. It's not only liberal Democrats who oppose Estrada. Even the country's newspaper of record, The New York Times, thinks the Senate should vote to reject Estrada’s nomination, citing his "scant paper trail" and "a reputation for extreme positions on important legal questions."

So, Coleman can mount his soapbox to decry the Democrats’ supposed politicking--what he dubs their "zeal to inflict political damage on the president"--but we all know he’s ignoring the fact that, with dividend tax-cuts for the rich, unbudgeted-for preemptive war in Iraq, an exploding deficit, and an imploding economy, the president is doing just fine inflicting damage on himself.

Straw Men:
Vicarious Empire and Blair's inexplicable love of Bush

I lived in London for a semester in 1992, shortly after the Gulf War ended. As an unrecruited representative of American foreign policy, I was repeatedly asked for my take on the War. How humiliating was it for us to let Saddam get away? Is America losing its edge? People seemed to enjoy the thought of the US being taken down a notch.

I'd get these questions quite frequently, but, to be fair, the most common setting--Prince Alfred's pub near the Sutherland Avenue Tube stop--didn't suggest I was necessarily conversing with the most reliable, or sober, folks around. But when reading British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's address to the UN yesterday, I couldn't help but recall a conversation with a loose-lipped man who enigmatically wore a tuxedo (an oddity in this Aussie/Kiwi pub overrun by shaggy college students and dozing Border Collies). “What's it feel like to live in a dying Empire?” he slurred in a frank tone I'd rarely encountered in London. Misery loves company, he argued; we had empire once and so did you, and now we're both in the same boat.

I’ve been struggling to understand Tony Blair’s and Straw's intense desire for war with Iraq, and this encounter gives me a thought: England’s cultural memory of glories lost drives the Blair government to seek vicarious empire through the US. Straw’s comments to French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin yesterday were filled with such Wild West swagger, arrogance and condescension. The Straits Times reports the meeting this way: "Staring Mr de Villepin in the eye, Mr Straw called him repeatedly by his first name, a not-so-subtle putdown in international diplomacy. Laughter erupted the first time Mr Straw referred to Mr de Villepin as simply 'Dominique'." He repeated the first name 4 or 5 times. This is pure childishness--High Noon antics, right down to the confrontational stare--the British version of Bush’s Mad Cow(boy) Disease and the diplomatic equivalent of sandbox namecalling.

It's like Blair and Company are trying to be more American, i.e. more boorish. In the African paper The Sunday Nation, Philip Ochieng writes on the American-British likeness:

Loud and pushy, he has never heard of tact and courtesy even as an "ambassador" in somebody else's house. For he knows it all.

He excels only in the legerdemain of money-making, the filth of accumulation, the itch for other people's property, the cacophony of sabre-rattling as he grabs it, the artlessness of propaganda.

On Iraq, therefore, it surprises few that the West is divided precisely between the Franco-Germans and the Anglo-Americans and precisely on style.

Straw’s gall is on par with Dennis Hastert’s digs on the Eiffel Tower and calls for sanctions on French wine and cheese; Rumsfeld’s insults about “Old Europe”; and the Bush-Blair team’s track record of fabricated evidence of Iraq’s material breaches, spying on UN Security Council members, and trying to pass off a 12-year old doctoral thesis as "intelligence" on Iraq’s wrongdoings.

Straw, like Blair all along, has this weird me-too eagerness for supporting Bush and his preemptive war. Could "coattail empire" really be such a powerful motivator?

“The United States, conceived as an anti-imperialist project, is now engaged on remaking the world order,” writes The Guardian. “This requires allies, like-minded friends who will change the way the globe is ruled and regulated. It is these thoughts which, perhaps, lurk behind Tony Blair's moral case. The idea of finding yourself on the opposite side to America, a nation with a history, of wrecking global treaties and disregarding international law, must be terrifying.”

And Paul Foot in the same publication wrote in February:

Is not the truth that these US warmongers, most of them oil millionaires, are hell-bent on extending their capitalist empire--and their control of oil supplies--everywhere on earth, and that the invasion of Iraq is a further step down that road? And is not the British prime minister now fanatically committed to the same process? When the SNP MP Alex Salmond shouted at him last week ‘when do we stop?’ Blair rounded on him, eyes gleaming like those of Arturo Ui in Brecht's play [The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui]: ‘We stop when the threat to our security is properly and fully dealt with.’ In other words, we go on like Ui, until we conquer the world.

What strikes me about this passage is the fanatical glint in Blair’s eyes, suggestive of some other power governing the man. Many people have commented to me about Bush’s televised speech last week, and very little of it had to do with the content of the speech. “He looked drugged,” was the most frequent remark, followed by “He didn’t seem to believe what he was saying.” I’ve thought the same thing about Tony Blair, especially as he emotionally staked his reputation on the moral correctness of attacking Iraq.

Does the allure of Empire have a narcotic effect? Does Blair's lapdog fervor bear the same symptoms as Bush's religious zeal? Is empire that seductive? Considering all that empire entails--domination of markets and natural resources worldwide, global "partners" who give in to imperial wishes through bribes or fear, a "way of life" that rests on a diminished standard of living for developing countries--the answer is likely yes. Or, perhaps there's a simpler explanation. Like pride.

An Interview with Robin Rimbaud a.k.a Scanner

I interviewed electronic artist Robin Rimbaud a.k.a. Scanner in 2000, light years before September 11. I never published the interview, but, rereading it after digging it up on my hard-drive, it still seems timely.

((Tape begins with Robin checking my recording levels and is punctuated throughout by his nervousness that the tape isn’t recording. We are seated at a round table in the Walker Art Center’s basement, between the artist’s green room and the stage door. Around us are the sounds of preparation for the night’s film/performance of Godard’s Alphaville with a live score by Scanner, mingled with the sounds of the building’s nearby boiler room, tech storage, carpentry shop, and plumbing works. Our conversation is accompanied by the intermittent sounds of water flushing through pipes deep in the walls, tinny radio songs filtered through the gray cinderblock walls, the various hums and clicks of machinery, a nearby refrigerator, and heating equipment, and the distant noise of AV guys and stage hands completing a sound check on stage. All of these things, Robin hears and some of them he comments on. The work Scanner is best known for--and from which he takes his pseudonym--featured human voices “stolen” from the airwaves and sampled into his works.))

Paul Schmelzer: Let’s jump right in: have we as a western culture lost the ability to listen?

Robin Rimbaud: What’s interesting to me is the way that we consume sound now. When I used to listen to sound when I was 16, 15 years old, I would lie in my bed in the dark and listen to a Pink Floyd album or a Brian Eno record. And you really would absorb it on so many levels. You would really breathe that record. I wonder today when we listen to music how we consume it. When we’re listening to a CD on a portable carrier, we are incorporating acoustic sound around us. How much does that become part of the work? I’ve fed that into my work. It led me to begin to ask myself questions. When you listen to techno, do you walk quicker than if you were listening to 15th century church music? If you listen to hip-hop, which generally runs at around 110 per minute, do you generally walk along at that kind of sloppy pace? It’s interesting because when people use mobile phones today, they generally, if they’re in a conversation, walk away from the group, because they’re on the telephone. It’s interesting because that suddenly becomes a private space for them, even though it’s a public space. They generally take seven to nine steps around, up and down. If you notice now I’ve said this, you start looking outside a café, you see people start to take this amount of steps. It’s really interesting, these kinds of moments. It all comes from listening. It all comes from this kind of almost obsession. It’s like, if you were to go and buy a pair of shoes tomorrow, you start looking at other people’s shoes. Because I work with sound all the time, I constantly listen to these kinds of sounds. We sit and talk now, but we embrace the sound of water coming through the system behind us, some kind of engine hum in the distance here. But once it’s erased, that noise, once the machine is switched off, we suddenly realize how noisy the environment has been.

PS: This is “silence” to us now.

RR: This would seem to be silence, but it resembles the inside of an airplane, not only acoustically, but also visually at the moment.

PS: Since you sample the forgotten sounds, like the water pipe, perhaps the music you make is more familiar than keyboards and guitars, which are actually more alien to the human experience.

RR: It’s a good point. When I first had some success with Scanner, eight to 10 years ago, when people started to pick up on the controversial issues—the private/public, the invasive issues of “should you be doing this,” the morality issues of the scanned conversations—the interesting thing for me was that I was using the human voice in the work. And the human voice is something very unfamiliar to electronic music… It appealed to people because electronic music, particularly, was perceived as a very cold, inorganic, distanced, alienated type of music, and I was bringing something quite warm to it: I was bringing acoustic sound, the human voice. Which as any ventriloquist knows or anyone who studies the history of the voice, the human voice is the one item we can really relate to. It’s interesting to note that we all like the sound of our voice when we speak, but you never like to hear it back on a tape recorder. That’s because it lacks the resonance. Your body isn’t acting as a kind of speaker. For me, it’s curious to me that ventriloquism…has evolved. Machines like this are the new form of ventriloquism. They’re disembodied voices. A mobile phone is a form of ventriloquism.

PS: It’s interesting when I listen to your music and hear only half of a conversation, and I can’t help but fill in the blanks…

RR: What I’m interested in is stories. Our history of development has been through stories, in a way, through family stories, through parables. The bible is just a series of stories. And it’s really interesting because stories get changed. You have a tendency to reinterpret a story. You hear a conversation or a part of a conversation and you start to fill in the spaces, and that’s what began to interest me. Not you and I talking together, but just overhearing one part. You start to picture an image of what these people look like. Their social backgrounds. What relationship they hold to one another. And then try to fill in the spaces. When you didn’t hear what the other person was saying, what were they really talking about. You just heard a bit of a pop record, Scannerfunk, where there are these voices buried underneath the mix. These people saying things like “The sun is shining” and “I’m too sad to tell you,” and all these very melancholic phrases just keep spinning out underneath this elegant, melodramatic music. I like to use these voices on that level. Also, to relate it back to the issue of how you listen to that record, somebody may be listening on a Walkman on a bus and hear these voices. Is it on your headset or is it behind you? Is in the environment or is it in the frame of the music?

PS: When you use these snippets of conversation, two points fascinate me. One is about relationships: women tend to communicate one way and men another, making it evident that “communication” isn’t happening, rather mutual one-way message-sending. The other is about technology: these halves of conversations are like the messages borne on the radio waves that travel out into the ionosphere and travel in space forever, never to be responded to.

RR: I’ve taken the role, in a sense, of being a medium. Pulling down, retrieving these indiscriminate signals that float around us all the time. Pulling them into these soundscapes. …It’s something that interests me, the idea that as we are talking now, rather like those radio waves floating out there into the ether, these stories float into the walls here. If you have a computer and you have all your data there and you throw something away, there are bits of software, which allow you to dig within the frame of the computer and pull out that information again. It’s really easy. You just literally hit “un-erase” and it will un-erase your hard drive. Something you threw away three years ago, if you haven’t initialized your hard drive, will still be there. I love this romantic idea of speakers. If we could un-erase what has been through them, what would they have heard? If we could un-erase the memory of a building, what would we hear? What stories would be there? We can look at images. We can make film. But how would you capture that sound, these stories that have been lost?

PS: There’s something compelling in there about the spirituality of technology—the idea of ether. The air used to be the realm of anima mundi, mediums would channel spirits through the air, and heaven was “up.” Today, technology uses the air, and you’re being called immoral for grabbing what floats in the air.

RR: It is a romantic idea that around us the whole time there are these radio waves, and it merely takes a mechanism like a scanning device itself or a shortwave radio to enable one to pick up these messages…

PS: With the intercepted cellphone calls, you have no ethical dilemma because you’re erasing out all the identifying information?

RR: I’m not interested in exploiting people. If I wanted to exploit people, I wouldn’t have released CDs. I would’ve taken their credit card numbers down and bought products. People always order things over the cellphone. I’ve heard so many people giving out credit card details, addresses, rendezvous, but you can do all kind of pranks, all kind of extreme things, but I wasn’t interested in that kind of exploitation. I was more interested in the kind of linear narrative that was happening—how people communicate with each other, how they act, how when I make a performance it’s called a “live act.” It’s a performance, it’s a persona you’re adopting; it’s a live act. Like now, we’re in a different situation. We’re in a formal question and answer. Well, it’s not formal, but we’re both playing roles. Unfortunately, devices like this [tape recorder] take away innovation or improvisation, but I think we’re doing OK. It’s such a huge question, the issue of sampling. At the moment I’m trying to work out a project; I want to make the most extreme sampling project imaginable. I’m thinking about trying to document years of the century, trying to do the 20th century in one swift cut in like a one-hour piece that goes through everything. I was thinking as much as possible of going through everything imaginable and putting it onto one CD. All music, Led Zeppelin, Stockhausen, whatever. Alphabetically. I was going to work through my and everybody else’s collections I know and sample them in and just make one huge piece. And hold it together with something really simple, maybe just a breath or something.

PS: Tonight you’ll be performing the score for Godard’s Alphaville. In terms of your early work taping phone calls and addressing issues of the pervasiveness of surveillance, it seems like a fitting film for you.

RR: It’s interesting because it’s filmed in very normal circumstances in the ‘60s in France and yet the direction, the way he’s mapping a city with image, is so futuristic. It’s like a non-place. That’s what’s so interesting to me. …It also has this Big Brother feel, of this computer running a world, but you’re never sure of this world. … It’s an alienating film, but it’s set in a certain period in the ‘60s when Godard, amongst other directors like Resnais and Truffaut, were really playing with the idea of film and how far you could take it. Godard was always a key figure, and always is a key figure in a sense, in the development of the way you can subvert a very easily accessible medium.

PS: What about the issues of surveillance. Is the Alphaville nightmare coming true today?

RR: In some senses, the word nightmare obviously makes it seem more dramatic. But I think it’s already there. I live in a city, London in England, where there are more closed-circuit TVs than anywhere in the world. More information is now passed between organizations and people in the last 10 years than it has been in the whole of time. More books have been published in the last 10 years than in the history of time. It’s quite phenomenal, the overload of information. Where it becomes scary and unnerving is the access to information. I don’t particularly have a problem with people having information. What I’m curious about is who holds that information and how do they use it? Where it becomes intriguing, and where the scanning element came into it, is the argument is the more technology develops, the safer we will be. That often seems to be the image that’s being projected to us: it’s making it a safer community, people are not ripping off the system through credit card fraud and all this kind of stuff, or like housing benefit abuse and all these things you can take from the government and all these analog ways you’d rip the system off. In fact, it’s much easier now. It just takes a 13-year old kid to crack into a system. I’ve got a couple of friends that are hackers and it’s amazing. They can just crack into a system like that, so swiftly. It seems to be the method by which people transmit information is the most vulnerable point. That’s the most interesting thing. A law’s just been passed in England where employers can rightfully look into their employee’s emails, but there’s a secondary law that no one knows about that allows you privacy at work, but people don’t know it to fight back. These two laws, one big, one small, both battling one another, but the big one is the only thing that people know about.

((Our second interview takes place in the Teen Programs Office at the Walker, the only quiet, uninhabited place we could find. Sitting on a grey, once-futuristic looking sofa, we talk, our conversation punctuated with automatic beeps and e-mail chimes from the three Macs in the office. The microphone rests on the sofa making slurping noises as it rubs against the burlap-like fabric. We start out talking about the previous night’s performance of Alphaville.))

PS: One scene the stayed with me after the film last night reminded me of [Guy deBord's Society of the Spectacle: Lemmy Caution is walking through the city and he sees a wall-mounted machine with a sign that says “Please insert coin.” So he does, and out pops a card or bar that says “merci,” which he pitches over his shoulder in disgust. It reminds me of how a whole life can be circular: we watch the TV show, then read about it on the website or magazine, discuss it at the watercooler the next day, never really getting beyond the spectacle and to real human beings. We respond to the signs around us without thinking, somehow pleased (unlike Lemmy) to get our little thank-you brick in return.

RR: The film actually plays on that very cleverly. There’s this phrase that people, the women in particular, keep using: “Yes, thank you very much, please,” or some phrase like that, which is a very bizarre phrase. I like it, it’s a kind of tautology. When he actually takes that chip out and it says “Merci,” it is a beautiful moment. It’s very funny; not what you’d expect.

PS: Back on the technology part, the early part of your career, where you’re talking about how advanced technology makes us more vulnerable than ever: it’s interesting to me how we’re so “wired” and “interconnected,” but it’s all a myth—were more distant from each other than ever before.

RR: The thing that’s lacking in a sense is that, when people grew up, before architecture became what it is today, when buildings now are built, particularly in the ‘60s, they failed to realize that the social interaction between individuals was key to your upbringing. So they started, particularly in England, building blocks of flats where you have no streets. There’s no engagement with your neighbor. You walk out of your door, you hit a staircase or a lift, you exit, and then you’re on the ground. There’s been no relationship you’ve had with any other person... If you walk down the street, there’s a relationship you’re having between buildings. You’re seeing people coming out of spaces. There’s kids playing in the street. There’s this kind of flux and change that’s existing there. It’s interesting that technology has really led us to a role now we play where, I do question about what kind of real communication is happening.

…There’s something terribly dehumanizing about new technology sometimes, this kind of language and etiquette we need to learn. I feel sometimes we’re in such a pace that we’re failing to give ourselves the opportunity to engage with the technology. The Otaku kids in Japan, the kids who just grew up just playing games who don’t really socialize with their peer group… I was in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, and I pass this enormous warehouse-size space with maybe 200 kids all playing Quake. They’re all sitting in this big kind of cyber-world. I was thinking, it’s curious, because what I used to do as a kid was play football in the park. That’s an analog versus a digital form of engaging with your peer group. But there is something important about that kind of physicality. A type of call and response. Where you understand what it feels like, flesh against muscle. This kind of physicality of dealing with situations.

Sometimes I feel like digital technology has an awkwardness about it. You’re communicating through a device quite often designed by someone else, and you have to fit a certain parameter. If you use SMS text message on a mobile, you can only have 160 characters, which is an interesting scenario in itself. How far can we take that? What kind of communication can you have? Do we start to edit our conversation apropos the situation? A couple years ago, I made a piece for an exhibition in Holland for a thing called the Impact Festival. It happens every year; it’s like a digital film festival. I made this piece where, there was a program called something like “Images for the Future” or “Ideas for the Future.” And I made a piece where, I was thinking OK we’re talking now. When you talk in e-mail you talk in a more edited fashion. You don’t keep mumbling around the subject like I keep doing here and drifting off. You’re more precise when you write things down. Well, you have a tendency to start editing words. You edit sentences. You know, the way the language is a living language and the dictionary is constantly updated. Well, I thought, what would be the logical conclusion 500 years into the future? How edited would our language be? Maybe we wouldn’t even talk anymore; we’d actually use telepathy. Just a playful investigation into this. So I invented a language, which was a telepathic language. The piece was basically just these two people in a gallery space, a brother and a sister, and a huge video projection. You walk into the space, nothing in front of you, just left and right, and either the male or female voices follow. Basically what they did was just take the words and cut them up. So instead of them saying, “Hello, how are you today? Isn’t it a beautiful day today,” they go, “Hll, hw r y tdy? Snt t a btfl dy tdy?”and cut the whole thing up. It was quite dark and sinister in its way. The guy would go ((SFX)) and the girl would go ((SFX)).

PS: As I hear that e-mail chime in the background, I wonder, since you’ve traveled the world sampling sounds, are there universal sounds? Is found sound specific to a place?

RR: It’s a good question. Cities have their own languages, and it’s something we fail to understand. Our environment’s changed over the last 15 years with the advent of fax machines, mobile phones, bank teller machines, all these kinds of devices. But cities really exhibit their own language completely. This is just a purchased computer that has a series of roll call sounds in it. Which is pretty much the same everywhere: if you buy the system, somebody who’s developed it put half a dozen alert sounds. You can change them, but most people don’t bother to do it. If you’re a student, generally what you do is you download some ridiculous Simpsons thing on there. Now that I’ve said that, you’ll probably tell me you’ve got a Simpsons one.

PS: I did that a few years ago.

RR: We all do that in the past. It’s always a playful thing. Then we reach a certain point and you think, I’ll just let the machine do it for me. I’ve got six options. I’ll go with one of those. But cities certainly do exhibit their own language. You go to somewhere like Sydney, and there’s a kind of electrical hum to the city. It’s really strange, this really weird electricity in the sound. You go to a place like Melbourne, it’s so quiet. The general ambience of the city when you come back to somewhere like London, it’s enormously loud, London. It’s just a barrage of information. Visually, but aurally as well. It’s incredible, the sound friction that goes on. A taxi engine in London sounds very different than a taxi engine does in Cairo. The green man that helps you cross the road in Australia sounds very different than the one in Berlin. These machines—things like a taxi being built—you’d think they’d pretty much be the same all around the world. But they’re not. When a car drives through Milano in Italy, it sounds different than it does in Washington, because the cobbled streets in Milan. I’ve become very fascinated by this language of cities. If I played you a tape now and said, is this London or New York, you’d be able to guess. By car horns, the kind of ambience of New York, the sirens. It is quite curious how you learn the kind of geography through an acoustic disturbance.

PS: Also how sound bounces off architecture differently… As the world becomes dominated by Microsoft and Macintosh, I’ve had some of these sounds pop up in my dreams—

RR: Gosh. You poor man.

Quotable

I think people look at [Bush] and think John Wayne. We in Europe like John Wayne, we liked him in cowboy films. We don't like him running the world.

-- Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror

UN investigates US plans to bug Security Council

While the story of US plans to spy on UN Security Council members to gather information about their votes on Iraq has been severely under-reported in the mainstream American press, The Observer runs two new stories. One tells of an arrest made in Britain: a 28-year old woman, an employee of the Government Communications Headquarters, was taken into custody "on suspicion of contravening the Official Secrets Act"--i.e. she was arrested, it seems, for suspicion of leaking the NSA memo calling for heightened spying. (I wonder if Frank Koza, who wrote the memo, or Condi Rice, who instigated it, will be arrested?) The UN has opened an investigation into the spying incident following anger by some Security Council members. The original news account "caused a political furore in Chile, where President Ricardo Lagos demanded an immediate explanation of the spying operationm," writes The Observer. "The Chilean public is extremely sensitive to reports of US 'dirty tricks' after decades of American secret service involvement in the country's internal affairs. In 1973 the CIA supported a coup that toppled the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet." The article goes on to explain that the spying operation was initiated by Condoleeza Rice but that "a decision of this kind would also have involved Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet and NSA chief General Michael Hayden" and would be run by the president himself during his daily intelligence briefings.

American Refuseniks

U.S. Marine Travis Clark says he won't go if he's deployed to fight Iraq. "I can see violence used if there was an invading army invading my people," he said. "But I'm not going to go into someone else's country and force them to defend themselves." He's part of a small but growing number of armed forces and reserve troops who are second-guessing their career choice based on a clash with what they see as the immoral values of the Bush administration regarding this war. While it's hard to tell how many soldiers will refuse to serve, the G.I. Hotline has received double the number of calls in the past month: 3,582.

The problem seems to be that recruits sign up when they're 18 years old and are relatively unformed, morally and personally. The bill of goods they get from the armed forces, it turns out, is completely different than what they thought they were signing on for:

Some callers to the G.I. Rights Hotline said they were 18 when they joined and were still forming their opinions. Others said they were persuaded to join by military advertisements, brochures and recruiters talking a lot about job skills, world travel and education benefits, and nothing about the brutality of combat, said Bill Galvin, counseling coordinator for the Center on Conscience and War in Washington, D.C., who helped answer calls.

A U.S. Armed Forces Web site, for example, asks: "Where else can you get paid to train with the best, travel around the world, make lifelong friends, and get an education?"

"Many of these people thought they were going to computer school," Galvin said. "Reservists think it's a job they do two weeks a year and a weekend a month. These people are realizing it's not about what they thought it was at all."

Soldiers like Clark may end up in jail for being true to their conscience. To learn more visit the GI Rights Hotline website or call 800.394.9544.

25 arrested at DC Women's Day peace rally

After a rally of "several thousand women" in Washington, D.C. yesterday, more than 25 women were arrested, including Alice Walker, Terry Tempest Williams, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Griffin, and Democracy Now host Amy Goodman.

President Spin: Bush demands standing ovation

FromThe Mirror of London:

George Bush pulled out of a speech to the European Parliament when MEPs wouldn't guarantee a standing ovation.

Senior White House officials said the President would only go to Strasbourg to talk about Iraq if he had a stage-managed welcome.

A source close to negotiations said last night: "President Bush agreed to a speech but insisted he get a standing ovation like at the State of the Union address.

"His people also insisted there were no protests, or heckling.

"I believe it would be a crucial speech for Mr Bush to make in light of the opposition here to war. But unless he only gets adulation and praise, then it will never happen."

Mr Bush's every appearance in the US is stage-managed, with audiences full of supporters.

It was hoped he would speak after he welcomed Warsaw pact nations to Nato in Prague last November. But his refusal to speak to EU leaders face-to-face is seen as a key factor in the split between the US-UK coalition and Europe.

The source added: "Relations between the EU and the US are worsening fast - this won't help."

Literature for dark days

The complete works of George Orwell are now online.

Marching with the sisters/Reclaiming the flag

During today's peace march in commemoration of International Women's Day, some 600 to 700 people marched from the Midtown YMCA on Lake Street in Minneapolis to Powderhorn Park. It was a wonderful, diverse assortment of families, dogs, Code Pink supporters, IndyMedia punks, neighborhood activists, and peacenik toddlers. I was proud to clog Lake Street with 'em. Special thanks to the woman who, following Bill Moyers' lead, was passing out American flags with this message:

Don't let war supporters hijack the flag. Fly your flag, but ONLY with antiwar signs and at clearly antiwar events.

Call Women Against Military Madness to purchase a "No War on Iraq" lawn sign ($10) or smaller apartment-window sized size ($5), then get a flag of your own.

Headlines

• Bush exempts oil industry from Clean Water Act.

• A Hennepin County, Minnesota, sheriff's counterterrorism expert lumps Students Against War, Arise! Bookstore, and Anti-Racism Action in with neo-Nazis, Christian identity groups, and neo-Confederates as "more dangerous in Minnesota than al-Qaeda."

• Sen. Tom Harken of Iowa, who voted in favor of authorizing the president to use force against Iraq during a lopsided 77-23 vote last October, now says he "was fooled" by Bush, who he characterizes as "the cowboy who rode out of Texas, all guns blazing" in pursuit of Saddam.

Brits fabricate evidence for war

A new report from The Guardian:

British intelligence claims that Saddam Hussein has been trying to import uranium for a nuclear bomb are unfounded and based on deliberately fabricated evidence, according to an investigation by the UN nuclear inspectors in Iraq.

Read more on Blair's trumped-up story about Iraq's attempts to import uranium.

News Flash: Richest Minnesotans pay lowest taxes!

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the richest of the state's households--those making more than $102,000 a year--pay less in state and local taxes than nearly everyone else.

Halliburton contracted to put out Iraqi oil fires

Surprise, surprise: A subsidiary of Halliburton Co.--the company Dick Cheney was CEO of from '95 to '00--won the contract to oversee any firefighting operations at Iraqi oilfields after any U.S.-led invasion. (As your recall, Halliburton was also given a $9.7 million contract to build detention blocks for Afghani prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.)

In other Halliburton news, a radioactive device which could be used to make a "dirty bomb" was stolen from a Nigerian subsidiary of the company.

Buchanan on the "Wages of Empire:

I swallow hard as I type this because I never thought I'd say it:

Read Pat Buchanan.

A sample:

Even if Iraqis initially welcome U.S. soldiers as liberators, within months there will be Islamic bombers willing to die to drive us out, as they drove the French out of Algeria, the Israelis out of Lebanon, the Marines out of Beirut. While the Arab and Islamic worlds did not succeed in many endeavors in the 20th century, they did excel in terrorizing and expelling all the old imperial powers. Our turn is next...

And another:

The cost of invading and rebuilding Iraq has been put at $100 billion to $200 billion by Bush's former economic advisor. That was last year. More recent estimates have soared. Will Americans pay this immense sum to reconstruct and "democratize" Iraq? With California mulling higher taxes and firing workers to cover a $35-billion deficit, how long will taxpayers tolerate shakedowns like Ankara's demand for as much as $30 billion for U.S. troops to transit Turkey and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's demand for $15 billion in foreign aid and loan guarantees to hold our coat?

The Fifth Column

Longtime Republican activist and co-founder of the Center for the American Experiment and journalist-social critic Richard Broderick have launched a new magazine, The Fifth Column, which aims to explore "ways to persuade the American Right and the American Left fo join forces in principled, values-based opposition to unbridled power politics." The current issue features a piece by historian and Minnesota Green Party candidate for lieutenant governor Rhoda Gilman on the relevance of the 1862 Dakota War to today's issues of terrorism and justice; Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan on the White House's feigned indifference to antiwar protests; and a nice introductory quote by Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials. I squirm anytime I read a bio that includes "Republican activist," but this publication looks like it's got potential.

Our enemies and The Pledge

Rogert Ebert on the separation of church and state, "horizontal prayer," and what Sister Rosanne of St. Mary's School knows that John Ashcroft doesn't. (Thanks, Adrienne.)