Gina Harris's Blog, page 171

Concert Review: Melt-Banana

Seeing Melt-Banana perform is like nothing else.
Though they have played with four members in the past, there are only two now: Yasuko Onuki performing vocals with Ichirou Agata on guitar. There are pre-recorded sounds and effects to fill the music out, which Yako controls via a remote.
That sounds practical, but the way she wields the brightly colored remote - thrusting it down, then up in a victory stance, or out at the audience - makes it seem an even more integral part of the show. It is Yako's conductor's baton, or weapon, or at least a prop.
http://www.numark.com/images/ozone/melt_banana.jpg
I did have my camera at the show, and took many of my usual poorly-focused shots of the other bands, but between my lack of skill, the lighting for the Melt-Banana set (pretty dark with bright flashes), and the frenetic speed at which the band moved, there was no chance of anything ever coming out.
Many people classify Melt-Banana as noise rock, but their songs do not ignore musical elements the way many noise rock bands do. The tempo and ferocity with which they attack the songs feels punk, but the bright lights and high pitch feels more pop. Pop punk is a thing, but what that term is used for is not what they are doing. On Facebook they simply call themselves a rock band based in Tokyo, and I think that's the most sensible approach.
Probably none of that makes it easy to know if you will like the music, because there is no easy basis for comparison. They do have a large catalog though, so it should be pretty easy to figure out.
I can recommend two starting points. Fetch from 2013 is their most recent new material, and from what I have seen was well-received by long-term fans as feeling both new and right, a balance that is difficult for many bands to achieve.
In addition, the album I purchased, Return of 13 Hedgehogs (Mxbx Singles 2000-2009), gives a wide variety of songs covering a decade, and was recommended by Yako herself. "Tintarella Di Luna" was my favorite track from there, bringing in some almost surf rock sounds and covering a lot more ground than you could expect in the 2:04 minutes it takes.
The other recommendation that I will make is that even if you are not sure about the music, but you still have a chance to see a show, the experience might be worth it anyway. There really is no one else like them.
http://www.geocities.jp/azaplink/mb/mxbx.html
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Melt-Banana/192954987398661
https://www.youtube.com/user/xxxMELTBANANAxxx
https://twitter.com/melt_banana/

It's us

Periodically people will ask why God allows bad things to happen to good people. Sometimes it is in anguish, knowing that there is suffering that is undeserved. Sometimes it is used as a way of proving that there is no God, or that God isn't worth much. That is completely missing the point.
I am a religious person, and a key point of my religion is that God has given us the power to choose. If you believe free will is an illusion, today's post may not hold much for you. For everyone else, I know that I make mistakes and mess up on a regular basis, but I do value that power to choose, and I don't want to give it up. I know that sometimes other people make ignorant or mean-spirited choices that negatively affect me, but still, I don't want to give up my power to choose, and everyone else having that power comes with it.
There are people who know that, but still think about at a fairly low level: what I do affects my outcome. Those may be the easiest cause and effect cases to observe, but there's more going on.
Think of it this way. If I smoke, that obviously increases my odds of developing lung cancer. Less obvious but still pretty well understood, it also increases the lung cancer likelihood for those around me, especially with prolonged exposure.
Cancer is a cause of huge heartbreak, and there might be a feeling that a longtime smoker who gets it was asking for it, as well as some anger toward smokers on behalf of those who get cancer from second-hand smoke.
What about the cancer in Detroit?  Some people had their houses bought out, but only after prolonged exposure. Some would like to move, but they can't afford to without being bought out. Their health is being directly impaired by exposure to toxins. Questions of legal liability are important, but not what I'm talking about here. Someone decided that the profit was more important than the environment or the people living in it, but it's more than that.
If we are collectively allowing weak environmental protections, because we don't believe the indicators until things have already gotten irreparably bad, or if we do believe the indicators but know that realistically they will affect poor brown people more than us, or we have decided that government is bad and only gets in the way of progress, or we voted for people who give into corporations because they tugged on our heartstrings about abortion and played on our fears about race, we have a responsibility there too.
If a farm bill that was supposed to help farming families and ensure that there was always a food supply in America gets twisted so that it now puts money into the pockets of corporations that used their superior financial resources to buy up the family farms, and for profitability they end up growing crops that are inedible without extensive processing, and then the subsidized additive you have is high-fructose corn syrup which they say is fine in moderation but it's hard to eat something in moderation when it's in everything, including things that aren't particularly sweet, and the entire cycle is hard on the soil, farming families, and human bodies, and still doesn't guarantee a good food supply, but we keep on mindlessly buying the additive-laden food, enriching the corporations and manufacturers and voting in the same politicians, that's on us.
If the desire for lower taxes means that we keep taking money out of schools, so gym and music and recess is cut, and classes are over-sized so children don't get much individual attention, and a lot of the better-off ones end up using online schools which are free because that money just comes from the general educational budget, but it's not an option for families who can't afford to keep an adult at home, and then in the public schools the most important thing is passing standardized tests, so the education goes downhill, and now there is less possibility of them finding the stress relief of exercise and the joy of creativity, because really, the corporations only want drones, and school funding comes from those corporations sponsoring the curriculum or the cafeteria, that's on us.
If eating the artificial food has a worse effect on some bodies, and combined with stress, poor diet, and a lack of activity, they gain weight, but there is no profit in improving the food and activity, so they get referred to pills and surgery and gym memberships and supplements and programs that have a lot of profit potential in them, and many fail and get depressed, and others start experiencing disorders where they no longer even see their bodies accurately, and that is worsened by the media showing false images and criticism from others, because we have been taught that it is all about the personal accountability so if you can't conform that is on you, that is on us.
And if the scariest thing in the antebellum US was that the slaves would rise up, and so modern police forces were based on the slave patrols, and years of extending slavery, economic manipulation, destruction of property, murder, and redlining have enforced extreme inequality, and unequal prosecution of crimes fills the prisons with black men (and there are people making a profit on that) that's on us. If we try and justify it, and if we get mad at protesters because they block traffic or make you uncomfortable when they are trying to establish safety, let alone comfort, that's on us.

God allows it (for now) because we do.

The price of oil

There was an episode of "The Munsters" where Grandpa invented a pill for turning water into gas. He also accidentally put insomniac Marilyn into an enchanted sleep, so it was fortunate that the representative from the petroleum company was a handsome young man with the last name Prince.
One of the plot twists was that the company wanted to pay Grandpa to keep the pill off the market. They had no intention of stopping their petroleum production, and they didn't want the competition that the pill would provide. Does that sound far-fetched?
Extracting oil from tar sands releases three times the CO2 as regular oil production. It involves strip mining and is also water-intensive, requiring as many as five barrels of water for each barrel of oil produced. A large project is slated in the Amazon Rainforest Basin, which makes the CO2 production especially unfortunate.
The process has some similarities to hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". Fracking is also very water intensive, but instead of releasing extra CO2 into the air, it is more likely to contaminate the groundwater. It release carcinogens into the environment, largely because there are so many chemical in the fracking fluid. Of the up to 600 chemicals involved, ingredients can include lead, uranium, mercury, ethylene glycol, radium, methanol, hydrochloric acid, and formaldehyde.
Those sound pretty awful. With record-breaking high temperatures, increased release of CO2 sounds really irresponsible. With drought spreading, processes that require intensive water use should be weighed very carefully.
Do we need to pursue oil quite this rigorously? Probably not. Currently oil inventory is increasing, because production exceeds consumption.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/global_oil.cfm
You could really stimulate the economy (as well as help the planet) developing green technologies, but the oil companies don't want to do that, because oil is what they do. That's what they're used to. They don't want to change.
Remember 13 In The Hole? http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/12686/13-In-The-Hole
(Incidentally, one of the polluters there is an oil recycling plant.)
One of the scenes that stayed with me is a woman talking about her mother investing in that home. She bought it and improved it and hung on to it because she wanted there to be somewhere for her family to go. That is a heartwarming sentiment, and home ownership is economically responsible, but that home is not a safe place now. Every home in that neighborhood has someone who has died of cancer.
That is a lot of human suffering. There is illness and death, discomfort from the smell, and economic hardship involved. The water is unsafe, but has still been subject to manipulation by the water company.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/10/20/detroit-water-un.html
The Supreme Court just ruled that regulators have to consider the financial impact on a business when they are regulating it. Were these companies required to consider the health impact of their polluting? The economic impact of making these homes - the primary assets of the residents - unsalable?
So my question is why do we keep putting the needs of companies ahead of people? It's not because they are morally superior, or a force for good. You can call them job creators, but are these good jobs? Would they provide better jobs if they weren't allowed to wreak havoc?
It shows up over and over again. It's not always obvious, but when you drill down into human suffering, there is usually someone making a profit on it.

Comics and confederates

Last Saturday I was listening to Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin talk about March Book Two, the second volume recounting Lewis' participation in the Civil Rights Movement.
There were two things that came up that went along with some thoughts I've been having, and that ultimately relate to the big picture.
One was that Aydin expressed his hope that the book would inspire more activism, and that one area of focus would be student loans and education costs.
For the other, one of the audience questions was about how comics culture is not always a welcoming space. She and Aydin had some back and forth on that topic. You do need to be the change you want to see, which is hard, and certainly one way of doing that is voting with your dollars, but as a woman you only have seven tenths as many dollars available for voting, (which could easily be even less that that if you factor in some culturally necessitated differences in the cost of living).
To her I would mention that I have always felt welcome at Things From Another World (multiple locations) and Floating Planet. They are helpful and kind and glad to see you. So if in the Portland Metro Area you are finding a comic book shop or clientele that is not treating you right, keep looking - there are options. Most of my comic-related socializing happens on-line, and there are great options there too.
That probably seems like a digression, but not as much as you think.
In October I wrote a little about how the groups that frequently acted as agents of change have been weakened. At the time I focused on unions, students, and working-class women:
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2014/10/scary-and-dangerous.html
Since then I have become more aware of how it filters through. You can add non-profit workers to the list. Sure, really luxurious wages would seem inappropriate, but living wages, good health plans, and 401K plans go out the window too. It's similar to way we treat teachers, and add college professors to that list, because without tenure they are treated as completely disposable. The end result is that anyone with any self-interest has to leave, or they are constantly being torn before guilt or fear. If they do make the choice that shows the most commitment to the social good, their end result may very well be dying under a bridge.
I see it in my own accounting. In January I file my taxes and in February I get a refund. In February and March I make contributions to tip jars and crowdfunding. I buy more music and comics, supporting artists. Then that bump is gone. I still see just as many needs, and they would be good things to support, but I can't. There is a general constriction tightening around the good we can do.
Hearts are good. There are a lot of people out there who want to help each other, and would if they could. With very small resources some amazing things still happen, but it is nothing compared to what would happen if we didn't have that glut at the top.
That completely relates to whether a woman or a young girl or a person of color can head into a comic book shop or convention and feel welcome. The comic gatekeepers are pretty similar to the Gamergaters with their aversion to Social Justice Warriors. They're not that different from people clinging to the Confederate flag and calling it heritage. They think they're aggrieved, and if they can just keep someone else below them that at least they will have that, so they help maintain a social order that breaks people in the service of consolidating power. It's stupid and ugly and shows a complete lack of understanding about how everything works.
Sometimes it can be worth taking it on headfirst, and sometimes you really need a rest. Sometimes the people who should be the ones supporting you have their own less overt issues and that can be frustrating.
I still know that there are pockets of calm and support, and that working for it helps those oases spread.
I believe it's worth fighting for.

Band Review: Derek Bishop

Derek Bishop was disappointing.
There was something in his pictures that showed not only a sense of style, but also indicated energy and edge - maybe it's the way he's balanced on the tire on the cover of Bicycling in Quicksand.
It led me to expect something fun and unpredictable. Instead the music was strangely subdued, like I was listening with the volume too low, but turning it up didn't do anything.
There's nothing wrong with his voice, which I really like, or his skill in performing music. It's not grating; it's just disappointing. It makes me think he might be overproduced. Having a chance to listen to multiple remixes of "Baggage", they all had the same issue.
That being said, "Baggage" was probably my favorite track. "Pack up your baggage from my brain" - who can't relate to that? However, I think "The Last Word" shows the most potential, with rolling piano that felt like it was getting somewhere.
In the music videos, there is more energy, making it possible that his live performances are more interesting, or his performances with other people, which he does sometimes. I can't write him off.
I see many positive reviews posted on his site, so it may just be a matter of taste. Bishop lists his genre as extra-catchy eclecto piano pop.
http://www.derekbishop.net/
https://www.facebook.com/DerekBishopMusic
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/bicycling-in-quicksand/id963256008
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8WrQ-OR_vR9i0ycRSTaD2g
https://derekbishopmusic.bandcamp.com/album/bicycling-in-quicksand
https://soundcloud.com/derekbishop
https://twitter.com/MrDerekBishop

Band Review: Love Brooklyn

Love Brooklyn is a band from Corinth, Mississippi. Their Facebook page lists Cartel, The Dangerous Summer, Fall Out Boy, Boys Like Girls, and All Time Low as their influences.
I think they sound most similar to Boys Like Girls and All Time Low. I hear less of a punk influence in their music, which is softer in general. At the same time, a strong sincerity comes through, and enough energy that the music does not feel at all weak. In addition, the chorus work on "All The Way" has a feeling of reaching out to the universe, making me believe that the band can be epic if they need to.
The band currently has five tracks available on Soundcloud, and plans to record an album this summer. As much as "All The Way" impressed me, "Where We Stand" is probably the most important track to hear.
Definitely worth checking out. Let's wish them well.
http://www.lovebrooklynmusic.com/
https://www.facebook.com/lovebrooklynband
https://soundcloud.com/lovebrooklynmusic
https://www.youtube.com/user/lovebrooklynmusic
https://twitter.com/HeyLoveBrooklyn

When the lies get believed

Circling back to last week, I wrote that all of the other prides beyond "white pride" were reactions against the abuse.
"Black is beautiful" was necessary because it was such a given that black was ugly. Black little girls would find black dolls ugly. Little girls at a Disney event told a black girl dressed as Elsa that "black is ugly" this year. Donald Trump just called Mexicans rapists, and while lots of people find him vile, Amy Schumer just told a "joke" that said the same thing. Racist jokes are made all the time, and then if you complain about it people say you're too sensitive.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/samara-is-the-real-queenhttp://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jun/28/amy-schumer-comedys-viral-queen
With most of the groups that have some sort of pride events or initiative, you can find a history of abuse. There may have been some improvement, but there is still a long way to go. Also, the improvement didn't happen magically, but was fought for, and pride was a part of it.
White pride does not have the history of abuse, but it adopts it.
"You rape our women and you're taking over our country."
That's what Dylan Roof told his victims.
Setting aside the "our" for now, white women are most likely to be raped by white men. That is one more area where crime tends to stay within race. Not only that, but violent sex offenders in prison are more likely to be white. Without specifying violent, the sex offenders in prison are 75% white. When you take into consideration not only how low the rate of conviction resulting in imprisonment is, and the way prosecution happens so disproportionately to minorities, at least with other crimes, that's kind of amazing.
Taking over? Black people are about 37 percent of the population, but only 10 percent of elected officials, and that's counting local government. There are two black senators out of one hundred, and 49 out of 535 representatives. That's not even parity.
Affirmative action is keeping you out of jobs? No, it's not. A recent study showed that white applicants with a felony conviction were as or more likely to be called back for a job interview than a black applicant with a clean record. Without the felony, the white applicant was twice as likely to be called back as a black applicant. Again, remember which race is more likely to be pursued for drug crimes.
One big area of resistance to accepting the existence of systemic racism for white people is that life is hard. If we have all of this privilege, why am I barely getting by? There are reasons for that, and I believe we'll spend some time unpacking that next week.
For now, you may know that the Dominican Republic is cracking down on Haitian immigrants, except that many of those immigrants will turn out to be third-generation Dominicans who neither know anyone in Haiti nor speak the language, but they do have darker skin.
http://www.ryot.org/5-things-know-cleaning-haitians-dominican-republic/935183
The government's request for large buses and the rumors of camps being set up along the border sound ominous, and a little reminiscent of Nazi Germany, but we don't quite know how it will go yet.
Here's the thing I'm pretty sure about. It can be really easy to decide that economic problems or employment problems or crime problems are the fault of one group, but that isn't the real story. If they truly do go out and round up people with darker skins and send them out of the country, they will succeed in causing a lot of human suffering, but I'm pretty sure that they'll find out that the country's problems remain pretty much the same. What do you do then?

When the police lie

"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority." - Benjamin Franklin
The police lie. That can be viewed as an inflammatory statement, but it's a bigger problem that it's true.
"It's because of the lack of black fathers" and "Where's the outrage over black-on-black crime?" are not the only scripts. There is also a whole set of scripts to blame the victim in every incident of police brutality.
"Why was he running?""You need to comply with police orders immediately!""The officer feared for his life."
Except we have video of Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott in the back, and then planting the weapon that he would say was stolen. We have video of how quickly Tamir Rice and John Crawford were shot, with no chance to understand and comply. And there are a lot more examples than Freddie Gray of why being taken into custody can be terrifying.
It appears to be part of a long tradition. As I was reading the screenplay for Call Northside 777, they were wrapping up the reparations hearings for torture victims of Richard Burge, former Chicago police commander. Part of that was learning about various black sites where detained people would disappear for a while, the most notorious being Homan Square.
That was a horrible story, but it stuck out because one of the key plot points in the movie was that one of the framed men was taken to multiple locations without being officially booked. At one of these locations the witness who falsely testified against him was able to see him for identification purposes. The events that movie was based on took place in Chicago in 1932.
Shortly after that I watched a documentary about the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia in 1985. There is footage of an unarmed man crawling out of the building, and police officers kicking and beating him, which they said was because he was armed and dangerous. Confronted with the lie, one of the men said that if you knew what kind of a guy this was, and responsible for the death of a really good man (though there are some ballistic details that would call that into question), you'd want to beat him too. Burge has said he can't believe the government is going to pay reparations to vermin. Well, some of the "vermin" are confessed criminals, but they only confessed because of the torture.
I hate writing this. I am thinking about various law enforcement officers that I care about, most of whom I believe to be good men, but their profession has a wide potential for corruption.
I remember discussing police work with one of them. This was a while back, but he was talking about how people see "The Shield" and think it's like that, but that was based on just one department that went bad.
I wish the Rampart scandal was the only incident of police corruption. Just recently I have been reading about Philadelphia, and Albuquerque (huge scandal that eventually went away with only the whistle-blowers punished) and Miami Gardens, and yes, in Chicago they were so skilled at torturing people that one of them went to work at Guantanamo. A Baltimore whistle-blower had to move to Florida.
Sometimes members of marginalized groups are pressured to speak out against other members of their group, like Muslims need to speak out against every act done by ISIS, even when done against other Muslims.
I guess the way you can tell that the police are not marginalized is that they do not get this pressure. They are more likely to circle the wagons in a show of support. They will gently talk down a fellow officer and then hug him while his wife bleeds to death in the car and their 7 year old daughter watches. They will make T-shirts and wristbands to show their support.
"I am Chris Humphries.""I am Darren Wilson"
You are not thinking hard enough about the company you keep.
It is a horrible thing to not be able to trust the keepers of the public safety and peace, but that's where we are. Too many have shown themselves to be trigger-happy, especially with their romantic partners, especially with the mentally ill, especially with people of color, and especially if they're black.
We cannot automatically accept what they say about anything.

Lies we tell about black people

Last week we were talking about white pride. I think we deconstructed the history pretty well, and why that's a problem, but there are also some basic fallacies with regard to how it functions now. I want to get to that, but I am going to approach it via some specific areas of lies and misconceptions.
When we talk about racism lately, the discussion often comes from an incidence of police brutality, or other violence against black people by white civilians. It is very common for right-wing pundits and politicians to try and deflect by bringing up two issues. It then becomes common for people who listen to these pundits to go there too. I turn your attention to "Black On Black Crime" and "Absent Black Fathers".
It's completely reasonable to argue that those issues do not excuse the other issues, and that if one issue needs discussion it is right to focus on that instead of always trying to deflect to something else, but also, those are wrong ideas in people's heads.
My awareness shot up a lot after Trayvon Martin was killed. That would have been a stupid time to bring up black fathers, because he was going to his father's house. His father was there. That's been happening with a lot of these names and press conferences. Their fathers are there. Maybe the parents aren't together, but both parents are in the child's life.
So I started thinking about my own black friends - the ones where I know them well enough to know things about their family - and without counting siblings (there are some cousins in there), of ten family units the parents stayed together in seven (though three of those unions have one partner dead now), with one divorce (which did not end contact with either parent), and two where I am not sure. That's a higher percentage of lasting unions than with my white friends.
Now, you can tell me that I'm in the Pacific Northwest, and there is no way that's a representative sample, but two of those families are from the South and one's from Detroit, so, you know, it's not completely unrepresentative either. (Actually, the divorced family is from California, so make what you will of that.)
That is still anecdotal. Anecdotally, I could also tell you about a white woman who almost certainly refrains from marrying the father of her three children so she can continue collecting government benefits and that would not prove anything about white families. If we move away from the anecdotes, a recent study showed a slightly higher rate of involvement for black fathers than other races, especially in the area of homework.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr071.pdf
So, let's talk about crime statistic based on race.
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/distorted-exaggeration-black-black-crime-ignores-much-americas-criminalityhttp://www.thenation.com/article/192361/about-black-black-crime
Actually, there are a lot of good articles about this, but here are the three key points.
1. Most crime happens within the same racial group. If I am a crime victim, the perpetrator will most likely be white. Years of enforced segregation have ensured that most of the chances we get to commit crime are on people of the our own race. To make black on black crime an issue without making white on white crime an issue is disingenuous, but also a pretty effective illustration of how society makes generalizations about races other than white.
2. That being said, black crime rates have nonetheless been dropping steadily, at a faster rate than the overall crime rate. Fox News and their ilk have been slow to give credit to black communities for this drop in crime, which has been happening because...
3. Many black people do care greatly about black on black crime, and they do outreach and hold summits and create programs to reduce it, with a pretty good success rate. In the areas that are still worse for crime, there are people working on it. We can say a lot of things about what structural factors are working against them, but that leads us into other areas, so for now let's just hear from Jon Stewart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_Bk8TVZ7KU
Right around the three minute mark, that's what I'm talking about.
The discussions are worth having anyway, because racism is an important issue. Effects of structural racism is an important issue, and should not be derailed. It still seems worth pointing out that the derailers are lying.
They may not know they are lying. I remember being taught that slavery disrupted the black family, along with welfare rules and the war on drugs. For liberals that should lead to sympathy for what society has done to the black family, where conservatives are less likely to make allowances, but neither side is seeing the actual picture. You can have the best intentions and a lot of compassion but still be the chump who swallows the party line.
Let's not be chumps. There's a lot of wrong information out there. Sometimes it happens on purpose, sometimes it may not, but it can only get in the way of real progress.
If you care, you need to question.

Band Review: The Elegant Mistakes

The Elegant Mistakes are a Rock/Alternative band from New Jersey.
One of the most interesting things for me was reading on their Youtube channel that the band consists of all teens, between the ages of 15 and 19.
The description appears to be from 2012, so they should all be older now, but it is impressive to hear their level of proficiency at that age. They have a clear and together sound.
There is sometimes a feeling that the music could be stronger, or delivered more forcefully, but that seems like something that could easily happen with experience.
They have five tracks on ReverbNation, with four original songs. There are also many performance videos on Youtube, including several covers, allowing you to get a good feel for the band and their abilities.
It's hard to know whom to compare them to in order to give an idea of their sound, though Natalie Merchant comes to mind. Performances include covers of Weezer, Oasis, Evanescence, Lenny Kravitz, Gotye, and Michael Jackson, so it's a fairly wide range. I would start with ReverbNation and focus on the original songs; I believe those are their strongest.
http://www.facebook.com/elegantmistakes
https://www.reverbnation.com/theelegantmistakes
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheElegantMistakes/about
https://twitter.com/ElegantMistakes