saul williams' niggy tardust is 'really good™'. that's officially my rating. 4/5 stars, something like that. you should know that means i like it enough that i'm going to have it on incessant repeat on my stereo, my mp3 player, my mind, for the rest of the week and then some. it's right up there with NIN's with_teeth and year-zero, and a step/giant-leap below The Downward Spiral, or Led Zeppelin (the album), or The Wall.

at first i thought it was too obviously crammed with reznor's year-zero soundscaping. but i get it now. saul and trent are a very organic fusion at this moment. Trent can write very intense lyrics when he's picking at his own emotional scabs, and while *he* doesn't get close to that level of power when he's trying social commentary, that's what Saul's all about.

So I don't think Niggy's sound is a case of trent not being able to sound like anything but himself, even when trying to make a hip-hop album. "Niggy" isn't Trent trying to do hip-hop. It's more like an in-between sequels, alternate take of year-zero. It's an iteration of year-zero. it ought to have a halo number. Saul's lyrics, notwithstanding their frequent use of "NGH" (which is often ironic at two or more levels), could easilly have formed the semantic content to year-zero. you might have to listen to Niggy a bit slant to hear that, but that's only fitting: saul's diction is down with dickinson's idea of truth and divinity.

Download it at niggytardust.com

funny addendum: my CD changer just tracked off the end of 'Niggy', and onto NIN's "Broken". Till the lyrics of "WiSH" kicked-in, I didn't quite notice that we'd switched discs!

New York Magazine interviewed Trent and Saul (unfortunately mostly about the distribution model rather than the music). Trent confesses to putting his money where his mouth his [when asked how much he paid for Radiohead's in rainbows]: "I bought the physical one, so I spent a whopping $80. [Pauses.] But, then I re-bought it and paid $5,000, because I really felt that I need to support the arts, so people could follow in my footsteps."

Last week the PBS TV show NOW reported statistics on military rape and sexual assault. How about some support for our troops? No, really, how about it?

I don't particularly like it when people report statistics on sexual harrassment along with ones on rape, because it can tend to confuse people. In military terminology, according to NOW "Military Sexual Trauma" includes acts of harassment all the way through acts of rape. I'll make an unjustified assumption that NOW was careful with their editing, and that when they have Dr. Patricia Resick, a V.A. psychologist state, that 15% of women in the firts gulf war were raped (see the show's transcript) they really mean rape.

Fifteen percent of women raped in a few months??! By fellow soldiers? You Go Girls! Join the military. Heck, with ROTC, the military might even pay for you to get rape training in the college fraternity/sorority system so you'll be used to it when you get raped under combat conditions later on.

I'm not being glibly sarcastic. I'm fucking furious. Why the fuck don't we train our men and boys not to rape?

(originally posted as a comment in dbt_support ). for me, something that seems to get in the way of acting healthy is the feeling that being healthy is somehow a way of conforming to other people's invalidating ideas of what or who i should be. i'm discovering that certain rebellious, but also constructive -- or at least not self-destructive, acts help me get over this.

Rebellion is very much a personal thing. Figure skating, for example, feels rebellious to me, because it's something that men aren't conventionally supposed to do. Other things, like flirting with bdsm, may or may not be healthy for all people at all times, but they seem to end up helping me. it's good to be able to do things that i *can't* talk to my parents about, and that they *wouldn't* get. all too often I let myself feel that my parents have co-opted my own successes, so having things that they *can't* co-opt, help me feel alive and self-motivated.

like many things, it's a balancing act.

grumpygirl tries to smile Brought to you by www.grumpy-girl.com

^^girl's in need of emergency ice-skating therapy even worse than I am!

Something now??
Through life no fun
I want to feel
I want to run
I'm gonna keep catching that butterfly
In that dream of mine ~ "catching the butterfly", the verve

Brian Lehrer reports that the US, after participating strongly in some aspects of the negotiations, is not expected to sign the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

The US pushed negotiations to, among other things, remove any language pertaining to "occupied territories", and to excise any explicit reference to abortion when talking of the right to health services.

If we can't sign this convention, what *can* we sign? Instead, apparently, the US pointed out that it has existing legislation in the Disabilities Act, which other countries are invited to emulate. In other words, human rights for the rest of the world, American rights for Americans. The US seems to wish to politically secede from the Human race.

Worse, we wish to retain veto-power or just plain bully-power over the rest of humanity. Perhaps it's the done thing in UN negotiations, but it strikes me as rather sinister that the US participates in shaping an international instrument that it plans not to join. I could be wrong, but this doesn't seem like a case of negotiations having been made in good faith, only to fail to live up to some sine qua non that the US needs in order to sign on. I find it hard to believe that the US could not have negotiated for a palatable treaty on disabled rights, seeing as the US does indeed have advanced national laws in the area already.

We also haven't signed certain other human rights convections such as the convention on the rights of the child, and the convention against discrimination of women. (Moral failiures which may or may not have been originally committed by previous Presidencies, but obviously upheld by the current one).

Shame on us. Again.

Nine Inch Nails knows how to make money without seeming like that's all they're after. When the 2005 album With_Teeth was released, the *whole album* was available to listen to on mySpace. Hordes of NIN fans went out and bought the album.

NIN promises a new full-length release in April. The marketing for this one is just plain fun. First, they've set up a bunch of websites purportedly created in the 2022 world that the album describes. The sites are ( the usual suspects for a dystopian future world )

Parallel to this Alternate Reality Game (ARG), USB drives are being left in bathroom stalls at NIN concerts. The drives contain mp3s of tracks from the forthcoming NIN album (thusfar three have been leaked), along with other files that contain clues to the ARG. There are more clues in tour T-shirts, and numbers to call with recordings on them. The latest (and most disturbing) is 216-333-1810 (in conjunction with the leak of the song "Me, I'm not" and the uswiretap.com site). WARNING The recording at that phone number is a simulated cellphone call from a girl in a nightclub where people get locked-in and massacred. Not pleasant to listen to (for me, much worse than the torture stuff in the Broken movie, which was clearly simulated), and you can find transcripts online if your interested in the ARG, but not getting the heebie-jeebies.

Oh yeah, the Songs... You can find the dload sites at echoingthesound.org and other places. As these are unofficial "official" leaks from NIN, they're not pirated. Go get them and listen.

was the 1st leak (and indeed is officially released to radio stations). It's OK.

" was next. People have called-it Public Enemy-ish, which is kindof like saying Stravinsky is Mozart-ish because they use the same instrumentation. I'm not sure what to classify it as. It's fun as hell to dance to with it's crazy beat.
came out today. Very, danceable. Not in an 'industrial EBM' way, but just flat-out nightclub stuff. Reminds *me* of the Timbaland/Timberland "Sexy Back" thing, although it's a very different song. Both songs have deceptively insipid sounding lyrics (if you bother to look them up, you'll realize that Justin Timberlake isn't just moaning about 'get your sexy on', but actually goes into some light bdsm stuff in that song!).

Anyway, Year_Zero, is a damn geeky and fun concept for an album release.

Further proof of intelligent design:

• Bikers who go the wrong way down a bike lane at night with no lights whatsoever. Nevermind that they are endagering pedestrians who aren't expecting wrong way traffic, and seriously endagering bikers and skaters going the right way: it's a bike lane so they have to use it. Going the right way on the adjacent avenue would be too much trouble.
  
• Pedestrians in Central Park who cross the road against the walk light without looking, despite the fact that bikers and skaters are hurtling towards them. It's a park, so they have the right to walk wherever, however, and whenever they want. Corollary: Bikers and skaters who don't bother to slow down when pedestrians are crossing when the walk light is on.
  
• People who don't move to the back of a bus or into the middle of a subway car.
  
• People who insist on walking into a subway car before people have gotten out.
  
• People who leave their dogs' shit all over the sidewalks.

And you wonder why the Middle East conflict is seemingly intractable in this decade.

On the other foot...

I absolutely adore the fact that I can step out the door at 9PM, lace-up my inline skates, hit the park loop, hear a live band and interrupt my laps to skate to their music, and finish-up my workout at 10:30 or so in relative safety. And yes, I wear lights so the clueless pedestrians and wrong-way bikers won't hit me :-)

I'll try to be brief.

On this Memorial Day, let's please remember to, as the movie Saving Private Ryan exhorts us, earn the sacrifices that were made on our behalf in WWII. We can do so in many ways, encouraging freedom, democracy and prosperity in our own country and abroad. However, if we continue to soil our flag with blood shed in a war waged for reasons of commerce and political expediency, it calls into question the very meanings of the words "freedom", "democracy", and "prosperity". We can't walk out of Iraq, but lets not celebrate what happens there with nationalistic pride misapropriated from WWII.

I watched some of the Memorial Day concert, and was rather moved. The big mistake is in categorizing all war casualties as heroic deaths made in the defense of freedom. Any soldier in combat can desert in the face of the horrors they face. The overwhelming majority do not, and this certainly does make them brave and heroic -- to a depth that most civilians aren't able to comprehend. Unfortunately, the current wars that the US is fighting were not necessary to the defense of freedom: the bombing of Afghanistan was retaliatory, and the war in Iraq is just plain senseless when the human cost is totalled.

During the Memorial Day concert broadcast, great efforts were taken to personalize the sacrifices made by soldiers, including having actors read 1st-person narratives written by a prisoner-of-war, a mother of a dead soldier, and a member of a combat unit that experienced casualties. The taboo that that the broadcast dared not break was to further personalize these accounts into being the accounts simply of people experiencing war, rather than of United States soldiers waging war. When one strips the flags off the carcass, one sees that deaths caused by collateral damage, the deaths of enemy soldiers, and even the deaths whithin terrorist militias all leave behind grieving families.

I'm sure I've said it before: Memorial Day is a profound argument against the unnecessary waging of war. To read of President Bush being "in awe of the men and women who sacrifice for the freedom of the United States of America," or to watch Gen. Colin Powell shake hands with and thank soldiers, makes me sick.

National leadership forces one to make terrible decisions whose consequences are fraught with peril no matter how one decides them. But surely the need for Bush and Powell to send troops to Iraq cannot in any way compare with the need for Roosevelt and his cabinet to enter into WWII. The flags and roses planted each year by Belgian schoolchildren at the foot of the US WWI graves in Flanders Field do not symbolize the same things as the flags that are draped over the steel caskets that are coming home today from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Christianity has a saying "love the sinner but hate the sin". In loving the sacrifices made by those in uniform, lets not forget to continue hating war.

yea i can paint scenes of my social interactions with the broad garish strokes of a nin song. just fucked over another bunch of people who assumed that i act like a normal person, and that if i'm not there to meet them at an airport, it's not because anything's gone wrong, but because i just couldn't bother, and fuck informing them, because why the fuck should they need to do more than shrug their shoulders at my absence and move on.

trust in me and be betrayed.

and i had the presumption this morning to think that it was going to be a good day. after i'd already taken pains to smear shit all over other peoples' good days, i really shouldn't have thought i'd be able to walk away undetected.

all who care, even the least, about me are bits of flesh in *my* big broken machine. prepare for my point of view to grind you into fecal refuse. now go die and leave me alone. until i feel i need you again.