Birds Before The Storm

sigh.
You know how 9/11 truthers make protesters seem even crazier and more stupid than we are? This guy has just ratcheted it up a notch.

This is happening now, so I don’t know everything that is happening. But a gunman has taken hostages at the Discovery Channel. They believe it to be a guy James Jay Lee who has been arrested for protesting the place before, and he’s got a seriously wingnut list of demands. Some of the basic ideas make sense: advocating that human ingenuity ought to be turned to reversing environmental catastrophe, that the media has the opportunity and the responsibility to encourage a more responsible worldview. But it’s all couched in rhetoric about “filthy, filthy hobbitses” er… I mean, humans.

I wish I was baffled by how someone could possibly mix an anti-civilization worldview with an anti-immigrant one, as well, blaming immigrants for being “yet more human filth” or whatever. Clearly, those people were going to be people wherever they were.

This kind of militant misanthropy will probably only increase as civilization staggers forward, plowing down the last bits of the wild earth. And that sucks. The destruction of the wild sucks, and motherfuckers like the unabomber are in no way the solution.

from the list of demands that Mr. Lee had at a previous protest:

The Discovery Channel and it’s affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other’s inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order.

I spoke at the Stockholm anarchist bookfair this summer about anarchist publishing, and one of the most challenging and useful audience participants was an anarchist academic named Deric Shannon, who later interviewed me for his project transformation radio. I actually haven’t listened to the edited piece yet, since I’m on a bus (holy crap I’m on a bus and the internet at the same time! the future!), but the interview and the kinds of conversations that I managed to have with him and a few others in Stockholm are among the highlights of my recent time in europe.

Political prisoners with birthdays in September. download the poster and print it out and mail these fine folks a birthday card! Poster is courtesy of the Chapel Hill Prison Books collective.

I went with my friend Dea to the boat graveyard in Staten Island, a fascinating place where they just dump boats to rust and rot. It’s beautiful and spiky and probably not particularly safe. i played a lot with my new pinhole lens, as well, so that’s the deal with all of the hella-blurry pictures. Dea and I shot with the same camera, so it’s not actually 100% clear who took which pictures, which is fine with me.

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I guess about a week and a half ago, John Zerzan mentioned me on his radio show Anarchy Radio, which you can listen to online. I was a bit nervous about what he would say, when a friend told me he’d brought up my article Anarchism Versus Civilization, because he’s had some unfriendly words to say about the whole post-civilization thing in the past. He seems to be mostly favorable of the piece, and takes to task several of the commenters who critiqued my article who hadn’t really read it. This pleases me, because while I disagree with most of Zerzan’s conclusions and ideology, I find his critique to be very useful… and it seems like he returning that favor.

Okay, so I feel like I made my point over the past month, that goth has always had rather radical elements in it, including many of the most prominent bands. So I’ll stop posting that series to birdsbeforethestorm. But I’ll keep exploring the intersection over at nurrgoth.tumblr.com, with perhaps a slightly broader focus, and not just music videos. And that site is rather easy to contribute to, in case you run across stuff that belongs there!

And Graceless: A Journal of the Radical Gothic is well underway and will be totally awesome.

I got the following email today from some piece of shit:

Hello my name is Jason Drake with Sunergy Domains.

We wanted to let you know that the domain name, steamypunk.com
is for sale.

If you are interested in obtaining this .com name please let us know
and we can send you more information.

Thanks,
Jason Drake
Sunergy Domains
Primary email: domains@sunergy.org
Alternate email: drakesourceone@gmail.com
ph: 707-SUNERGY

Some nerve. They know that I have “steamypunk.net” registered so they figure they might as well buy “steamypunk.com” and hold it for ransom.

I hate that these bastards are called websquatters, too. Because they’re not squatting, they are real-estate prospecting. Squatting is historically the opposite of real-estate prospecting: a web-squatter would be a hacker who took back one of these domain names for free and used it because no one else was, and it was just being used as leverage by some greedy bastard.

I did, however, respond to the email:

Fuck you.

Nurr Goth Isn’t PoliticalNurr Goth Isn’t Political is now it’s own blog on Tumblr!

Okay, turns out that industrial hip-hop didn’t stop in the 90s, and it has definitely stayed political. This song, by Meat Beat Manifesto, is from 2008.

lyrics (incomplete) after the cut
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Nurr Goth Isn’t PoliticalNurr Goth Isn’t Political is now it’s own blog on Tumblr!

Goth can (and used to more than it does currently, as far as I can tell) cast its spooky shadow across pretty much any genre. And at least in the 90s, there was industrial hip-hop, including the incredible The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who derive their name from socialist literature and collaborated extensively with more “properly” industrial bands like Meat Beat Manifesto.

lyrics after the cut:
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Nurr Goth Isn’t PoliticalNurr Goth Isn’t Political is now it’s own blog on Tumblr!

This is a fan video, but the lyrics to this song are pretty explicit too. I don’t know too much about Die Warzau, but they seem pretty political in general. A bit frightening, though, with an album titled Vinyl 88 (88 being code for “heil hitler” in places like Germany where you’re not allowed to be explicitly pro-nazi)… but near as I can tell this is intentional satire, as the band seems to make statements against racism with some regularity and the song “hitler’s brain” on that album is a collaboration with George Clinton.

lyrics after the cut:
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