I just got kicked out of the Dimitri Shostakovich fan club… It was crazy…how it went down. I should write about it. They try to blackmail me…and there was sex stuff too…all sorts of weird shit. It would be a racy tract.
Sorry for the group thing…dry spell pride…
I recently penned a piece for the music magazine ‘Perfect Sound Forever.’ I have scribbled for this mag in in the past, and read it now and then too. It’s pretty decent…anyway…. This most recent extemporaneous exploration concerns itself with all things ‘Hold Music.’ The piece includes a quasi historical narrative, (there is very little in the way of material to gather for the history of telephone or other ‘hold music. I kind of fudge/forced it…but not too wantonly.’ Bullshit historiography has a lot of potential for fun.
There is plenty of digital ink and otherwise spilled for ‘Muzak,’ but that was not my interest at all. Unfortunately, the word ‘Muzak’ ended up in the title of the piece…. and it’s kinda hard to avoid writing about it when it comes to canned music in general. I say unfortunately, because I really wanted the piece to be essentially fiction, with the trappings of ‘music reporting,’ you know, lampoon the ‘Top Ten’ thing… sort of in my own vertiginously Nutso and Shirley way… Wasn’t my call. Alright…fine, I got a little bizz-buzzed and I tried to be a writer…ha ha….yeah..you got me…jerko.
This piece was edited down. PSF has a great editor by name of Jason Gross…but of course, my crazy prolix ass get’s a bit misty eyed for all the word inflated crapola excised. I gotta stop fretting about that….
I hope someone get’s a kick out of something outta this.. Sorry for so many words. Have a great day…
The article is listed as: TELEPHONE HOLD MUSIC
Thanks,
Dom Maltempi
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5-29-069
By: Domenic Maltempi
A personal Giglioscene period (punctuated with loose white straw fists of hair)
I’m glad something gave me courage
Something besides the wet pills on a ruined desk
Cursing manuscripts
in lopsided dialects spoken to hardly anyone present, or in fact there
Nuzzling lickspittles
are calling my shots
it’s not even summer with your hammer dress
buffeting a new skinned confused blue wave
Flowers refusing to cooperate
Retired in two amorous warring hands
It won’t matter how they die
What colors for, there for that, and that and that and that
It will matter what color you will die for
scratch that scratch that
As….what color as
I’m not going fine fine prevarication waltzing with your upset Viennese all-star target practice
I don’t want to meet you in the park with your secret service jokes
My life insurance is stale
They get you with the appetizers and watered down drinks
before the train sunset quarrels continue
and they do, and you’re fingers aren’t fast enough
slick tar circumference intuition rides coach for free
A hunch
That’s what father Rictus wanted me to call it….
‘that’s not a guess Mr. M
That’s a hunch, and keep like that
Take off that glove
Now give it to me!
And the more we screech for nothing the more we’re not worth it
2. I don’t know what each finger weighs
The ones that are no longer there
Still recalling a certain plunging you
My motherhood still in your sympathetic chest
That was note, above…. But I only wrote the first letter of the first word
Back of Bamboo rolling papers, useless to me
More fey eyed clock racket quiet
god I want you
this party is being superimposed
it’s just terrible
losing you’re buttons
I’m waiting in something called the Lido Lounge
The cheerleaders applauding a bubble economy as “wealth creation” (to use one of Alan Greenspan’s favorite phrases) would like us, their audience, to believe that they knew that there was a problem all along, but simply could not restrain the economy’s “irrational exuberance” and “animal spirits.” The idea is to blame the victims – homeowners forced into debt to afford access to housing, pension-fund savers forced to consign their wage set-asides to money managers for the large Wall Street firms, and companies seeking to stave off corporate raiders by taking “poison pills” in the form of debts large enough to block their being taken over. One looks in vain for an honest acknowledgement of how the financial sector turned into a Mafia-style gang more akin to post-Soviet kleptocrat insiders than to Schumpeterian innovators.
The post-bubble tomes assumes that we have reached “the end of history” as far as big problems are concerned. What is missing is a critique of the big picture – how Wall Street has financialized the public domain to inaugurate a neo-feudal tollbooth economy while privatizing the government itself, headed by the Treasury and Federal Reserve. Left untouched is the story how industrial capitalism has succumbed to an insatiable and unsustainable finance capitalism, whose newest “final stage” seems to be a zero-sum game of casino capitalism based on derivative swaps and kindred hedge fund gambling innovations.
http://www.wizardofozfestival.org/
As promised
dom maltempi
I re-echo some of the thrust of the writers evaluation of ‘Problem Radical’s.’ At times this play made me viscerally angry, an anger devoid of any redeeming tension brought on by some perplexing and fatiguing yet engaging interplay between text, sound, general art direction and so forth.One should not try the intermedia play thing for TWO HOURS unless you have something, anything, to bring some sort of fluidness or ‘bonding’ to it. There was something twistedly mundane about this two hour wading into a paste-board avant-schlock ‘opera.’ There were some strong acting performances, particularly when actors were working together (seldom seen ). Sure, I dug some of the writing, and at times interesting sing-song fleshy-automatism redolent in the the delivery of lines. Hey man…. I like experimental theatre ok! The constiuents parts of the perfromance only excerbated a siren like redundancy about it’s essential movements.I also enjoyed the costumes, that added some great visual interest. Sadly, these interesting costume changes became a bit overwhelming and therefore added to the overall underwhelming effect of the play in general. ‘Got nothing to say, or do, or someone to interact with…? Just change your F$&(#$! clothes. These incessant changes seemed to further add a touch of ouch to a painful performance. The play was a punctuated cold slap of inchoateness that struggled so hard to make a critique . ..a statement, paint a picture... of WHAT? : The reification of everything, inter-era urban problems, dehumanization of work, lifestyle calcification in the dilapidated future-past-present ?Finally, that extremely predictable gluing of sheets of paper on the board upstage that eventually showed us a couple in a flying saucer, in some ways exlemplified what this play radiated overall: a rather staid and predictable set of programmatic images playing at frenetic art, a static image of a UFO that will never fly , it’s passengers abandoned. The final composite image was all glued up quiete The music was just a lot of bombastic chugga riffage that hardly corresponded with what was going on, which would be impossible, because nothing really happened.
150 First Ave., NYC.
April 25–May 10. Wed.–Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 5:30 p.m.
(212) 352-3101, (866) 811-4111, www.theatermania.com, or www.ps122.org.
Mike Whitney..excerpted…and on point… The binge (druggy like horseshit high times caused by consumer debt…leading to x-y-z….hone in on consumer debt as dark catalyst for worsening times to come….. there will be no recovery till this cannabalistic variety show (neo-bio-peo-Capitalism.. is OUTLAWED by US…that is….regular dudes and gals….) 4-10-09
As housing prices fall and foreclosures rise, the capital position of many of the banks will become untenable leading to a rash of bank failures. An article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal puts adds some historical perspective to today’s financial crisis:
“The events of the past 10 years have an eerie similarity to the period leading up to the Great Depression. Total mortgage debt outstanding increased from $9.35 billion in 1920 to $29.44 billion in 1929. In 1920, residential mortgage debt was 10.2 per cent of household wealth; by 1929, it was 27.2 per cent of household wealth….
The causes of the Great Depression need more study, but the claims that losses on stock-market speculation and a monetary contraction caused the decline of the banking system both seem inadequate. It appears that both the Great Depression and the current crisis had their origins in excessive consumer debt — especially mortgage debt — that was transmitted into the financial sector during a sharp downturn.
Why does one crash cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system. It appears that we’re witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.” (From Bubble to Depression? Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith, Wall Street Journal)
The party continues for ‘NATO’…..an alliance for ‘peace,’ against enemies…always enemies..always threatening no matter how crippled, tin-pottish, uninterested..
NATO – Still Mission-Creeping At 60
We’re at the sixtieth anniversary of NATO. This weekend there’s a ceremony in Strasbourg and Kehl, the latter being the German town facing Strasbourg on the east side of the Rhine. Sarkozy of France and Merkel of Germany meet and embrace, in symbolic affirmation of Unity Restored, after divisive conflicts now buried in the mists of time. I’m not sure what theatrical events have been planned to symbolize this celebration of Gallo-Teutonic warmth, perhaps some flotilla on the mighty Rhine itself, with Sarko as a latterday Mark Anthony and Merkel as the Cleo, perhaps some performance piece about Mars casting aside the instruments of war and entering the bower of Venus to enjoy the pleasures of peace. NATO’s impresarios could review a rather comical “Mars and Venus” I saw the other day, by the Dutch painter Cornelis Cornelisz, now in the excellent Norton Simon museum in Pasadena. Mars, lookinga bit like Sarko with a mustache, has taken off his helmet, tunic and trousers and is standing nervously with no clothes on, while while a rather suburban Venus, also en deshabille, lounges back on a plump cushion having her toenails trimmed.
To give vibrancy to the event Sarkozy has just formally brought France back into NATO’s “integrated command”. Charles de Gaulle, a leader who looks better and better with every passing decade, took France out of this same integrated command back in 1966 as a rebuke to American domination of the alliance. There were plaintive howls from NATO’s bureaucratic establishment at redeployment from chic Paris to dreary Brussels. No doubt there’ll soon be an institutional shift back to Paris by NATO personnel, wearied of Belgian beer, moules frites and waterzooi.
There are gale-force gusts of bombast about the NATO Alliance’s historic role as Europe’s mighty shield and buckler, guarantor of its freedoms against “aggression”, thus perpetuating sixty years of humbug. There was never the slightest chance of the Soviet Union and its auxiliaries in the Warsaw Pact moving rolling west in the prospective onslaught luridly evoked by Winston Churchill in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March, 1949. Churchill gestured to the specter of the “Mongol hordes” that had menaced Europe 700 years before, only heading home when the Great Khan died. “They never returned,” rumbled the old faker, “until now.”
Having borne almost the entire burden on the Eastern front of crushing Hitler’s armies and having suffered appalling casualties in so doing, the Soviet Union was in no condition to invade western Europe. As Jordan Marsh points out, “one of the best-kept secrets of the cold war is that Nato was founded in 1949 to protect Western Europe against the Warsaw Pact, which was founded in 1954. There never was a threat of Russian invasion. Stalin had entirely too much on his plate to think about such madness. But Nato had to be established to enable the arming of West Germany without upsetting the French and to provide a market for the US Military Industrial Complex. The biggest Russian threat was Stalin’s 1949 “Peace Initiative”, which would have included a united, unarmed, neutral German state. No market for the MIC. No threat to France, Eastern Europe, or Russia.”
This didn’t impede mad Western scenarios of the sort that threat-inflators routinely issued down the decades until the very moment the Soviet Union collapsed, and even then there were hold-outs who maintained that the Russian bear was faking it, to throw the West off guard.
………………………
he, suddenly, it was all over. NATO’s formal purpose evaporated. The Soviet Union collapsed. Without delay NATO burgeoned into exactly what its left detractors had always said its essential function had been from the very start, a US-dominated political and military alliance, aimed at encircling Russia,and acting as enforcer for larger US imperial strategy. NATO’s onslaughts on Serbia duly followed.
Timed for the anniversary NATO’s leaders are scheduled to proclaim a new “strategic concept” to define the organization’s mission for the 21st century, doubtless including its availability to battle global warming, latest in the long line of imaginary threats, conjured up to elicit larger budgets, more weapons, new “missions” launched from the ramparts of Western capital. In the short term the warcry raised last week by Obama, only a few days after the tenth anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, is: On to Kabul!
NATO doesn’t need a new mission. It needs to disappear into the trashcan of history along with the cold war that engendered it.
Alex Cockburn….from a portion of his diary.. in counterpunch.org dated April 3, 2009
This (below) is an excerpt from a piece in Washington Post today (Sunday the 29th of March 2009)….regarding tax havens, and more particularly Switzerland’s bank privacy laws coming under much pressure (bout time!) I giggled not a little upon uttering the words out loud to myself seen below: “the little wiseguy countries.”
“The world has had enough of con artists,” Bernhard Weissberg, editor in chief of Blick, a popular Swiss tabloid, wrote in a recent column. “And the big countries have had enough of the little wiseguy countries, whether they are called Andorra, Luxembourg or Switzerland.”
Indeed….we have had enough…even the many bellowing hypocrites who would do the same thing if they knew how, or were in a position to……..
