Angels of our Better Nature is a blog by a soldier deployed in Iraq. He’s eloquent and writes like a journalist.

I’d like to draw your attention to a banner ad I just saw:

It’s actually a flash animation. The two characters run across the ad, and you can position the crosshairs with your mouse.

I don’t know who this ad links to, because I didn’t want to click it. AT ALL.

Greenpeace (the organization) is being charged with a 19th-century maritime crime by the federal government. Here’s the story. Basically, some Greenpeace activists boarded a vessel in Miami, as a way to raise awareness of trade in illicit lumber. Yes, there is such a thing as illicit lumber, which is further endangering many already-threatened species, and it’s nice to have an opportunity to talk about it, wouldn’t you say?

However, as August Pollack says:

I’d like to congratulate the president for ending all terrorism on this planet, as the devotion of Justice resources to something as pathetic and pointless as this must show, lest we are meant to believe the Bush administration is so cowardly and sniveling that they would risk the lives of American citizens by devoting precious law facilities into scouring the books for hundred-year-old naval law for the sole purpose of scoring one against a harmless environmental group whilst they high-five each other and grunt.

Furthermore, the suit is against Greenpeace, not the actvists who actually boarded the boat. Greenpeace is predictably critical of Bush’s environmental policies. Connecting a few dots, we come up with the idea that perhaps Bush wants his legacy to be one of encouraging the government to use its vast power to silence criticism from organizations that exist in no small part for the purpose of criticizing the government.

If Ashcroft’s DoJ could come up with a way to bring criminal charges against newspapers that are critical of Bush, it would.

Instead of Mozart, today I’m listening to Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. Mozart directs you towards sublime beauty like an usher in a theater. Beefheart dares you to find the beauty in being burned with a lit cigarette.

Ok, maybe not quite that harsh, but that vivid image popped into my head, so I’ll run with it. Maybe it’s better to say Beefheart is a lot like making love to a vampire with a monkey on your knee. (That’s the title of a Beefheart tune.)

Here, try this: ‘Frownland‘

Towards A New Creationism:

Earlier today I was listening to Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. And I was thinking: This is music from the late 1700s. 1784, if memory serves, re-arranged in 1901 (some of the manuscript was lost, so a composer filled in the gaps). The version I was listening to had been re-re-written, since the arranger believed the 1901 addenda weren’t true to Mozart’s time. Of course, Mozart wasn’t true to Mozart’s time, sooo…

But I was listening to it, and thinking about it, there on the couch, wrapped up in my sleeping bag. What can I say? It was cold, and I like the constricted feeling of being in a sleeping bag. I sat there and listened and hallucinated mildly, seeing some nifty shapes and colors and, more importantly, beautiful empty spaces between the shapes and colors. The key is that it was beautiful. Not simply the abstract places my mind was going, but the concrete places the music was going. Mozart’s Mass is, by any observation, about as objectively beautiful as anything can be. It’s purpose is beauty. It’s truth is in it’s beauty.

So I was sitting there, and in between mild hallucinations, I thought: Why do I have to go back 200 years in history to find a work of beauty? I fast-forwarded through my knowledge of music history, and couldn’t find the same kind of pure beauty anywhere. Arvo Pärt came close, but his beauty is austere and implied, a bit like the space I mentioned before, the space between the shapes.

Most of Pärt’s music is religious in nature. Mozart’s desire (with the Mass) was to reveal the glory of God in the ornate complication of the aesthetic of his time. Pärt is revelatory in the act of removing all complication.

And as luck would have it, Pärt wrote a mass, as well. Which happened to be in the CD rack near where Mozart was. So I listened to it, too.

And I thought of Debussy as a kind of pure beauty, but his aesthetic is representational. Which is ironic, because he hung out with the cubists and surrealists. If Claude Debussy were here to argue with me, he’d take exception to being called representational, but he’d miss that all his music makes direct connection to images from mythology and real life. ‘La Mer,’ the sea. Prelude to the afternoon of a faun. Just read the title of the piece and you know what’s coming, right? He was trying to get away from the more formal aspects of orchestral music (no repeated melodies, texture over substance), but missed a biggie: the title of the piece.

So, as a channel for pure beauty, the vessel of Debussy is flawed, as far as I’m concerned. I dig the guy’s work, but he doesn’t make this particular cut. I’m too distracted trying to figure out which instrumental theme is supposed to be the faun to see the overarching beauty.

So it’s true: Unless I want austerity, I have to go back 200+ years if I want beauty. The time of revolution in the New World. A time of European empires. Religious intolerance and political upheaval. The last remaining embers of the Enlightement still bright enough to be seen, but too dim to cast any shadows. Just enough technology to get everyone in big trouble.

That’s where beauty lives.

Theme song for today:

‘Rehumanize Yourself,’ by The Police.

Can 1981 have been that long ago? And… Stewart Copeland.

I just watched a cool little music video. It’s from someone called Robokoneko. The song is ‘System Experiment.’ If you go here: http://www.couchblip.com/couchblip.html, and navigate to Artists and then Robokoneko, you can watch it. I’d link directly to it, but it’s a Flash site, so no direct linking allowed. Feh.

I got to that site via NeuroPop, which makes psychoacoustic music and sound effects for games and movies. They have a rotating ear-brain toy, the audio equivalent of those optical oddities you find in science textbooks and the like.

I got to NeuroPop via dingus5.

Goddammit. Even Duke Ellington can’t cheer me up. Not even ‘Madness In Great Ones.’

Things must be pretty dire.

Update: Had to dive through the dark. ‘Mind Bomb’ (The The) in the car, and Mass in C Minor (Beloved by God) here at home. What a luxury to be surrounded by the greatest music ever created by humans. Angel trumpets and devil trombones, encoded on little silver plastic discs. What a luxury to have a steady supply of the world’s best drug (music) in my medicine cabinet. “You.. are.. invited!”

Billmon pretty much always gets it right. In the article I’ve linked to, he basically says that we’re in an escalating war of cruelty, where each step we take is, of necessity, more cruel than the one that preceeded it.

Essentially, what has happened is that the Bush administration has done everything in its power to make Iraq the scapegoat for 9/11. In Billmon’s article, he links to a WSJ article which mentions that up until May of 2003, non-Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib were assumed to be terrorists, and labeled as such with a wrist band. The word ‘terrorist.’ On their wrists.

And I remember all the rhetoric about how invading Iraq was payback for 9/11. We heard it everywhere from the Bush administration all the way down through the media and to the grunt with his boots on the ground in Iraq. Of course, there’s no connection between Iraq and 9/11. We might as well have invaded Mexico, since they have brown people there who might be Arab.

Anyway. So the point here is that the war Al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorists want to play is exactly the game we’re giving them. Scapegoating Iraq by invading and occupying, torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib as part of that scapegoating. And now that there’s a reason for Iraqis to be pissed off, Al Qaea releases a tape of an American being beheaded with a kitchen knife. That’s their play. They *want* hatred and violence. They *want* to incite us to hate them.

It’s their way of saying ‘Bring it on.’