Ten years ago I was in Philadelphia and excited to learn that Emergency Broadcast Network (or EBN for short), an art music/video project would be touring with dj Spooky providing live mixed visuals and even performing their own set. I had first seen their work in college in the mid 90s, probably on a friend’s VHS player showing a copy of Commercial Entertainment Product, their 1992 release of eleven videos on video tape. The frenetic and aggressive music on the video album didn’t really appeal to me; it was more the way they sampled video samples of explosions and machine guns firing with their audio into a coherent music (and video) collage that blew me away. Till then I hadn’t been fortunate enough to see them perform live and didn’t even realize that they were more or less an art project that had been shoehorned into the form of a touring band. (It might be a testament to how narrowly focused I was on the particular strains of ambient music that I was listening to and mixing with then as a DJ at SUNY Binghamton’s WHRS, that I missed their 1995 CD release Telecommunication Breakdown. If I had heard it I would have been amazed at the ambient stylings of the tracks “3:7:8″ and “This is the End” and I would have been enchanted to learn that both Bill Laswell and Brian Eno were involved with the release.) Shown below, “3:7:8″ :

Upon moving to Philadelphia in 2007 I bought a copy of Commercial Entertainment Product at the Digital Underground, a music store at 5th and South where I was making friends with local scenesters, and it was there that I probably learned the following year of the Spooky tour with EBN coming to the TLA. I had a mixed experience at the show. I think I got there late but was quickly impressed by EBN’s visuals. They had set up a double screen with a mirror image of the left on the right side, so there was some very cool if simple effects of action in the videos blending towards the center of the two screens. The visuals they provided for Spooky’s set were again very aggressive and I thought kind of childishly masculine, with lots of quick cut edits of men in race cars, spies, guns, and things getting blown up. EBN had made their name for videos that parodied the manipulation and dissemination of propaganda for the first Gulf War through mainstream media. For example, in their video “Syncopated Ordinance Demonstration #1″ (see below) they contrast the war footage of tanks getting bombed, with GI Joe’s cartoon battles, and scantily clad women shooting uzis in gun manufacturer advertisements, and so present the different ways violence on TV is presented in one single grotesque.

EBN’s viduals for dj Spooky’s sets were much more superficial. Without depth, EBN’s art was merely being used to complement the aggressive and masculine tone of Spooky’s presentation of illbient in relation to hip hop.

But I wasn’t dissapointed during EBN’s solo set. I saw videos that were works of art in and of themselves, and not being used to complement some other message. One of them featured a manipulation of Frank Sinatra from a short TV clip that would phase in and out of itself in audio and video. Seeing it made the entire evening worthwhile. Following the show, I searched in vain for anyone who had recorded the show. I wrote to dj Spooky asking for more information. I asked friends who new folks that regularly bootlegged shows at the TLA. Nada. And to make matters worse, I soon learned that EBN disbanded.

Fast forward to 2006. EBN videos were all over the place on youtube, and I did some exploring and found that the EBN project has been revived somewhat. All the members had gone onto other things, mostly in media production work, and EBN frontman Joshua L. Pearson had become a family man. But he had also created an official web page for EBN and posted a few videos, mostly quicktime files from Commercial Entertainment Product, for download. I still couldn’t find the Sinatra video but I was excited that it probably wasn’t lost. Hopefully it would be posted on youtube or somewhere else. At the time, looking for it would have to wait since I was terribly busy in Louisiana doing urban planning following the hurricanes of 2005. I would follow up on this later.

And so when I had some spare time earlier this year I sent out emails to all the EBN project members on whether the group had any plans to make an official release of the old videos on DVD. Greg Deocampo (currently of Mediatronica) was the only one who responded, but wow, what a response. He pointed me to his pesonal project Eclectic Method (EMN) and his portfolio of EMN videos. On a separate page of the EMN project, Greg had all the videos that had been made for the CD album Telecommunication Breakdown in 1995 but hadn’t been released due to there not being enough space on the CD for all those videos. (Only “Electronic Behavior Control System,” “3:7:8,” and “Homicidal Schizophrenic (A Lad Insane)” were released on the data side of the CD.) Mediatronica was also hosting a mirror of the videos on their video distribution site televis.es. Among the flash videos was a copy of the Sinatra video entitled “Frank”; I was overjoyed! (See “Frank” below.) A great interview of Deocampo is available in the episode archive of the public radio program, Some Assembly Required.

Having become a collector of EBN videos, I was dismayed to find that quite a few were no longer accessible on youtube or anywhere else. For years, a site called GNN (Guerilla News Network) had hosted a series of seven EBN videos it called “The Lost Tapes.” A few had surfaced on youtube, and one or two on file sharing networks, but the others had since 2004 when GNN stopped hosting them, become truly lost. Another video, “Banjo Lesson,” was made inaccessible when a youtube user named Nomeus had his account suspended. And so last week, I went looking for Nomeus, and finally caught up with him on his urban exploration site flurbex.com. I’ve since been able to get copies of all the missing files and repost them on youtube. Here’s “Banjo Lesson”:

Tags: collage,collecting,EBN,video
Categories: Aharonium, Ears, Film, Mythology and Poetry
No Comments »

Yochanan Lavie, who regularly reads and comments over at failedmessiah.com, recently shared this poem inspired in general by the sickness and evil near the root of Aaron Rubashkin’s animal slaughtering and meat processing factory in Postville, Iowa, and specifically by Rubashkin’s use of PR flacks, paid industry “representatives,” and the Orthodox establishment to shill for them.

I’ve reposted Lavie’s poem below.

“Jeer at them” with apologies to William Blake

And did the Rebbe’s feet in recent time
Walk upon Iowa’s fields of green?
And were the illegal Mexicanos
On Iowa’s pleasant pastures screened?

And did the ICE helicoptors
Hover over our well-paid shills?
And was Crown Heights builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my public relations flack!
Bring me my homeless men of Texas!
Bring me my army of wetbacks!
Lie to my critics that afflict us!

I will not cease from PR fights,
I will stick it to the goyishe “Man”
Till we have built Crown Heights
In Iowa’s green and pleasant land.

Adapted from “And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake from the preface to his epic poem, Milton: a Poem. In 1916, C. Hubert H. Parry composed music for the poem to be sung as a hymn called “Jerusalem” (thus Lavie’s “Jeer at them”). Wikipedia notes,

The term “dark Satanic mills”, which entered the English language from this poem, most often is interpreted as referring to the early industrial revolution and its destruction of nature.^[1] This view has been linked to the fate of the Albion Flour Mills, which was the first major factory in London, built in 1769 by Matthew Boulton and James Watt. It was powered by Watt’s steam engines, and produced 6,000 bushels of flour a week. The factory could have driven independent traditional millers out of business, but it was destroyed, perhaps deliberately, by fire in 1791. London’s independent millers celebrated with placards reading, “Success to the mills of ALBION but no Albion Mills.” ^[2] Opponents referred to the factory as satanic, and accused its owners of adulterating flour and using cheap imports at the expense of British producers. An illustration of the fire published at the time shows a devil squatting on the building.^[3] The mills were a short distance from Blake’s home.

The Romantic movement which Blake helped invoke began in response to the dehumanization of industrialization, environmental devastation wrought by the intense exploitation of nature, and the loss of culture resulting from the alienation of artisans and craftsmen in the production of goods. The purpose of industrialization is to use efficiencies to lower costs, but often enough, industrialized mass production simply shifts costs away from the consumer and industry and onto the workers and the environment. Resources, both natural and human, are ruthlessly exploited resulting in environmental and social ills that ultimately cost more money to rectify than that incurred in the expense of a more humanely produced consumer good.

Lavie focuses on the exploitation of “illegal workers” and “wetbacks” (terms I’d never use) to describe just one corruption within the Rubashkin enterprise. Rubashkin’s business ultimately aims to satisfy Jewish Americans insatiable and unhealthy appetite for (kosher) meat through the mechanism of industrialized mass production. The exploitation of undocumented workers is one method of lowering the costs to the consumer. Unfortunately, lowering costs doesn’t come without a price — the true costs of environmental and social ills caused by pollution and labor abuse are simply passed onto the health and welfare of society and the environment we depend on.

With all the attention on Rubashkin’s disgusting labor practices, it’s also time to remind folks how Rubashkin has regularly sought to lower standards whether it be in food safety, worker safety, humane treatment of animals, and the pollution of the environment.

Might the Rubashkin travesty revive the nascent Jewish movement that aims to place renewed emphasis on Jewish and humane values in the Kosher Food Industry? You can do your part by supporting hekhsher tzedek.

Tags: Evil in our midst,romanticism,William Blake
Categories: Poetry and Yiddishkeit
1 Comment »

In the House that Emma Built
There are two chambers
One looks upon the other
And the other looks outward

A turntable spins ye-ye
A darkness sleeps in fits
A cat speaks in Mandarin
and the walls, last forever

A man is hidden under the boards
While the window glares on its curtains
All lines cast suspicions
on the vagueries of nature’s curve

Brightly bit, sound asleep
exposed in so many tears
and projected through with
the light of shining wit
a drama in black and white
and a tragedy in color

The turntable spins ye-ye
the dance party is over
and the cat licks its chops
in the house that emma built

in a sub-basement that the house built
in a different plane, on a scale removed
the memories of the house dream an emma
cast in infrared and animated with love
a panoply of spirits shimmering and laughing
cooking and breathing and weaving a guitar out of old chord

kittens act out Siysphus with a ball of twine
on a mountain of folded laundry
the bicycle room looks upon the garden
and echoes with the ring of rusty belling
a friend is dozed upon the chaise casting spells
of resurrection…

awaken dear emma, awaken
life under rebar and concrete oppression
erodes all homes with moisture and oxygen
the house becomes the garden, the window the way through
the emma the notion, and the idea a means to
awake dear emma, awake
and live in musical tires, with spyrographs drunk in honey
and fungus budding through floorboards, over sweet oceans
in time with all awakening

the house becomes the emma
a smile simply drawn
in parametric models
grown from new math
all the lawns have been banished
and the asphalt all ground up
what becomes is Now is emergent
this house that emma built
a lattice of dreams in habit

Categories: Poetry
No Comments »

In the beginning, there were seven kings

One created a kingdom of earth and became suffused with it.
One created a kingdom of one and hid himself in it.
One created a kingdom of love and filled it with two and a challenge to entice them.
One created a kingdom without number and became lost in it.
One created a hole and pondered in it.
One created a throne and a castle but rarely dwelled there.
One created a kingdom of mystery of awe and of wonder, and an ocean of tears all about it.
One created a kingdom of sorrow and filled it with souls of all manner of complexion and humour.

Between the kingdoms, there were seven paths.

One path led around a hill, and its passage could not be described.
One path was covered with water.
One path was hidden under earth and mountain.
One path was painted with letters, sygils, and symbols, mostly forgotten.
One path was so broad it was easily mistaken.
One path was too narrow, and surrounded by demons.
One path led back on itself when walked on facing forward

——-

with apologies to Tolkien, a riff on his “Verse on the Rings of Power”, this was inspired by some thoughts after reading Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess on the trancendent and imminent aspects of divinity.

Categories: Poetry
No Comments »

hello blog, welcome back me.

One year later and I’m still in Baton Rouge and working with my planning team, now an order of magnitude larger. Plans out the door include the City of Port Allen Annexation Plan and the Comprehensive Coastal Protection and Restoration Master Plan for Louisiana. To reprise, I came down here a year and a half ago at the blind invitation of URS Corporation who I soon learned upon arriving was needing planners, civil engineers, economic development specialists, and the like to fill Parish Recovery Teams in a FEMA division called ESF-14 Long Term Community Recovery. Most of those parish teams were disbanded at the end of April, our reports and projects destined to live on as part of the massive Louisiana Speaks initiative. Andres Duany, Peter Calthorpe, and John Fregonese were all part of this effort too, as was the Coastal Protection and Restoration Master Plan for Louisiana. What once seemed to me to be a disparate collection of independent planning efforts loosely guided along parallel planning paths, has now come together in a somewhat elegant convergence under the direction of important civic groups like the Center for Planning Excellence and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. Situated as I’ve been in the corporate planning world consulting on various aspect of these massive plans — and now looking back — I’m relieved that there has been so much collaboration where there could have been more fiasco.

What else is new? Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis from Flower Mound, Texas, came last weekend to Baton Rouge and spoke at length introducing a number of now obscure aspects of Judaism (angelology, animism, fantastic/cosmic beings such as the leviathan, behemoth, and ziz, etc.). Right up my darkened alley, I found these talks enlightening and inspirational. Enlightening because I don’t get to hear other scholars talk about these things ever so it helped me make all sorts of connections that I hadn’t before. Inspirational sinceit once again made me dream all romantic like that I could be a rabbi someday too and help resurrect animism as part of a wider environmental worldview within Jewish practice. Who knows when I’ll get to that… but I’m looking.

Molly F. introduced me to a reading circle and we’ve since read Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Hemingway’s Movable Feast. Hemingway urges writers hovering above their blank pages to just “write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” A very cool person I met over Passover in Cincinnati urged me to do so, so I did. And this is what I wrote:

when i write i
dodge words, not knowing
whether i’m
channeling truth or
arranging pawns

when i speak i
walk over cliffs,
over water,
into fire, then
remember and wish
telepathy could permeate
all our hearts

when i act i can’t see
except through mirrors
representing the image of
the likeness of myself,
my eyes imagining
possessing the eyes of others

so i write without walking
and speak with my eyes closed
and act with my heart
prepared for battle

and when a miracle occurs
and i am blinded by truth
and my heart is pierced
and my tongue is splintered like babel,
i am suspended (between worlds)
and take solace in simple presence,
in silence, and in wonder…

but if I’ve learned anything these years:
miracles only blossom
from preparation
and preparation develops
from a choreography
where the dancers
are a multitude of desires
who in patient discipline,
with love and with
humble recognition
of the limits of language and symbol
discover and express the ubiquity of hidden things
pointing the way.

Each of us an intervention
of the Other
each of us a miracle
of presence defying
recognition, pointing the way
improvising without choreography
in fearless moments.

———-

Next we’ll be reading Young Werther by Goethe. I was hoping for Gogol’s Dead Souls but the reading is admittefly very lazy and likes short books!

I’ve been Netflixing more lately and I found a film that really surprised me. My queue is so long and I move through it so slowly so I am clueless where I got this recommendation from to see it. The film is My Son, The Fanatic and it offers a very nuanced vision of assimilation and the politics of ethnic and religious identity for Pakistani Muslims in England. Of course, the story will also resonate with anyone familiar with the embrace and dissonance of cultural influence, personal choices, conformity, and hypcorisy. I loved it.
Molly F. and I saw the entire Firefly series and Serenity. Now I know why so many people were in love with this. I join my voice with theirs in mourning the stupidity in cutting down this young series just as it was hitting its prime.

Speaking of good stories, I finally received my DVD of the complete Nowhere Man series. The dvd box surprised me with some trivia: the producers of this deeply wierd conspiracy serial, are the same producers of the very successful 24 series. 24 is a fun story but I’m a bit afraid that Cheney and his Bushies, look to the 24 scripts to nourish their own destructive agendas. The last pronoic story I’ve ever seen was the brilliant, They Might be Giants film from 1974. Julia S. saw tht with me and we both enjoyed it immensely.
Speaking of my friend Julia S., we took a trip to the Festival Internationale in Lafayette a few weeks ago. There I saw one of the best live shows in my life — that of a group from Guinea called Ba Cissoko. I pray someone recorded it and that I can hear it again since I missed the first 30 minutes. I made some 30 second recording with my cell phone I hope to have on youtube eventually.

Categories: Aharonium and Poetry
No Comments »

Inspired by Borges’ 14 kinds of animals catalogued in “a certain Chinese encyclopedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,” here are

14 kinds of people

1. those mistaken for bigfoot
2. those who are asleep
3. government workers
4. nameless ones
5. those who exist only in dreams
6. women with cats
7. seafaring ones
8. those who are crying that cannot be consoled
9. actors
10. dead ancestors
11. babies
12. others
13. cyborgs, or drivers of cars
14. those that are already driven to madness

Tags: Jorge Luis Borges
Categories: Poetry
No Comments »

her voice
soft like honey
seeps into me
i can feel
intonations
resonating
in my ears
sweeten the
harsh world
with your
lavender voice
caressing my pen
torturing my fingers
write i must write
for you
and you
alone

Jennifer Wickboldt wrote the poem above, one of many available sprawled over old tripod user pages. Friday evening I had a long conversation with her. Later today she is being cremated. I can still see her sitting in my apartment, the apartment she used to live in before I came here to Baton Rouge. She was asking me about passover and mezuzahs. And she liked the band Red House Painters. She was very cute and had a boyfriend who loved her very much, many friends, and a dog named Latte. She was a magic person, so of course, she was constantly assaulted by demons who feast on vivacious creative people. Sunday morning they got their wish, convincing her to do herself in. She traded her future away for salvation from a troubled past. I am so sorry.

As my father says, tragedies like these remind us to hold each other tight and never take for granted the time we have with each other.

Categories: Aharonium and Poetry
No Comments »