Unplanned Obsolescence

Phil Freeman, author of New York Is Now!: The New Wave of Free Jazz , weighs in on how Jandek is no longer "Jandek" and how Jandek made Jandek On Corwood an obsolete curio of a time that has passed.

Surely most of those who post and read here already know that Jandek, the last truly underground musician, crawled out of his cave this month. He played an hour-long set at the Instal 04 festival in Glasgow and, in so doing, rendered two other cultural objects thoroughly superfluous: Will Oldham, and the documentary Jandek On Corwood.

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In a way, Jandek On Corwood is a religious film. That's certainly how it's structured. You can't interview the deity, the figure at the center of the cult - he's not talking. So you interview those who've devoted some portion of their lives to interpreting the scrolls, and the one or two who've actually had person-to-person, one-on-one encounters with the Man Himself. From a viewer's perspective, this is where the movie goes to hell.

As Seth Tissue said- "Death to "Jandek", long live Jandek." (Seth has some great photos of Jandek live here.)

6:45:04 PM     leave/read comments []

6:28:15 PM     leave/read comments []

I'm enough of an aviation geek to drool over this nifty piece of flying hardware, but somehow it seems to have missed its mission.

US rolls out most expensive jet. The US brings into service the first FA-22 Raptor, a stealth fighter rated as the most expensive jet in military history. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

It costs a lot of money and well, the world is a bit different than the one it was designed for:

The FA-22 stealth fighter can fly at 1500 km/h and still remain undetected by radar.

It fires precisely targeted smart bombs and can engage hostile aircraft far beyond the pilot's vision.

That is the impressive part of the story.

Irrelevant?

The other part is that, at a cost of about $260m (£142m) each, the Raptor is designed to fight a potential Soviet enemy that no longer exists, and a Third World War that - if it ever happens - will be very different from what could have been imagined in 1981.

What we need is a jet that gets U.S. troops out of Iraq at Mach 2.

4:28:36 PM     leave/read comments []

Apparently, it will run on the blood of dead U.S. servicemen and women.

Oh, that's right- that's what the current Hummer runs on.

3:45:06 PM     leave/read comments []

My pal, Jason Errett, reports in from New Mexico:

Well, I had an enjoyable evening out at another Kerry rally, this one at the Civic Plaza downtown. It was a pretty big event, probably close to 15,000 people. We had Bill Richardson and Jeff Bingaman present. Bill gave a pretty good rousing lead-in speech and introduced a special guest, Chester Nez.

Chester Nez is one of the few surviving Navajo code talkers from WWII and is more recently known for reversing the curse for the Red Sox. So, he declared that now, having reversed the curse of the Bambino, he would dispel the curse of George W. Bush. He did a brief traditional Navajo corn pollen offering to the various directions ceremony, and said that ought to do it.

I'm not much of a believer in curses and the dispelling thereof, but it sure seems to be working for the Red Sox so far.

It was a generally good speech, with some great audience response. We had one heckler, who pretty much got his ass handed to him, politely, by Kerry who let him say his piece, and then replied with a grin that he enjoyed hearing different opinions for all Americans, and that he supported everyone's right to express their opinions, unlike some who require loyalty oaths for admission to their speeches.

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