Saturday, March 31, 2007

That's my goat!

Babygoat's very first concert has been semi-imortalized in an online concert review. She's the 'baby wearing baby-blue hard-core earphones' mentioned in the second paragraph. It was a good show and I want to hear more from the opening act, Los Abandoned.

I didn't see my first concert until I was 17. After many years of admiring Molino's list, I hope to get my own list up this summer after a little bit of research and editing.

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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Goat report, 3/27/07

Everybody knows that children like to share their love of goats with the community but it turns out that if you have too much love for a goat, you will have to marry the goat. But as long as your idea of sharing your love doesn't include spray painting them, you're ok with me.

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Saturday, March 24, 2007

B for Blue Eyed

I saw an amazing documentary recently about the incredible work of a lady named Jane Elliott. The video was called Blue Eyed and it's one of those rare ones that I think everyone should see. I don't mean this in the sense of 'you'll really enjoy this' but more like 'everybody should be forced to sit down and watch this'. It's about a race-relations workshop she's been doing for about 40 years and shows one of the workshops taking place. The video also explores Ms. Elliott's life and the problems she ran into when she first started doing this in the elementary school class she taught back in the 60s. Of course most of her neighbors didn't take to it very well but that didn't stop her, thankfully.

The workshop (which she'll do for you!) starts when she divides up her participants into two groups based on eye color and then gives one of the groups specific directions on how to treat the other group. For instance, she'll tell the brown eyed that blue eyed people aren't as smart and they won't do very well on the test she'll give everybody, right after she gives the brown eyed people the answers. The process recreates the experience of racism in society but now it's (generally) different people who get to be the oppressors and the oppressed. Afterwards there's a discussion period where people talk about how they felt being discriminated against, such as being told they weren't as smart as those with different colored eyes. And of course the African Americans in the workshop point out that those feelings are similar to what they feel every day.

When people usually talk about 'white guilt' it involves slavery, something I've never been able to muster up the guilt for as I've never owned slaves (still trying to train those rabbits, however). While that was certainly a horrible crime against humanity, the fact is that whites should feel guilt about their ongoing complicity in the current racial climate, where nonwhite ethnicities feel inferior due to numerous subtle cultural traditions.

The more I thought about the video the more I was reminded of V for Vendetta. A good friend had a problem with the movie based on the fact that V actually tortures Evey to help 'free her'. This is something I never considered in all the years I've been rereading V for Vendetta: is it ok to torture somebody in order to teach them something very important? I never considered V's actions wrong and seeing Blue Eyed reinforces the fact that there are some things you can only learn through experience. Just as V has to torture Evey to make her the type of person who can replace him and stand up to the government, people don't really understand racism until they experience it. While I still feel I've learned a lot thru viewing 'Blue Eyed', I hope to take part in the actual workshop someday.

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Thursday, March 22, 2007

Zhardozh!

Way back in the day when I worked at a video store one of our favorite video boxes was that of Zardoz. Me and my friendly coworkers never saw the movie, never put it on after closing like we did other movies, we just would walk by it and say, in our best Sean Connery voice, 'Zhardozh!' After seeing a clip of it on YouTube, I almost want to buy it as it seems to be delightfully bad. Then again, I'm not sure I want to risk BabyGoat seeing Sean Connery in an orange diaper. Via Sons of Steve Garvey.

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Thursday, March 15, 2007

Free music: Stew

In line with last night's post about the multitude of Stew/Negro Problem songs over at Jefito, I decided to add to the wealth by posting one of my favorite songs of the past few years. Stew's The Naked Dutch Painter (5.14 M mp3) was excluded from the Pocket Guide (probably due to the bonus tracks that required 5 minutes of silence in the actual CD track and I have excised) and is a damn fine tune, but your mileage may vary.

4/30 Update: File has been taken down. Maybe you can find it elsewhere.

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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Pocket Guide to TNP/Stew

As I've mentioned before, I greatly enjoy the music of a songwriter who goes by Stew and one of his projects, a band called The Negro Problem. I was pleased to see this week that one of my favorite music blogs, Jefito, has a Pocket Guide to his work that does a decent job of summing up his career thus far and has a bunch of mp3s that'll be up for a week. Give 'em a listen!

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Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Video: CPAC 2007

What happens when a wacky liberal takes a video crew to a big conservative convention? Much hilarity.

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Friday, March 09, 2007

Please boycott the RIAA

I'm late to this party but I nonetheless urge you to boycott the Recording Industry Association of America members this month. Gizmodo provides an excellent rundown of reasons why and if you want more detailed news on what the RIAA does, check out the Recording Industry vs. the People blog. While I'm attempting to inspire you to shut down the RIAA, you may want to read The Problem With Music by Steve Albini or Courtney Love's speech about the real piracy in music.

In some of the discussion over recent Digital Rights Management legislation (which Gizmodo says its boycott deserves credit for), I saw this comment, which made me worry about my precious collection of digital media. I hope BabyGoat stays good...

These DRM rules really piss me off and I intend to go on violating
them. I have two small children who are experts at inserting DVDs/CDs
into things not designed to play them, quickly causing scratches that
either degrade or prevent play completely. In addition, both of those
also get taken in the car for entertainment, greatly increasing the
chance that they can get damaged. Whenever I purchase something (and
we purchase lots of somethings that come on 5" laser read media) that
is going to possibly be damaged I make a copy and use the copy. I do
not own a single user made CD or DVD for which I did not purchase the
original version (though I do have "mix" CDs made of purchased music)
but I am not going to again pay for another new copy of a movie I had
already purchased because my 3 year old used her Crayola marker to
write on a DVD.

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Video: Bunnys v. Chickens

How do you regulate crazy bunnies? With the chicken police, of course. Via Ms. Goat.

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