The night began like most others in L.A.; we sat in traffic. My friend Krystof was trying to figure out why his iPhone didn’t sound right playing through my car speakers. I wasn’t paying too much attention – I was busy checking my work e-mail on my phone while driving and attempting to explain a lecture I’d been listening to during my morning commute on the nature of memory by some guy named John Steele (a random Pirate Bay download). Little did I know how prophetic it would turn out to be. From Wikipedia, “While his work is often closely related to the psychology of fragrance, in talks and writings Steele also explores Buddhism, Vedic culture, the great yugas, geomancy and geomantic amnesia, geobiology, time out of balance, shamanism, the effects of geological formations on human consciousness, cross state retention, and the importance of sacred sites and spaces.” That could easily be a review of the new Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros record.

Part of a fashionable non-movement of “Hippiesters”, Edward Sharpe is a collection of ex-hipsters who have seemingly become spiritually enlightened, which only time will prove or disprove. If you’ve ever attended Agape church in Los Angeles – and if you’re plugged in to celebrity culture at all you’ve heard of it – then you’ll know the vibe (by the way, the “church” is very much worth going to at least once – http://www.agapelive.com/). There are lots of people in hippy-like fashionable garb driving home in Mercedes, Bentleys and on custom Harleys.

The band is fronted by Alex Ebert, of Ima Robot, and consists of members of various L.A.-based bands. It also has a former American Apparel chick Jade Castrinos…but I haven’t been able to confirm any American Apparel photos, just that she worked for them and was a fixture of the LA hipster scene of the mid-2000’s. But why all this background for a show review? That’s part of the deal, are they for real or not? Perhaps the suspicion arises because of the fact that Alex Ebert used to wear eyeshadow, or the connection to major Hollywood stars, or the fact that there were about a hundred onlookers behind the stage all wearing extremely expensive clothes and not dancing. Whatever the case the music is fun, a lot of fun, and that’s probably why at the end of the day none of the “why” actually matters. And to see it relatively new, before the flood, was a treat.

I won’t speak about the opening band Eskimo Hunter, it isn’t fair to them. I wasn’t there to see a cross between My Bloody Valentine and whatever else they are supposed to be so after doing my best to get into them I spent the rest of their set checking out the strange mix of people that Edward Sharpe had brought out. There were raver kids, hipsters, hippies, bro’s, adults, film industry people and an unusually large amount of high-school kids, which might have something to do with the Alex Ebert/Ima Robot connection. The place was packed – people were everywhere – but because of our connection with Capt. AKAK we were able to get right up next to the stage.

Once the one-man sound crew began setting up for Edward Sharpe you could see how fucking cool this show was going to be – piano, tambourine, a xylophone, an accordion, a trumpet, synths, 2 guitars, bongos, drums and several vocal mics. After a long time – there was one guy setting up the microphones – the band came on stage, all twelve of them. They began the set with “Janglin’” a quasi sing-along that essentially defines the band – feet stomping rhythm, lyrics about spiritual redemption, and a lot of ass shaking.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros are if nothing else a great party band. Everyone in the group is into the music and into the feeling that it elicits in the audience – you can’t help but have fun. Any cynicism or coolness you came to the show with quickly evaporates – if you don’t believe me by the end of the show I was on the stage after someone shouted “Can we get on the stage?” and Alex said “Yes, just don’t break anything.” And I don’t do those things.

But this gets back to the question – are these guys for real? Do they mean what they’re singing about and the vibe that they put off? There is the definite feeling of a spiritual movement, of proselytizing, of doing things differently. They’re like a traveling religious show. Alex Ebert wears all white, is barefoot, and holds hands with people in the crowd while he sings. His first words to the crowd were the cryptic, “I had a paleolithic egg around my heart, I’ve broke it off.” The members of the band look at you in the eye and smile, after the show everyone in the band comes out and hangs out with the audience. Krystof was able to talk with Jade (although he couldn’t bring himself to confess his feelings for her). It’s like everyone was a member of some new-age church and decided to start a band; there’s a distinct lack of guile. At the end of the show we saw the accordion player getting picked up by her Mom.

Ryan McGinley is a New York photographer and the guy who took the photo above, you probably know who he is. When asked about his pictures he said, “My photographs are a celebration of life, fun, and the beautiful. They are a world that doesn’t exist. A fantasy in which freedom is real. There are no rules. They are of the life I wish I was living.” Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros probably fall into that category. They’re a mixture of the real and not real, of a staged experience and the authentic, they evoke possibilities beyond our own inevitable ones. And for that they point to the world we all crave.

(note: from a friend in Los Angeles)

Los Angeles, CA – 06/11/09

I don’t know if it’s because I’d been working for what felt like five years straight without a day off and I’d just come to the realization or if it was because I was extremely tired, maybe both, but the Handsome Furs were transcendent.

The Monolators opened for them and weren’t. They played their Queers-esque songs too fast and didn’t seem like they practiced much. They also seemed to have no dark side.

The Cinnamon Band were more interesting – they were like the Jayhawks if everyone except the drummer and guitar player had contracted swine flu and croaked and the 2 remaining members were on the “memorial tour”. The two of them drank Tecate after Tecate the entire set and sang esoteric songs about growing up in the South. The drummer seemed like a maudlin drunk. However, they had some good drawling harmonies and some of the songs weren’t too bad.

Then the Handsome Furs began setting up and it became immediately apparent that like baseball there is a stratum in music – some people are born to play and others are doing it because they just really want to. Dan Boekner was born to fucking rock.

I listened to Big Black intermittently in High School mostly because they had the angriest lyrics of all-time. That was the only other rock band that I’ve heard where a drum machine was featured as the entire percussion section. Yes, there’s been the Postal Service and others, but no one has rocked out like Big Black, until Dan Boekner bought his first Alesis.

There is a definite William Gibson vibe to Handsome Furs; the feeling that if you walked outside the club it would be drizzling a cold acid rain on a population of androids and their leather-clad human masters. It’s an interesting counterpart to the mostly anti-technology/sad-state-of-modern-culture lyrics but the drum machine, the synth and the odd movements and coked-out appearance of his wife made for a decidedly post-apocalyptic evening.

Alexei Perry is certainly playing a part on-stage but if there’s even a shred of reality in her appearance and actions then she’s definitely a drug-user and probably borderline-schizophrenic, which is probably why I find her attractive. During the show she alternated between grinding her teeth, licking her lips and rubbing her nose and making weird jaw contortions. Dan didn’t seem similarly afflicted, just like he’d been up for several days and now really needed a nap.

In between songs Alexei would run around the stage and do big butterfly thank-you’s with her arms – she’d put her hands on her chest and then throw her arms out to the audience. During songs she would stand on one leg and pirouette and then other times do Muppet-esque dancing with her arms while attending to the drum machine and synth. I wouldn’t be harping on this if it wasn’t such a compelling sight. The tableaux made you really want to go hang out with both of them after the show. You felt like Dan would be sitting in a chair in an old dingy hotel room with a bottle of whiskey and a cigarette while Alexei was in the bathroom snorting cocaine cut with comet so you could really feel the burn. He’d then make some offer like, “if you want to fuck her tonight go ahead, I can’t get it up anymore.”

That’s obviously an exaggeration but I’m not kidding, there was a palpable sense of danger and enlightened decadence that they exuded. But oh yeah, the music was good too. They only played one song off of the first album, Plague Park, the rest being songs from the relatively newly released Face Control.

Having heard the first two bands, and a lot of other mediocre bands at other shows and on records, it helps to make plain the fact that in many ways true talent is a natural phenomenon, is born. While the other bands were sincere, probably practiced more than the Handsome Furs and had some good songs, it was like a different kind of human had landed when the Handsome Furs started in on their set.

And this wasn’t even the best that I’ve heard them play. They seemed tired and a little crazed, but they still played an incredible set of modern music, music to watch the world crumble to.

(guest blog entry from a loyal reader)

Rationality isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place. Shakespeare? Fuck Shakespeare. Yeats? Fuck Yeats. We need less words and more action, less contemplating and more cavorting, less calculation and more frivolty.

Once the veil of words falls from the eyes what is left?

Truth? Wisdom? Life? What do we weep for long after reading a romance or watching a film on perfect young love? The movie always ends at the wrong place, the characters are in love, the world an ocean of possibility. It never ends five years later when boredom and routine have settled in and the excitement of the beginning has evaporated.

It’s at that time that rationality counsels caution, “don’t blow a good thing, you might not find it again,” or, “this is temporary, these feelings will pass…,” or, “the grass is always greener, better stay where you are.” But the irrational, the emotion, the subconscious, the body, what do you call it…it has no name. It that cries out for newness, for the next adventure, to push for what is not there and what might be impossible to achieve – pure love, happiness without sacrifice, life without reflection.

Perhaps that is the face of addiction, that clawing, gnawing fear that there’s something wrong with this picture, this moment, this circumstance, this choice. It says, “you could find something better if only you searched far enough.” There are only three ways to relieve that constant tension: suicide, intoxication or acceptance. Which one?

If you’ve ever wondered what really drives the modern art world, photography included, then you’d be hard-pressed to do better than spend a day at PhotoLA, one of the main photography events in the U.S. where famous dealers and galleries show up, all with lots of photos to sell.

Besides the overwhelming sameness of most of the imagery what you quickly feel is the undercurrent of highbrow voyeurism and an excuse to view a bunch of naked chicks while holding an expensive glass of wine, or a $4 Americano.

Actually, naked men are well represented too, although it’s difficult to find one over 18 in any of the photographs available for purchase. At one gallery’s booth a man in a motorcycle jacket that cost more than most people’s entire wardrobes listened intently while the twenty-something female gallery employee described the history of the prints she was leafing through. “All of the boys in this series are between 8 and 14,” she told the man. He nodded in understanding. All of the boys were completely naked as well.

At another gallery’s booth the main attraction was a set of prints based around the theme of women getting felt up in Japanese subways while supposedly not knowing their pictures were simultaneously being taken. Having come from the generation of Vice-magazine and virtually unlimited amounts of online pornography, the imagery wasn’t particularly disturbing. What made it feel odd was that it had been hung on a wall, along with the other galleries displays of pre-pubescent boys and girls, and called art.

Perhaps it began with, or ended with, guys like Robert Mapplethorpe picking up a camera and just going shithouse crazy with it. At this point, though, it seems we’ve reached the end of the road of photography as art. There’s simply nothing left to take a picture of. The form has descended to a kind of really expensive pornography, an excuse for people to get off on imagery otherwise taboo to the mainstream culture.

Landscapes, still life, portraits, everything has been done. Because of the restrictions of the form – lens, camera, developing, printing – once someone perfects a genre as a photographer you’re forever doomed to be compared with them. No landscape can ever be photographed seriously after Ansel Adams.

The human landscape is all that’s left and it too is rapidly diminishing as a viable subject. Ryan McGinley and Tim Barber have done youth culture as well as anyone’s going to do it. A thousand photographers have documented every niche and every sub-niche available in the human spectrum. Art thrives on the new, on uniqueness, and as a mechanical art photography is unable to deliver as it once was.

That’s not to say that photography is over and done with as an art form. People will still collect it and every once and a while a photographer will come out with something new, usually based on pushing the boundaries of extreme imagery. But honestly, after Mapplethorpe devolved into Terry Richardson, where does the form have to go?

Los Angeles, CA –

There is a truism that we are a species blessed with self-consciousness. However, this is part of a massive misunderstanding or more accurately, misperception.

What we are “blessed” with is a collective neurosis that makes an error in logic appear to be a step on the road of evolution. In this sense self-consciousness is an oxymoron, meaning there is no such object as the “self” and consciousness is simply what is, the point at which our thought-of-as-disparate senses come together and converge into their actual whole.

What is the object of this perception of assumed self-consciousness? What self is the self supposedly conscious of? Is it a physical sensation that is being described? For example, the fact that you can see your own hand? Try to not see your hand with it in front of your face and your eyes open. Pass it over a flame and attempt to not feel it.

There is no “turning-off” consciousness and we are therefore not in control of it. It follows from this that “consciousness” does not exist, for we can only know something by not knowing it. We cannot stop thinking, seeing or feeling, even if for some reason we wanted to try. Eyes that are no longer there still “see”. This has been shown by experiments with tactile responses electronically transmitted through the tongue eventually taking the place of blinded eyes. The participants had the exact sensation of sight, of seeing the objects in front of them.

In addition, the idea of being self-conscious implies that we know what its negative means, to be not self-conscious. This is like trying to stop the wind from blowing or the moon from rising. Try as we might it will happen regardless of wishing, hoping or thinking really hard about it.

The way that self-consciousness is used in day-to-day language is somewhat more useful, if still mistaken. What most of us mean by saying that someone is “self-conscious” is that they are conscious of the way that they assume other people perceive them, usually negatively. Someone is only “self-conscious” if they are acting nervously and are worried, or have convinced themselves, that the people around them perceive them negatively. What the self-conscious individual hasn’t realized is that there is no self to be worried about, no person to defend, no method to hold back the ocean’s waves.

Music is a good example of something that provides a window on the eternal nature of man. Taken out of its pop-culture milieu and the relatively recent historical development that it can be bought and sold, music is a good example of the irrational, non-understandable nature of consciousness.

In most industrialized cultures music has been wholly divorced from the masses. Meaning, people do not create music as they once did and for the most part do not play or sing music. At one time stories were told, loves were gained or lost, and much of life was sung as opposed to talked about. No longer.

The idea of the band playing on the decks of a doomed and sinking Titanic is an interesting way to convey this idea of the irrationality, or the non-being, of music and perhaps ultimately of the nature of man.

Nearer My God to Thee was supposedly the song they played as the ship went down into the cold waters of the north Atlantic. But why did they keep playing? Why not throw themselves overboard? Why not get drunk or beat someone up for a spot on a lifeboat?

Perhaps as musicians they understood and knew the unknowable. The feeling that music can evoke of a relaxation of the mistake of self-perception, the movement of the thoughts towards something other than the obsession with self, and thereby the temporary dismantling of self-consciousness.

At that moment, as they kept playing, they might have grasped the significance of the prayer “it is by self-forgetting that one finds…it is by dying that one awakens to eternal life,” and thereby escaped the modern terror of a cold, lonely, death.

What happens when you combine nuclear weapons, Las Vegas and a view of history skewed towards propaganda? Besides a whole lot of fun, you get the Atomic Testing Museum located off of the Strip.

As you walk into the stainless steel interior of the decidedly Desert-Modern building (which also houses something called the Desert Research Institute and an office for the U.S. Department of Energy) your first instinct is that the museum might be cool, might have something interesting to offer, and that you might get to see some people melted by nuclear weaponry. Yah!

Alas, no people getting melted. However, the sight of thousands of people getting vaporized might be less horrific than the shear otherworldly terror that underlies every diorama and piece of information in this museum. For this is reality, there is no turning away from it. And what is that reality? It’s Zen, it’s nirvana, it’s the Tao, the world as it truly is: terrifying, unescapable, engulfing, ultimately…beautiful.

Any discussion of spiritual terms automatically causes abstraction, something not real (the biggest catch-22 for any spiritual seeker). Which is why a nuclear weapon is such a beautiful thing: you can’t run away from it.

For the Atomic Testing Museum to take this opportunity to help people by showing them a door to ultimate reality and turn it into a mere exercise in nuclear industry propaganda is not surprising. However, it does unwittingly unlock another door to who ultimately controls our country and ultimately our destinies. The “museum” doesn’t hide it. Everywhere you look are “funded by” plaques with Wackenhut, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin logos. The museum’s pamphlets all proudly tell of how the museum was funded by those three company’s dollars.

Sadly, the “museum” also is proud of the fact that it is endorsed by the Smithsonian Institution, is housed in the same building and is in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, and that 50% of it was funded by us, citizen taxpayers, through a Congressional grant thanks to the “tireless dedication of Senator Harry Reid” (from the ATM’s pamphlet).

And yet at best it’s an attempt to paint a positive picture of an otherwise terrible technology, atomic weaponry (there is little discussion of atomic energy, this is very much a weapons museum) and at worst it’s blatant corporate propaganda coinciding with willing participation from the U.S. government. Of course Lockheed-Martin, Wackenhut and Bechtel want us to keep building nuclear weaponry. Lockheed builds the warhead delivery systems, Wackenhut provides the staffing for nuclear weapon installations and Bechtel builds the plants that make weapons-grade plutonium. They’re simply protecting their investment, that’s logical, but what is the U.S. Government doing letting them?

While Eisenhower’s words from January, 1961 of “beware of the military industrial complex” are still reverberating down through the last fifty years little has been done to heed them. The military and its suppliers operate in a shadow-world away from the eyes of citizens. We are unable to witness what goes on in the thousands of military bases across the country and across the world, including places like the Pentagon. They are off-limits to the people that fund them and that they purport to defend. The conversations and deals that are made on these bases are similarly off-limits to us, we just pay for them.

Still, somehow, the Department of Energy and the Smithsonian Institution, both arms of the U.S. Government and thereby of the people, find time to not only associate with but fund an institution as ridiculously in-bed with privately held corporations that supply the military as the Atomic Testing Museum.

It’s impossible to describe the amount of historical whitewashing that has gone on inside the Atomic Testing “Museum”. From calling modern thermonuclear weaponry “clean and safe” (that is a direct quote from a museum plaque) to saying that Native tribes displaced from Nevada testing sites were “valiantly contributing to their nation’s welfare” every piece of information that could potentially be harmful to the nuclear weapons industry has been slightly altered from an objective viewpoint and replaced with the viewpoint of an industry public relations representative. It’s as if every placard and exhibit were vetted by Wackenhut, Bechtel and Lockheed-Martin. Oops…forgot; they built the museum.

It is difficult to describe the doublespeak that goes on in this altar of propaganda. I encourage you to go see it for yourself. Perhaps the saddest part of all is that most people will leave the ATM thinking to themselves “boy, I’m sure glad that we have those nuclear weapons and that those responsible government folks are looking after them,” and never question who built the museum and why.

Perhaps unwittingly the Atomic Testing Museum does peel back a layer of ultimate reality and sheds light on the underbelly of America: the citizens have abdicated control. It’s one thing to say they never were in control, that’s excusable. But as Eisenhower’s 1961 speech reveals there existed a time in this country that the government feared its people. Perhaps they still do, perhaps all governments still fear their people, which is why they build museums to help pacify them. North Korea, Russia, China, they all do it well. The U.S. is following suit in its own sad way.

It couldn’t have been made up. We came out of the Sierra Mountains after six days in the backcountry of California; didn’t see one other living soul for the entire time. It was just us, the animals, and scenery that looked like it came from an Ansel Adams photograph or Currier and Ives print. We were in heaven.

Stopped at an Arco station on the way out of the mountains to fill up for gas. Went inside to pay and on the way out saw the headlines: “Retirement Funds Drop 20%”, “Depression: Is It Coming?” and the like (since then markets have dropped by 40%). In the short time we had been gone the stock market had dropped to its lowest point in 5 years and wasn’t stopping, gold was fetching unprecedented prices and there was a palpable sense of fear in the air. People were giving each other furtive glances, looking for signs.

To have emerged from the wilderness after a week of no external stimulus save for the trees, wind, and mountains this was an awe inspiring moment. We had felt at home in the mountains. Our first inclination was to turn the car around and head back. Besides the fact that it is now snowing in the Sierras and freezing to death is not a constructive way to spend your winter months we had also eaten all of our freeze-dried food. So, romantic notions aside, we headed back into the maw of Southern California, wondering if our bank cards would be working the next time we stopped for coffee.

The long hours on the road lent themselves to contemplation. What if we entered another Great Depression? Would this be bad or good? Besides all the arguments that can be made that only a bourgeois faux-intellectual would be considering this question at all it still held merit. America prides itself on being a country of the middle-class. Even though that is not the reality, the gap between rich and poor is at an ever-increasing all-time high, that is the belief. The belief in what America is defines its people, helps them get up in the morning, and helps them keep spending money, even money they don’t have. They do this in the belief that the future will be better, because it always has been, hasn’t it?

History is an unimaginably powerful force. It’s the bedrock of ideology, another word for it might be propaganda. The public school system won’t admit to it but what we’re teaching our children, and what we were taught, is of course not what actually happened, but what we would like to have happened. One of those core beliefs is that we as Americans always move forward, always overcome, despite the obstacles placed in our way by antagonistic forces. We defeat powerful countries to win independence, we defeat native civilizations, we expand westward, we do the impossible, we bend nature to our will. The basic belief is that there is no problem too big for “us”, even though no one knows who that “us” really is. “It’s certainly not anyone I know,” someone said in a recent article, “Americans are all a bunch of lazy, commodity-purchasing dummies.”

But the public education system is not the only place that ideology is propagated. The tail-chasing media (media in the general sense of visual and written content) creates a whirlwind of information. In a social milieu of isolation (what America has become due to lack of non-commercial public space and a fixation on television and the internet) the electronic and print media have become the de-facto social meeting ground. And what are the ideas that those mediums communicate? One place to look is at how those two mediums became popularized. Television, even cable, is only truly sustained by advertising and the internet is now overwhelmingly commercialized (despite its somewhat idealistic beginnings). As tools of mass communication they are also tools of one repeated message: buy, buy now, buy more.

There are exceptions to every rule and the above have their share. However, the main point is this: ideology or belief in an idea is what people base their decisions on. Those ideas, despite whatever alternatives exist are for the majority of Americans, despite their class, dictated by education and the media. The beliefs that are being indoctrinated into us are twofold: 1. ours is an invincible nation 2. we are defined by what we own.

Those beliefs are destroying us, literally. While some might take umbrage at the shallowness that they’re being accused of or in turn deny that they believe those things at all I can only suggest the following: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Matthew 7:16. Meaning, “I don’t give a shit what you say you believe, what do you do and more importantly, what is the outcome?”

This culture is the outcome, this country as it stands today is the outcome. No longer a republic but simply a nation, our actions, despite our beliefs, have become more and more irresponsible, more and more unthinking, more and more automatic. The ties that bind us together have decayed, loosened, broke-free and been replaced by an unthinking-ethos of reaction. Emotion has replaced authenticity and cheap emotion at that.

Perhaps it’s the Southern California landscape that infects these observations. The home of McDonald’s, gridlock, mall culture, the freeway, drought, unchecked pollution, gated communities, destroyed ecosystems, elective plastic surgery, ostentatious displays of wealth next to unaddressed poverty, it’s all here waiting for you in fabulous Southern California.

And yet it’s more than that, this area is simply the bellwether of a larger cultural trend, one seen now in small towns throughout America. That trend is the death of America as a cherished ideal of self-government, of control over one’s own destiny, of the ability to stand up and say “No”. Granted, this is a death that has been reported prematurely over and over, in every decade, by virtually every social commentator, as a way of lamenting lost opportunities and lack of a shared culture. 

This time it’s different. The pockets of resistance have dried up. Everyone seemingly wants a piece of the pie from the artists to the intellectuals to the non-profits to the religions, everyone’s ready to sell-out, ready to do whatever it takes to get ahead and raise a little capital. To do what with exactly? Since when did money or material wealth get anyone into heaven?

Which brings us back to the mountains and our reentry into civilization from voluntary isolation in the wilderness, a wilderness that America still offers and if you listen right, can still speak to you. It’s the wilderness of the true, unspeakable, universal God that religions point to, of John Muir, and of countless generations that go all the way back to a savannah somewhere in Africa where we took our first steps as a people, those first awkward steps toward where we are today.

Coming out of that wilderness after days of seeing nothing but the non man-made, and listening to nothing but the wind and birds, and hearing nothing at night except the cries of coyotes, and realizing that a hundred miles into the backcountry late in the season if you trip and break a leg it means you die and then coming out of that and immediately seeing the headlines of the purely man-made, of the crisis, of the sky-is-falling rhetoric it shoves in your face the hidden truth: we’ve lost our independence, we’re manipulated, we’re helpless, we’re wards of the state and we had better get used to it. This country is no longer ours, is no longer here for every man’s benefit, the flame of the ideals it was founded on have been extinguished. It’s taken a hundred and forty-three years but they’ve finally been snuffed out.

Another depression? Bring it on. We the people deserve it, deserve to stand in breadlines, to not be able to afford gasoline, to have our houses and cars repossessed, to have our grandparents’ life savings wiped out, to not be able to afford the next worthless electronic gadget, to have to do something with our time besides watch television. Do you not get it yet? Do you not see how important an ideal is, how fragile it is, how important it is to keep it alive and well amongst a people, to keep it strong and robust, despite the fact that those people might choose to do something besides buy the next product, or try to get one up on their neighbor?

That ideal points toward eternity, it is spirit manifest on earth, the best and truest goal that anyone and any people can point their life towards. It is the eternal wisdom of thousands of years of human existence, of people throwing off the chains of control and authority and saying once and for all, “you don’t own us.” The post Civil War story of our country’s existence has been one of asking for those chains of control to be put back on, of practically begging to have the locks put in place and the guards watch us, all for the small crumbs of material wealth, a poor substitute for freedom.

Those chains are now in place and tight, the locks are fastened and closed, the keys safely in the pocket of the guards who are our own brothers and sisters. As we are led to the cells the last light of freedom is extinguished from behind the heavy steel doors. As they close we have a sudden, sad, final realization: we’ve done this to ourselves. For there is no conspiracy, no big brother, no one to blame but us. We voluntarily walked away from the light, from freedom, from responsibility, and asked to be shackled. What we never knew is this: once freedom is voluntarily given up, there is no regaining it.

The main characters in these particular Woody Allen films – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Match Point, Deconstructing Harry, Husbands and Wives, Shadows and Fog, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, et al. – all have one basic problem: money. After you get over the bleak tidal wave of an Allen chamber drama and have time to reflect, you quickly realize that his character’s problems and existential quandaries typically boil down to the fact that they have too much time to sit around and think about shit.

Which is not to say that Allen doesn’t make superb films. He’s a modern master of a particular kind of film that is rarely attempted let alone pulled off nowadays: the drama. However, the more he runs the needle through the groove of existential quandaries as a theme the more redundant and derivative his films become. People have been behaving badly and selfishly for centuries, that’s a given, and people with money do it better than anyone.

If you read the general criticism of Woody Allen’s work these types of observations come up regularly, in fact they’re fairly pedestrian. Additionally, if you read his 1995 book of interviews Woody Allen on Woody Allen you’ll quickly realize that he doesn’t care very much. He likes making movies and makes a lot of them and can’t or won’t quit scratching that same thematic itch. Speculation in this realm is futile. Do an internet search for Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen – the man has too much baggage.

Woody Guthrie dying in a Brooklyn hospital inspired Bob Dylan to write these words about hope: “Cause you can’t find it on a dollar bill, and it ain’t on Macy’s window sill, and it ain’t on no rich kid’s road map, and it ain’t in no fat kid’s fraternity house, and it ain’t made in no Hollywood wheat germ…” So where do you find hope today? Woody Guthrie’s dead, Dylan’s about to be, the good poets are all gone (or perhaps our language is dead), post-1920 art sucks, modern philosophy is meaningless and inapplicable, fashion is eating itself, and good music is awash in depression or cynicism.

Or is it? In many of Woody Allen’s films he sets up a counterpoint to the privileged class, the working class characters romanticized because of their ignorance to the “larger” issues in life. They just want to live, dance and have a good time and don’t understand why someone would spend all their time being so miserable. Work is a necessary evil for these characters, love is a pleasure, God is a given and heaven is the inevitable result. And, there’s a lot of singing.

Buyepongo is that kind of band and in Los Angeles provides that kind of hope to small audiences in almost anonymous coffee shops at the almost anonymous hours approaching midnight. If you miss your 9pm train out of L.A.’s Union Station and have to wait until the 11:30pm train then perhaps you’ll make your way across the street, literally, to Olvera Street’s best coffee shop, Casa De Sousa. There you’ll find the sometimes six, sometimes eight, piece band playing Central American dance music – Cumbia – and getting down in a serious way.

The band consists of no one over the age of 21, some of them barely speak English, and they hail from regions in South America, Central America and Mexico – some are first generation native born, some are not. It’s a strange sight to watch, it’s like punk rock in Spanish with accordions and bongo drums, but everyone dances and yells and has something typically lacking at most music shows: fun.

Buyepongo might sit at the crest of a coming wave, of which there is no real proof, only conjecture. Whites have recently become the minority in the State of California and by 2042 will be in the United States in general. In Los Angeles that change occurred some time ago; by 2006 71 per cent of Los Angeles County’s population was considered minority (all of which opens up larger questions than this article can cover).

What we’re seeing happening in Los Angeles will soon be what’s happening in the United States: a traditionally marginalized group harnessing the DIY power of their adopted and sometimes native country’s punk and hipster heritage, combining it with the newer tools of MySpace and YouTube and coming out with a mixture fraught with energy, emotion and spirit.

Perhaps it is here that we’ll begin to find that regeneration of the U.S.’s own dying culture; a culture choked by money, a dead spiritual life and fear. Let’s just pray that as these coming generations mature they don’t settle for the given, and continually reach back into their histories for the possible. Let’s just hope it’s fun.

Remember, The Crime Syndicate is a collective and accepts unsolicited material for publication. Please use the e-mail address above for submissions.

The past decade has seen a rush-up to post-apocalyptic music and art. Even though Isaac Brock sang “I just don’t need none of that Mad Max bullshit” it only makes sense in the context of a bad scenario for humanity. What if instead we found the garden?

Technology is not as fun as it once was. The novelty is wearing off. You can only listen to an iPod for so long. High-Definition TV is only so entertaining. The sound of the wind blowing through tree branches never stops being fascinating. It and its parallel phenomena: rivers rushing by, creeks gurgling, birds calling, night descending, day breaking – these are the true sources of the common spirit that Lao Tzu wrote about, Jesus heard speaking in the night and what we hear calling from afar whenever we think to ourselves while watching or listening to the next media thing, “is this all there is?”.

That’s where MGMT comes in. The primitivist John Zerzan wrote, “The society that abolishes all adventure makes the abolition of that society the only real adventure.” MGMT makes it feel like a real alternative when they sing “We couldn’t use computers anymore. It’s difficult to win unless you’re bored.”

They seem to nail the wave of ennui that is continuously crashing on America’s youth by asking, “Yeah it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?” Is this small enclave of America’s youth the harbinger of a new day?

The eternal question: when will things change? How long can we sit around and put up with this world that provides little satisfaction and no legitimate fun? When they sing, “…to find a shore/…/Where we can crush some plants to paint my walls/…/I was too lazy to bathe or paint or write or try to make a change/Now I can shoot a gun to kill my lunch/And I don’t have to love or think too much” are they opening a window on that world?

The last line is the most intriguing, “And I don’t have to love or think too much”. Coinciding with the movement towards abstract human relations in non face-to-face communication in e-mail, “social” networking sites, text messaging, cell phone use and video/webcam chat we are seeing a hysterical move towards overemphasizing the emotions we now lack amongst those even supposedly closest to us. “Love” is quickly becoming a meaningless word.

It is undeniable that there is a move towards regimented thought and action in the training of our youth in the school system that we’ve propagated. Original thought is discouraged while a new age mish-mash of watered down politics and propaganda is passed off as critical thought. Difference itself has been incorporated into the new cultural ideal as now even the most extreme appearance and lifestyles are accepted as long as you still go to work every day and spend money.

This phenomenon probably began with punk culture – what punk nowadays can shock anyone? – and moved into areas like ultra-violence and marketing of hate in rap music, acceptance of virtually every sexual orientation, a general cultural acceptance of extreme vulgarity and explicit sexual references, ubiquitous porn, tattooing, fetishized female teenagers, acceptance of greed and avarice as positive traits, the list goes on. And what propagates these trends? Our imaginations no longer match up with our actions.

MGMT seems to be going in the opposite direction – perhaps they’ve seen the alternative: “And there were future reflections/On the face and the hands/On a green colored island/On a primitive man/It was the future reflected/It felt familiar but new/A street was missing a building/The kids had something to do”.

Please don’t make them stop.