i've run into this before, and i like minimalist and mathy stuff, but this has no process to it at all, which is supposed to be the point.

thundercat very quickly sold out the magic stick the last time he came through here. i remembered being a little surprised by this; i would suppose that not many people under 40 would get the heavy-handed zappa/duke references. rather, it probably had something to do with his then-recent association with flying lotus.

there's a new record out in a few weeks that hasn't leaked, to my knowledge. i suppose he'll be playing new material. and, i'm not going to review the old record.

he's playing here on st patrick's day, which is a day that i usually stay in on.

so, i'm going to put this aside and feel out the rest of the month. it's very possible...

https://thundercat.bandcamp.com/album/drunk-1

nah....it's way too pricey given the depth of my interest...

i don't like very much contemporary mainstream music, but i don't mind silversun pickups. i wouldn't call myself a fan, exactly. but, they're one of the few radio rock bands that's appeared over the last 20 years that i can passively listen to without suppressing the need to vomit.

this is their newest record, and it's maybe missing a bit of an edge, but i'm going to give it a few listens. i don't think i've heard the one from 2015, but i spent a bit of time with the one from 2012.

i have not seem them yet. i'm thinking about it...

i'm usually at least mildly familiar with the works being performed at the dso, but i'd never heard of carl orff before, so i looked him up this afternoon.

ummm.

i just don't really like wagner, i find him kind of bloated, so i don't normally have to have this debate. i guess i need to have it now, though.

i think it depends. i'd obviously rather not listen to or support nazis, as a general principle, although it's somewhat of a disingenuous argument - while orff may or may not have been a nazi, i'm pretty sure the dso isn't run by a secret nazi cabal or something. i would not be materially supporting nazism in any substantive way by going to see this, which appears to be a kind of christian hymnal that happened to be first performed in the geopolitical space of nazi germany, and was popular amongst nazis, as the contemporary thing that was happening.

but, it's a christian piece, it's not war propaganda. if anything, it's a reminder of the central role that christianity played in the nazi state. more concerning is the rendition of midsummer night's dream that he wrote that was composed to replace mendelssohn's - which had been banned. sadly.

i find wagner bloated, and i don't generally like vocally-driven classical music, but i do have an interest in the kind of apocalyptic banger that starts the piece off. i don't understand what they're saying, but i wish that it maintained that level of intensity throughout the piece. it doesn't.

i'm going to let it finish, but i think i'll skip this one, for all of these reasons.

this is interesting, but it's a good distance from downtown.

i'm advocating finding ways around them. 

but, if you want to go right through them, if you want to be a socialist and win south carolina at the same time, you have to hold that mirror up - you have to get them out of their clutches.

and, that is going to be a vicious, nasty fight that will take decades and might even lead to violence.

there's a white king and a black king, isn't there?

everything that bernie sanders says about him reflects an understanding of the white king, when he talks to black voters about him. and, i'm not sure he even realizes it.

biden is probably worse, but he doesn't hit those nasty trigger points in those obvious ways.

sometimes, the more you talk about something, the deeper you dig yourself in - and, sometimes, you don't know it.

was jesus a socialist revolutionary?

i dunno. kind of. a bit.

but, i know you're going to lose a lot of white people if you set up a political rally outside of a church and you start talking like that.

it's a bunch of white people coming in from new york and trying to redefine their history in terns they don't recognize, or reject.

of course they don't like it.

trying to present dr. king as a socialist rather than a reverend is the kind of thing that's going to confuse them and scare them off, as though you're an agent of satan or something.

he's basically revered and seen as a saint or a prophet, not as a socialist revolutionary. contradicting or muddying that means you're trying to undo things without even realizing what you're trying to undo.

martin luther king may have had socialist sympathies, and he may have been surrounded by socialists, as well.

but, he attracted people because he was a church leader, not because he was a socialist.

and, when the movement tried to move more towards socialism, wihout the explicit religious foundation, it faltered.

socialists used to understand the retarding effect of religion, and the necessity of breaking the power of the church.

there's really no better example than amongst black voters in the south. 

the real reason that they won't vote for socialists is that they've been brainwashed by christianity. and, this is the oldest problem on the left - how do you get them away from the church without triggering them and pushing them in further? 

the best answer anybody has been able to come up with is to lure them out of the grips of the church by sending them to school. but, it means you need to get into power first.

so long as the church remains the dominant force in southern society, these voters are lost to the socialist cause.

i would guess that a part of the reason that sanders does so poorly with black voters is that he reminds them of the activists in the 60s that they were taught to reject, and ultimately did, under the guidance of the religious authorities.

what happened to this movement? it was suppressed, but it ultimately got abandoned and rejected. and, by who? the people that sanders is trying to get to vote for him.

so, invoking this stuff is probably hurting him more than it's helping him.

this is a ridiculous article, as though citing a couple of people can be extrapolated to an entire subculture.

it is true that these radical black movements were shut down by force, with prominent leaders being assassinated or jailed. but, it's also true that they were broadly unsuccessful in generating any sort of critical mass.

 

the reality is that black voters looked at the black panthers, and looked at the church, and picked the church over the black panthers.

sanders does get a few black people to vote for him - about 10-15%, in most places. further, they skew younger, which would help him in the 2032 election cycle - and while nobody should be surprised if he at least tries this again in 2024, we can rule out 2032 pretty effectively. 

the reality is that that 10-15% is just about the maximum reach you're going to get from this black left today, and was about the maximum reach you were going to get from it in the 60s. it's never been more than that, and fantasies to the contrary are just a type of historical revisionism.

activists can often shout louder than silent majorities. but, the data has never upheld the urban legend of the black left. it's just another 60s counterculture myth erected by revisionists in the 90s.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/10/us/black-socialists-bernie-sanders-blake/index.html