Inspired by Mikey-Mike (as always) here is my top 20 of the decade. Plus a few more. Per his rules no repeat artists (though I cheat in one case...). I think a top 20 albums list will be much harder, because, were there really 20 great albums released this decade? I don't know.
Radiohead - Morning Bell
Animal Collective - Leaf House
Lightning Bolt - Assassins
Dirty Three - I really should've gone out last night
Bonnie Prince Billy - Bed is for sleeping
Arab Strap - Screaming in the trees
Sonic Youth - Rain on tin
Yo La Tengo - Madeline
Gillian Welch - I dream a highway
Vladislav Delay - Pietola
Clipse - Keys open doors
Songs: Ohia - Didn't it rain
Fugazi - Life and Limb
The Libertines - Horror show
Pulp - Trees
Cat Power - Good Woman
Arcade fire - Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
Iron and wine - upward over the mountain
Nas - One mic
Tim Hecker - The work of art in the age of cultural overproduction
++
...and you will know us by the trail of dead - Another morning stoner
Sparklehorse - apple bed
Camera Obscura - Knee Deep at the Npl
Kings of Convenience - Homesick
Stars - reunion
MIA - Galang
The streets - has it come to this
Air - Surfing on a Rocket
Kid 606 - Never Underestimate the Value of a Holler
Daedelus - Elegy (at last)
Luomo - Synkro
Broadcast - before we begin
My Morning Jacket - the way that he sings
The books - take time
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Pets: Who's Afraid of Michael Vick?
As my 
friends know, I have what is considered to be a somewhat idiosyncratic view towards animals. On the one hand, I am fairly uncomfortable around pets. This is especially true of large, jumpy dogs which I find frightening, but also other animals. I don't understand the point of petting, playing with, holding, or talking to cats, for example, or observing the behavior of fish swimming around in a tank. On the other hand, I'm vegetarian, and more sympathetic to militant veganism than most people. For all practical purposes, I'm ok with speaking in moral terms about the animal industry: it's wrong (it's also nearly impossible to live an animal-free lifestyle, even if you think you're being vegan). I even marched with PETA in last year's pride parade in SF, pictured above (I needed to get more near-naked girls in this blog...I don't have many readers right now, ok?!).
If I've found it at times difficult to gently convince people to examine the material and social conditions behind animal consumption, then I would have to say prompting any sort of critical reflection from anyone on the subject of pets is basically impossible. People love their pets, their pets love them, and that's the end of it. So instead of attempting to write an opus on the subject, I'd like to instead get at the subject by presenting incongruities in views towards animals which confuse me but seemingly not many people I meet.
Take the case of Micha
el Vick, who despite spending two years in jail for dog fighting, is still being vigorously protested as he attempts his comeback ("what Vick did was mild compared to child molestation," says one such protester). Even putting aside the fact that Vick's case had probably as much to do with the fact that he was a flashy, African-American athlete in the south, a sport in which animals tear each other apart and then are electrocuted is quite obviously cruel and should be banned.
Even given this, the fury unleashed by the Vick case bewilders me. As Earl Hutchinson writes:
I don't get this. If it is cruel to mercilessly kill a dog when it can no longer fight (and it is), isn't also cruel to put down a racing horse that has a broken leg? Shouldn't horse racing also be banned? And if we need to euthanize that horse because the life it would live with a likely-infected broken leg - sedentary, full of antibiotics, prone to disease - then shouldn't we also be concerned about the 10 Billion cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys that spend their lives in worse fashion and die every year in this country? And yet the same sportscasters, so full of bile for Vick, were tripping over themselves a year earlier to mock PETA for advocating for microfiber NBA basketballs over traditional leather ones. And, when some NFL players can commit manslaughter and get 30 days, was Michael Vick such a danger to society that he had to spend two years in prison during the prime of his career? What am I missing here?
Of course I'm skipping over a lot: the insanity of our justice system, the aforementioned issue of race as well as that of celebrity, the inherently condescending nature of sports "journalism." Sports shock-jocks and peta protesters occupy extremes of media sensationalism. Yet given the many fast food commercials one sees during football games, it is inevitable that there are many people who judge Vick harshly for his cruelty to animals while at the same time engaging in such cruelty at an industrial scale. This, much in the same way that their are "animal lovers" and pet owners who would abhor any cruelty toward one type of animal but are extremely comfortable with cruelty towards another kind of animal.
While
there may be a moral hypocrisy involved here, in general it is not interesting to look at this cultural phenomenon in moralistic terms. More likely, the terms 'animal' and 'human' need to be qualified instead of naturalized, as they are not categories which consistently and accurately describe the myriad of relationships we have to other living beings. Clearly the first-world dog would seem to us in this country to be more 'human' the the third-world child who makes the dog toy (or at least we
act that way). Instead, I might suggest that pets, like other objects of consumption, have a certain use-value; in their case, anthropomorphsized affection and entertainment. So, the disparity in our cultural relationship to dogs, for example, compared to our relationship to pigs means that it is somewhat meaningless to speak them both as 'animals' in the same way.
There is a historical aspect to this provisional thesis, but it's not of the disingenuous, man's-best-friend kind. Rather it's this: that the tendency to construct and broadly conceive of 'nature' in terms of its usefulness for human endeavors, mostly exploitative, is fairly longstanding and not necessarily in opposition to the romantic pretensions of environmentalists and "animal lovers" alike. I realize that this involves a somewhat tricky semi-universalism, wherein dogs and pigs are not both 'animals' in the same way, but both are part of some vaguely biological 'nature'. I'll have to think about this.
But again, avoiding the opus here...
I'll leave you with Jim Rome in an oddly self-aware clip:
friends know, I have what is considered to be a somewhat idiosyncratic view towards animals. On the one hand, I am fairly uncomfortable around pets. This is especially true of large, jumpy dogs which I find frightening, but also other animals. I don't understand the point of petting, playing with, holding, or talking to cats, for example, or observing the behavior of fish swimming around in a tank. On the other hand, I'm vegetarian, and more sympathetic to militant veganism than most people. For all practical purposes, I'm ok with speaking in moral terms about the animal industry: it's wrong (it's also nearly impossible to live an animal-free lifestyle, even if you think you're being vegan). I even marched with PETA in last year's pride parade in SF, pictured above (I needed to get more near-naked girls in this blog...I don't have many readers right now, ok?!).If I've found it at times difficult to gently convince people to examine the material and social conditions behind animal consumption, then I would have to say prompting any sort of critical reflection from anyone on the subject of pets is basically impossible. People love their pets, their pets love them, and that's the end of it. So instead of attempting to write an opus on the subject, I'd like to instead get at the subject by presenting incongruities in views towards animals which confuse me but seemingly not many people I meet.
Take the case of Micha
el Vick, who despite spending two years in jail for dog fighting, is still being vigorously protested as he attempts his comeback ("what Vick did was mild compared to child molestation," says one such protester). Even putting aside the fact that Vick's case had probably as much to do with the fact that he was a flashy, African-American athlete in the south, a sport in which animals tear each other apart and then are electrocuted is quite obviously cruel and should be banned.Even given this, the fury unleashed by the Vick case bewilders me. As Earl Hutchinson writes:
"Countless numbers of pro football players have committed rape, physical assaults, and armed robberies. They have been inveterate spouse and girlfriend abusers and have even been accused of double murder. Yet none of them have ever had an airplane fly over their training camp with a banner that read abuser, killer, robber, assailant, or thug. None have ever been taunted, jeered, and harangued by packs of sign-waving demonstrators screaming for their blood when they showed up at the courthouse. None of them have ever brought the wrath of the entire sports world -- sportswriters, fans, league officials, advertisers, sports talk jocks, and bloggers down on their heads. None have ever had senators, congresspersons, and packs of advocacy groups publicly demand that they be drummed out of their profession."
I don't get this. If it is cruel to mercilessly kill a dog when it can no longer fight (and it is), isn't also cruel to put down a racing horse that has a broken leg? Shouldn't horse racing also be banned? And if we need to euthanize that horse because the life it would live with a likely-infected broken leg - sedentary, full of antibiotics, prone to disease - then shouldn't we also be concerned about the 10 Billion cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys that spend their lives in worse fashion and die every year in this country? And yet the same sportscasters, so full of bile for Vick, were tripping over themselves a year earlier to mock PETA for advocating for microfiber NBA basketballs over traditional leather ones. And, when some NFL players can commit manslaughter and get 30 days, was Michael Vick such a danger to society that he had to spend two years in prison during the prime of his career? What am I missing here?
Of course I'm skipping over a lot: the insanity of our justice system, the aforementioned issue of race as well as that of celebrity, the inherently condescending nature of sports "journalism." Sports shock-jocks and peta protesters occupy extremes of media sensationalism. Yet given the many fast food commercials one sees during football games, it is inevitable that there are many people who judge Vick harshly for his cruelty to animals while at the same time engaging in such cruelty at an industrial scale. This, much in the same way that their are "animal lovers" and pet owners who would abhor any cruelty toward one type of animal but are extremely comfortable with cruelty towards another kind of animal.
While
there may be a moral hypocrisy involved here, in general it is not interesting to look at this cultural phenomenon in moralistic terms. More likely, the terms 'animal' and 'human' need to be qualified instead of naturalized, as they are not categories which consistently and accurately describe the myriad of relationships we have to other living beings. Clearly the first-world dog would seem to us in this country to be more 'human' the the third-world child who makes the dog toy (or at least we
act that way). Instead, I might suggest that pets, like other objects of consumption, have a certain use-value; in their case, anthropomorphsized affection and entertainment. So, the disparity in our cultural relationship to dogs, for example, compared to our relationship to pigs means that it is somewhat meaningless to speak them both as 'animals' in the same way.There is a historical aspect to this provisional thesis, but it's not of the disingenuous, man's-best-friend kind. Rather it's this: that the tendency to construct and broadly conceive of 'nature' in terms of its usefulness for human endeavors, mostly exploitative, is fairly longstanding and not necessarily in opposition to the romantic pretensions of environmentalists and "animal lovers" alike. I realize that this involves a somewhat tricky semi-universalism, wherein dogs and pigs are not both 'animals' in the same way, but both are part of some vaguely biological 'nature'. I'll have to think about this.
But again, avoiding the opus here...
I'll leave you with Jim Rome in an oddly self-aware clip:
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