Arrrrrrighty! Today, educate yourself about Anarcho-Primitivism. Subscribers to this school of thought point to property, the industrial revolution, and technology and the adoption of tools as the root causes of inequality, injustice, exploitation and human suffering in general. If you start seeing shades of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "noble savage" in this reading you're not far off, but while Rousseau proposed the Social Contract, Anarcho-Primitivism acolyte and professional Unibomber Theodore Kaczynski wrote the rambling manifesto "Industrial Society and It's Future" (in the third person, nonetheless).





Changing gears quickly from anarchy to commercialism, here's the latest piece of sweet sweet 80's design to get my glands going. The decade of excess brought stock-market peril, Reganomics, the fall of the Berlin Wall and at the decade's close, beach-mulleted raquet jockey Andre Agassi and his signature Nike Air Tech Challenge trainers. Follow the link and have a good look. Bold purple and hot neon accent the structural elements of the shoe without adding any unecessary baggage. Nike has always been good at this sort of integrated form and function. They look oddly familiar; I think I may have rocked a pair of these in my kinder-years, although probably in a sleepy colourway like navy and grey.

First: Learn about the British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia. It's an internationally contentious horseshoe-shaped atoll just south of my current geographical obsession, the Republic of Maldives. Pay special attention to this.



Today's musical suggestion is the perfect sonic remedy for tha mean case of the February's you're probably trying to shake. "Cape Fear" by Toronto's Germans. I fucking love this CD. It's Sonic Youth and Pavement through the 16bit lens of the console generation. The last three tracks form a totally ball-busting indielectro triad*, the centrepiece of which is the album's most dynamically layered track, the tale of an over-the-hill Street Fighter character who thinks he still has what it takes to run with the kittens ("M. Bison").

Germans - "Cape Fear"

see also:

The Spinto Band - "Nice and Nicely Done"
Slow Runner - "No Disassemble"





*If "Indielectro Triad" is not the name of your next alt-country power trio, you are an oblivious slug and don't know a gift when it's staring you right in the face. You're the type of person who'd walk past a "FREE THREESOME" booth at the mall and be all "well my shoulder is kind of stiff from carrying these bags around all day... I'd better not". You asshole.

I love everyone who comes, but if you don't come, it doesn't mean I don't love you. It just means you're a bad friend or have another commitment.

There really is no need to RSVP, but if you want to it'd be nice... Do it in the comments section or to my email, or call Julia or Dayn or myself.

Bring whoever if they're cool, and BYOB.

Fun for all.

I love everyone who comes, but if you don't come, it doesn't mean I don't love you. It just means you're a bad friend or have another commitment.

There really is no need to RSVP, but if you want to it'd be nice... Do it in the comments section or to my email, or call Julia or Dayn or myself.

Bring whoever if they're cool, and BYOB.

Fun for all.

Maybe I'll talk about something... now.

How about that dang trrrrrrism everyone's talking about?
Yeah, that's a popular thing to talk about.


I think very reasonably that these are just some angry kids. We were/are all angry at something around that age in our lives. We targeted our hypothetical lashing out at things that were culturally familiar to us as evil or wrong or in our view, ethically negative. We got angry at presidents, pollution and popular music. It wasn't an influential or even common strain of thought in our socia environment to despise or carry anger towards America the Great Satan, World Bank credit slavery, or Western culture altogether. Not to say for certain that the feelings of these kids in this terrorism situation even extended to that level.

As the world leaves the print age of linearity and enters the electric paradigm of simultaneity, tribalism re-emerges in a big way as a prominent method of social orgainzation. It is primitive but it is infectious and effective, and it is most importantly extremely subtle and covert while nurturing devotion in its members. A great example of the new tribalism is profesisonal sports fans. They grow fiercely aligned and dedicated to their team and draw battle ligns before the fans of their enemies. Fashion and music and pretty much a whole lot of other things are expressions of tribalism.

In a tribal environment, ideologies are very efficiently cultivated; minimization of other influencing forces accellerates this process even more. This is what happened. A couple of guys at the local whatever were circulating some ideas and laying down informed arguments and so some malleable young people got swept up in the anger and romance of it. I can see how it could happen. They took them to play freaking paintball! Awesome! Kind of like when you started doing drugs, hating jocks, being religious/atheistic or stopped eating meat or shopping at the GAP.

I agree with what seems to be the consensus out there, at least from the discussion on Tristan's and Calvin's blogs. There's probably one or two older guys in there who are, if not active extremists, then at least pretty deep into this dangerous dialogue the world is having with America. Maybe it's a kind of intervention on some level.

At any rate it could have been you in their place so I guess be thankful you've been taught to hate corporations and cell-phone plans and way-the-fuck-too-much-packaging and NASCAR and the Yankees.

Hate the Yankees, love fear.