"America is waiting for a message of some sort or another."
This post contains the SECOND volume of this mix that I reprinted at the link below in 2018 after the midterm election.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1129 - America is Waiting - again - a music mix and commentary content
I originally published the mix in 2017:
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #629 - America is Waiting, Musical Monday 1703.27
The mix focused on the video above, set to the first song in the landmark album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
I have had the goal written on my to-do list for about a year to either re-do the mix or do a second version.
Now, with the global coronavirus and COVID-19 pandemic, I need to make this mix more than ever.
As the quote above, America is indeed WAITING; it is "WAITING for a message of some sort or another."
This mix addresses the issues in the country as the president first referred to Corona virus and COVID-19 as a hoax promoted by liberals to defeat him.
The mix centers on this seminal album by Byrne and Eno that I featured in this blog entry linked below; it's one of my favorite albums of all time.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1728 - MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS
America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.
Takin' it again. Again! Again! Takin' it again.
Well now... no, no... now, we ought to be mad at the government not mad at the people.
Takin' it again. Again! Again! Takin' it again.
I mean, yeah, well... wha-what're ya gonna do?
America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.
No will whatsoever. No will whatsoever! Absolutely no honor.
No will whatsoever. No will whatsoever! Absolutely no integrity.
No will whatsoever. No will whatsoever! I haven't seen any any any citizen over there stand up and say "Hey, just a second."
No will whatsoever. No will whatsoever! I mean, yeah, so... wha-what're ya gonna do?
America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.
Find the mix below, linked from the title and in a video pod that will play here on the page or can be opened in YouTube.
I included one quote from the Clash song "Clampdown" that also seemed to fit the theme of this post directly.
In part, the pandemic crisis in this country is due to inaction by the president, and not just inaction, but counter-attack, attempting to refute the impending sweep of infection and death as a hoax or as something his administration has beaten: "there's 15 cases and soon that will be zero or near zero."
The president, today, 4/13, in a press conference, edited together video clips that make it appear as if he acted swiftly and decisively to respond to this serious threat when just last week he put nearly all the responsibility for response to the virus on state governors, who are primarily those who have made the decisions to close schools, restaurants, businesses, and urged people to shelter in place.
What we need now and have needed since February is a national plan from the Federal government; we need guidance and leadership. We need a message.
Following the mix, you will find a track list and then more images and content. There's an article from SF MOMA about a short movie named America is Waiting by Bruce Conner and then there's another article, this one from 2015, about how America is a bomb waiting to explode, which now, five years later, is even more true.
Enjoy all the content.
We're all waiting.
"No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
Kick over the wall 'cause government's to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
Do you know that you can use it?"
- The Clash "Clampdown"
America is Waiting for a Message - Mix vol.2 - Musical Monday for 2004.13
[1] Brian Eno and David Byrne - America Is Waiting - from MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS
[2] Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Red Right Hand (Official Video)
[3] Bad Pilöt - Arctica
[4] David Byrne & Brian Eno - Regiment (Tribal Fusion Dance) - from MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS
[5] Nine Inch Nails - Down In It
[6] PJ Harvey - The Wheel
[7] Siouxsie And The Banshees - Cities in Dust (Official Video)
[8] David Byrne & Brian Eno - Qu'ran (removed from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) - from MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS
[9] Dead Can Dance - ACT II : The Mountain
[10] GHOST COP - Enhance
[11] MOON WIRING CLUB ~ GALLONS OF GHOSTROGEN - by WotanAlthorpe
[12] Trent Reznor, Peter Murphy, Atticus Ross, Jeordie White- "Reptile" live 6.23.06
[13] Brian Eno & David Byrne - Mea Culpa
[14] Zola Jesus - Exhumed (Official Music Video)
[15] NIN: "Cars" with Gary Numan, London 7.15.09 [HD]
[16] Cabaret Voltaire - What Is Real
[17] Cabaret Voltaire - Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself) (1983)
[18] Brian Eno & David Byrne - Moonlight In Glory - from MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS
[19] The The - Infected (Video)
[20] Throbbing Gristle * What A Day
[21] Gang Of Four - To Hell With Poverty (TV Live)
[22] Chip Taylor & The New Ukrainians - Fuck All The Perfect People
[23] Pixies - Debaser (Official Video)
[24] Joy Division - Disorder (Official Reimagined Video)
[25] The Clash - The Guns Of Brixton/ Clampdown (Live On Fridays)
[26] Devo | Freedom Of Choice | Official Video
[27] Thom Yorke – A Brain In A Bottle
[28] Talking Heads - Heaven - 1984 - (HQ - 1080p)
[29] David Bowie - Five Years
[30] Brian Eno & David Byrne - Mountain of needles - from MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS
America Is Waiting: Bruce Conner and the Cultural Zeitgeist #director #BrianEno #DavidByrne #MyLifeInTheBushOfGhosts https://t.co/DuDPChusAN pic.twitter.com/CMOG26DJn6— Brian Eno News (@dark_shark) April 1, 2017
BUY THIS FILM
https://www.sfmoma.org/read/america-waiting-bruce-conner-and-cultural-zeitgeist/
America is Waiting: Bruce Conner and the Cultural Zeitgeist
As SFMOMA’s retrospective of the work of Bruce Conner (1933–2008) indicates, the inimitable San Francisco artist made his mark both within the art world and beyond. Producer of darkly incisive found-object assemblages, pioneering experimental films, meticulous drawings and collages, raucous documentary photography, and ethereal photograms, Conner was also at the leading edge of the movements that defined San Francisco and shaped the cultural landscape of the United States in the postwar era.
“San Francisco had a reputation for tolerance of different views. . . . There were people exploring words, music, dance, sculpture, and painting in unique ways that you wouldn’t find in New York or anyplace else in the country.”
BRUCE CONNER
RENAISSANCE BY THE BAY: SAN FRANCISCO IN THE 1950s
Bruce Conner and his wife, artist Jean Sandstedt, flew to San Francisco immediately after their wedding in Lincoln, Nebraska on September 1, 1957. Among the friends who greeted them on the West Coast were filmmaker Larry Jordan and poet Michael McClure. McClure, whom Conner had known since they attended high school together in Wichita, Kansas, introduced the Conners to his neighbors in the Fillmore district, including artists Jay DeFeo and Wally Hedrick.
By the time the Conners arrived, the San Francisco Renaissance in art and poetry was in full swing. It had been nearly two years since the infamous Six Gallery reading, when poets, including Philip Lamantia, McClure, and most famously Allen Ginsberg, performed their writing for a packed house. Notably, sculptures by artist Fred Martin— assembled from orange crates, muslin, and plaster—shared a stage with the poets that night. Far from occupying separate spheres, visual art and literature were closely intertwined. When Dave Haselwood, a friend of Conner’s since his Wichita days, founded the Auerhahn Press in San Francisco in 1958, Conner designed its logo of a wood grouse (Auerhahn in German). Covers of the press’s publications by poets associated with the Beat movement were designed by artists including Wallace Berman, Conner, and Robert LaVigne. In 1959, Conner and LaVigne organized a parade, described on the event’s flier as “a spectacle of Objects” accompanying “a WayOut WALK OF POETS,” as part of a benefit for Haselwood’s press.
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| Bruce Conner, RATBASTARD 2 (front and back), 1958; collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, gift of Lannan Foundation, 1997; © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
“You don’t know me but I know you and you are my fave rave.”
JOHN LENNON TO BRUCE CONNER
ALTERED STATE: SAN FRANCISCO AND THE 60s COUNTERCULTURE
Except for four years in the early 1960s, when he lived in Mexico City and the Boston area, Conner spent his entire career in San Francisco. By the time he returned to the city in 1965, a new countercultural ethos had begun to take hold. Conner was already well acquainted with certain defining features of what became known as the hippie era. He had experimented with psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico and had even lived for a short time with Timothy Leary’s commune-like International Federation for Internal Freedom in Newton, Massachusetts. His intricate mandala drawings were used in influential graphics of the era, appearing on the endpapers of The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964), by Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, and on the program cover for the Trips Festival. Inside the program, Conner is named as a participant in the watershed acid test, which took place over three days in January 1966 at San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall. He designed the cover of the San Francisco Oracle during the Summer of Love, producing four different color variations for the Haight-Ashbury–based newspaper’s August 1967 issue.
Conner quit the art world in 1967. Instead of exhibiting his work in museums and galleries, he pursued his activities in other spheres. He launched a highly unconventional campaign for a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, and participated in psychedelic light shows as part of the North American Ibis Alchemical Company, which performed with the likes of the Doors and the Steve Miller Blues Band at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom.
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| Bruce Conner, BRUCE CONNER SUPERVISOR, 1967; collection SFMOMA, gift of Michael Kohn; © 2016 Conner Family Trust, San Francisco / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
He was excited by the immediacy of the medium, saying: “Since my films were extensions of music, or music in relation to image, what more perfect way than to improvise and create at the time that it’s happening and have it immediately consumed.” The group’s final light show took place at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in November 1967. Unhappy with the group leader’s decision to project onto a screen, “like a movie,” Conner broke rank and concluded the performance by pulling the screen down so that “everything was projecting all over the place.” He remembered one audience member telling him, “I didn’t understand what it was all about until finally when everything came down it all made sense.”
“I was attracted to the phenomenon of the punk scene because it had a lot of the same kind of energy that seemed to exist in the 1950s in San Francisco when artists and various people were called the Beat Generation.”
BRUCE CONNER
DO IT YOURSELF: SAN FRANCISCO’S PUNK SCENE
In October 1977, singer and choreographer Toni Basil invited Conner to see Devo at the Mabuhay Gardens, a North Beach nightclub where punk bands had recently begun to perform. That night he met V. Vale, a publisher who asked the artist if he would contribute to his incipient punk zine, Search & Destroy. Conner resolved to take photographs for one year: “Do a document of what happened during that period of time, what changes take place: the geography of the Mabuhay Gardens.” More participant-observer than detached documentarian, he likened his navigation of the turbulent scene to “combat photography,” reveling in its rebellious spirit. His photographs appeared on the pages of Search & Destroy throughout 1978. He later organized them into two portfolios: 26 PUNK PHOTOS (1978, printed 1985) and 27 PUNK PHOTOS (1978, printed 2004).
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| Bruce Conner, BREAKAWAY, 1966 (still); collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco |
Even after his assignment ended, Conner—then in his mid-forties—continued to frequent local punk venues, such as the Deaf Club and Club Foot. Artist Christian Marclay, whose band performed at the Mabuhay Gardens, remembers him as “a gangly guy . . . dancing wildly in front of the stage.” The scene’s do-it-yourself ethos, annihilation of the traditional boundaries between performer and audience, and politically inflected anti-authoritarianism must have appealed to Conner, who always strove with his meticulously hand-crafted works to achieve direct, unmediated communication with viewers. His photos from the Mabuhay Gardens emphasize above all the rawness of the performances he witnessed.
Conner was a tremendous fan of music of all kinds, so it should come as no surprise that he created films inspired by the sounds he encountered during this period, including MONGOLOID (1978), set to a song by Devo, and AMERICA IS WAITING (1981), with music by David Byrne and Brian Eno. In the fall of 1978, he recorded demos of a new hardcore punk band called the Dead Kennedys, which had performed their first show at the Mabuhay Gardens earlier that year. (Papers in Conner’s archive indicate that the recordings, which were made at a local studio operated by a friend, later resulted in legal troubles for the artist-turned-producer.) This little-known fact, and the remarkable body of work that emerged from his involvement with San Francisco’s punk scene, underscore Conner’s unflinching commitment to this era-defining movement.
Bruce Conner: It’s All True takes its title from a letter dated November 18, 2000, in which Conner lists “some of the ways the media has characterized me,” including “beatnik, hippie, punk.” At the conclusion of a long list of monikers, many of them contradictory, he states, “It’s all true.” Indeed, it is precisely Conner’s fierce individualism—his refusal to slavishly adhere to any one ideology or movement—that made him an artist of his times whose art is strikingly timeless.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/319632-us-bomb-democracy-crisis/
America is a bomb waiting to explode (part II)
Sam Gerrans
Sam Gerrans is an English writer and activist. Quranite.com | @SamGerrans
25 Oct, 2015 13:15 / Updated 4 years ago
Last week I compared the US – and by extension all economies based on the same model – to Semtex. My exploration of this analogy both ruffled feathers and raised questions. This week, I want to address five of the most common criticisms the article generated.
Semtex seems stable. You can throw it, burn it, jump on it. But when you put the right detonator in it, everything blows up.
I think this is a fair analogy for the US at this time. Not everyone agreed.
In this follow-up to last week’s article, I want to address just five of the criticisms this assertion received.
1. I am anti-American
I’m not quite sure what that means, but if we are to take the founding documents of the country of America as indicative of what the US stands for – the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – then I am all for them.
The problem is that the Republic that America was created to be has been usurped by something else called Democracy.
In a Republic there are laws set in stone. There exist immovable principles, no matter how many fools can be drummed up to vote against their own interests.
In Democracy there are no principles other than how many fools you can drum up.
Yes, it’s true. I don’t believe in Democracy. To me, Democracy is a form of corporatized, Satanic hypocrisy the object of which – at least currently – is to mask a Cultural Marxist agenda designed to destroy you not only in this life, but also in the life to come.
But a Republic? Sure, I can get behind that. My problem with America is that it has ceased to be one.
Just because there is a plebiscite every few years where the people put an x on a ballot sheet doesn’t mean anything under a system where the ruling elite’s current placeman can rule by dictate known as Executive Orders.
So I’m not against America. I’m for America. I’m just saying that what we now have isn’t America.
America has gone and no one would like to see its return more than I.
2. Everything in America is stable, so what are you talking about?
This was in part, my point.
Things in the US – and all the other countries built on the same model – do seem stable. But you can only keep throwing straw on the donkey’s back so long.
Sooner or later it breaks.
My argument is that when it does break, unlike in previous collapses, the economic, the moral, and the social resilience to withstand such a rupture is no longer sufficient to the needs of the body politic.
I have personally lived through an economic collapse. It wasn’t pretty. The shops were cleared out in a couple of days. I had literally to race across the city to the airline’s central office with our last remaining money to buy tickets out of the country, all the time knowing that the currency could lunge down yet again before I could get to the office and make them take my money.
When things go, they go quickly.
3. America is different
If you think this can never happen in the US, think again.
American exceptionalism is a popular belief. But no amount of belief in it will protect the US against the hard laws of reality, as the ruins of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome will attest.
The Soviet Union was a great empire. Where is that now?
But – preppers aside – the US is in a worse condition to the Soviet Union prior to its collapse.
The population of the USSR had no illusions about the intentions of its government – given the millions killed by that government in the course of the 20th century – and most were used to improvising and collaborating to survive.
Added to that, most families had access to a dacha with some land where they could grow the basics.
Americans by comparison are weak, unprepared and isolated and have no conception of how to live frugally or improvise.
4. America is the greatest nation on earth
I agree that it was, at least prior to the institution of the Federal Reserve in 1913 – which is the point also at which point America began talking about ‘Democracy’.
I also agree that America was founded on principles of real capitalism, industry and initiative. The successful were allowed to flourish and the unsuccessful were allowed to fail. If these are measures of greatness, then America certainly was great.
But that was then.
As of Q4 2012, Forbes rated the United States as the country with the highest debt of any country in absolute terms, an estimated $14.6 trillion in general government net debt, double the debt of second-placed Japan.
And US debt has grown $10 trillion in the last decade.
The so-called Fed has created trillions of dollars in fiat currency, and no one really knows what the final numbers are because this privately run bank, which controls the US is not audited.
This fact was lamented by Alex J. Pollock, president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago (1991-2004) in the Wall Street Journal – hardly a hotbed of wild-eyed conspiracy theories.
Add to this the fact that the so-called Fed is gearing up for QE4 (i.e. a fourth round of creating interest-bearing fiat currency as debt since it began bailing out the criminals and psychopaths who were behind the mortgage collapse).
Iceland on the other hand simply let its banks fail and prosecuted the criminals and psychopaths.
As Bloomberg reports, this happy isle is finding crisis-management decisions made half a decade ago, have put it on a trajectory that have turned 2 percent unemployment into a realistic goal.
So from where I’m standing, if American values are the arbiter of greatness, Iceland is the greatest nation on earth right now.
5. I am a ‘pro-Russia’ propagandist
I don’t accept this. And I know whereof I speak. I lived in Russia for over 15 years. I learnt Russian in my twenties and speak it fluently.
I have seen Russia from the inside – the good, the bad and the ugly. I know Russia in ways few foreigners are likely to. Believe me: there is plenty wrong with Russia.
But there is plenty right with it – and it does not make me a propagandist to say so.
And it is Russia and not America which has the moral high ground on the world stage right now – a fact which many in America acknowledge.
For example, Putin has operated within international law regarding Syria, and has moved decisively to put paid to Islamic State – a move which almost everyone but the US and Israel applauded.
And it is Russia and not America which has stood up to defend at least some normative aspects of decency to protect minors from the onslaught of indoctrination into what – at least by any scriptural measure – is rank immorality, no matter how packaged and presented as tolerance and virtue.
But it was America – not Russia – which in recent years has been the cause of crisis across the world, destroying country after country as per the PNAC plan, a plan which anticipated – in fact bemoaned the lack of – an event such as a new Pearl Harbour.
One year later they got just such an event: 9/11.
How lucky can you be?
So something is very rotten in the US. It has over-extended itself militarily. It is belligerent, arrogant, and hypocritical beyond words. It is corrupt, bankrupt and sick.
What I am saying is that since its underlying health is so eviscerated, when what comes to all comes to the US – and the right detonator is triggered – its end will be explosive.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2004.13 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1745 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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