I think I bought this shirt when I was 16 or 17.  Tool's first three albums (well, technically, an EP and two full-lengths) were in almost constant rotation in my life during the first years that I owned this shirt.  I liked them for their mystery--their album covers and sleeves were always strange pastiches of vaguely (but not explicitly) disturbing imagery, and their lyrics (which were never printed in the liner notes, which meant you had to listen that much closer) were oblique and seemed to straddle a line between vulgarity and compassion.  A song like "Prison Sex" for example, off of Undertow, suggests that it is simply describing the actions of the song title, but upon closer inspection, the song is a horrifying and powerful discussion of how child abuse, without intervention, perpetuates itself.  Other songs dealt with achieving enlightenment, critiquing the consumer culture of Hollywood, and tearing down leaders who self-aggrandize rather than aid.

I think this mysterious quality was so appealing because so much music in the mid-90s was not mysterious, but was characterized by its outrageous obviousness.  This was an era when bands like Candlebox and Stabbing Westward were topping the charts, and while the songs were often catchy, there was very little to follow up that initial rush of the first chorus.  Tool handed me, and many of friends, a sonic world to explore that was both brutally loud and meticulously constructed.

I guess I thought the shirt was profound at the time--Jesus on the Front (look close at the logo) and "All Indians, No Chiefs" on the back.  I'm not particularly comfortable with that analogy now that I'm an anthropologist, and the sentiment now seems a little overblown to me.

But it's mystery that's kept me interested in music, ever since then.  It was right at that same time that I started taking classes in music theory--poring over Bach, taking his "Well-Tempered Clavier" apart, trying to figure out how it all worked.  It was also when I started exploring underground music, searching out obscure punk and post-punk bands from the 80s and 90s, trying to find something I (and most people for that matter) had never heard before.  And Tool's insistence on--dare I say it?--excavating their music...well, it lit the spark in me for all of that.

So thanks, Tool, for inspiring my search for the perfect sound.

P.S.  Oh yeah, and there's this terrifying gem (NSFW audio):

And just in case you thought Maynard Keenan (the vocalist) was all about screaming, watch this:

"Won't sleep, won't shut up"...words to live by.    

I bought it on a Washington High School Orchestra Trip to Kansas City.  We used to do these crazy trips with High School choirs, bands, and orchestras, where we would travel, and play some music, and then get set loose on wherever we ended up.   On this particular occasion, we decided to visit scenic Kansas city.  I'm pretty sure DHP was there, but I definitely remember Michael Busha, and Dylan McCort (Rest In Peace).  We were wandering around some mall, and I found this shirt in a Spencer gifts-type shop.  I was astonished, as I had just discovered Henry Rollins spoken word stuff, thanks to the Minister of Intrigue, I believe.  

If anyone could be said to have been in the right place at the right time, it's Henry Rollins.  He grew up in DC at the first explosion of the DC punk/hardcore scene in the early 80s that spawned Minor Threat, the Bad Brains, and numerous other bands.  When the mighty L.A. hardcore band Black Flag came to DC, he was ultimately asked to join them as a vocalist, a position that he held through their seminal album Damaged, and until they disbanded.  From there, he formed Rollins Band, and toured the world relentlessly.  What made Rollins unique is that he documented all of this in journals, which have been published, and recorded as spoken-word pieces.  It's an amazing record of an amazing life.  Want to know the history of Black-Flag from the inside out?  Pick up a copy of Get in the Van (either in book or CD form).  Want to hear Rollins talk about working through the death of his best friend Joe Cole, himself a fixture of mid-80s punk rock?  Pick up Now Watch Him Die.  Rollins is a pretty amazing storyteller, fleshing out the memories of his wild-ride of a life with humor, pathos, and lessons.  My dad once almost drove off the road, laughing so hard from listening to Rollins' "Tom Waits Story".  "Eric the Pilot", the tale of his trials and tribulations of getting to a show in Oklahoma, is epic, funny, scary, and full of absolute joy.  

I wore this shirt a lot and, as you can see, it's become quite ratty.  But that actually was a blessing because it got used for a different purpose--notice the green paint spots?  Those are from my and Alanna's painting of the living room of our first apartment together.  I wore this shirt to paint in, and it served me well.  Juan and Chris came over to help, and by the end of the day, we had a beautiful new space to make our first home.  Now that I'm in our newest home in Toronto, on the cusp of being married to the woman who, somewhere has a shirt with green paint spots as well, it seems appropriate to finally retire this piece of my past.  

My dad grew up in Sioux City, Iowa.  Sioux City is an interesting place, and it's a pleasure to listen to him talk about its folklore.  He has a whole map in his head with all of the town's hidden mysteries, and I've been priveleged to take that tour more than once. 

One of the points of reference in Sioux City is the Tastee Inn and Out.  Everyone I've ever met from Sioux City, or who has spent any time there knows about the Tastee.  It's an old style drive-through foodstand, but... what amazing food! 

The main dish is a kind of loose-meat hamburger (the "Tastee"), with a unique and unforgettable flavor.  For a side, you can get fries, but the real treat are the onion chips--onion peels, breaded and fried, and served with a seasoned creamy dip.  I don't have the skills to describe what it tastes like (or how unbelievably good it is!), but you can see some pictures here.

Every time we would go to Sioux City to visit my Dad's family, there would always be at least one trek to the Tastee.  In the same way that it makes its way into the stories that my Dad tells, it floats around my family memories, stretching back into my youngest past.  

For example, when I was younger, my parents threw a "junk food party", where you had to bring your favorite junk food for everyone to try.  Getting Tastees to Cedar Rapids was an impossibility, but only Tastees would do for my Pop.  Fortunately, he had been to his High School class reunion a few weeks prior, and had met a woman who had spent a bunch of time mixing the closely guarded recipe.  He called her up, and she agreed to give him the recipe over the phone, on condition that he not give it to anyone else!  Thus, we had homemade Tastees at the junk food party, and there was much rejoicing.  

I haven't had them in years, mostly since I haven't been to Iowa in years.  But just like with my Dad, the Tastee Inn and Out has become a fixed point for me; a place that memories and relations pivot around in my life.  I do hope that I'll make it back there again, some day.  

But of course, like all artifacts, T-shirts (or any clothing for that matter) carry emotions, memories, and associations independent of their production.  It's one of the great ironies of capitalist life--we're always subverting and reconfiguring the things we buy toward new ends, undreamed of by people who made them and sold them to us.  For clothes, this is especially salient, I think, because clothes are so embodied--we carry them next to our skin, and they are with us in almost all of our daily interactions with other people.  

Thus, I always have a hard time when I'm cleaning out my closet.  I have T-shirts that I love, and would never want to part with, but simply can't wear, for any number of reasons.  But, I hit upon a solution, and I figured that I would get started enacting that solution today.  

I've taken pictures of T-shirts that I'm discarding, and using them as an excuse to write about the memories and feelings they inspire.  It's maybe a little self-indulgent, but it's also a means for me to get rid of some old clothes, and exorcise/exercise the memories that I have attached to them.  I've created a Flickr set of my t-shirts, which you can see here, and I'll do a post on each shirt in the series over the coming weeks.  

When I was 14, my High School drama department held auditions for "Amadeus", and I tried out on a lark.  I had always liked theater, and had done some smaller plays and other skit-type things when I was a little kid.  Plus, I loved the movie, and F. Murray Abraham's searing portrait of Salieri, a man pulled in two by his own jealousy and his love for music, inspired me to want to play the same character.  Of course, I had never acted before in my High School, and I totally expected to not get a part, or to get a background role. 

I wandered into school the day after auditions to find the roles list posted on the door of the drama office.  I scanned the list, starting at the bottom, and as I moved upward, I didn't see my name, and assumed that I simply hadn't been cast.  It was only when I got to the top that I found my name, next to the part of Mozart.  At first, I didn't believe it.  There is a role in the play for a "Mozart Double" and I assumed that I had been given that role.  But after a minute, I realized that I was playing the real deal.  As Emperor Joseph II says:  "Well. There it is"

I really threw myself into the part, working on my high-pitched giggle, learning to play the piano part that Mozart uses to show up Salieri in front of the Emperor by rote, and teaching myself to breathe slowly and slightly when Mozart died.  Somehow, during the dress rehearsal in the dark of the back-stage, I managed to walk into an old water pipe, and cut my head open enough to get six stitches. Fortunately, we had wigs that covered our foreheads and my injury remained hidden through the performance.  

It was a wonderful experience, and I'll never forget it.  I kept up with Theater all through High School, playing Shakespeare, musicals, Greek comedies, farce, high drama, and more.  In college, I was involved with a great group called "Theater for Engineers" and spent a few more fleeting moments onstage with some amazing people.  Since I've come to grad school, time and interest for acting have faded from my life, but many of the skills I learned have come in handy in teaching--poise, clear speaking, and comfort at talking in front of a crowd among them.

So here's to acting, and to a time in my life when nothing seemed more natural than putting on a costume and talking with someone else's voice. 

"Good Feeling" is the last track on the original record (newly pressed versions have bonus tracks), and it represents perhaps one of the most violent (ho ho ho) right turns in all of popular music.  The previous songs had been snarls and frantic spasms of music and words, but "Good Feeling" is slow and sad--the sigh at the end of the argument.  Gano's nasal voice trades in its anger for longing, longing that the good feelings would stay, "just a little longer". Bandmates Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenzo (and Martin Hecke) provide the perfect backdrop of piano, bass, and softly played drums, and Gano plays a simple, yet achingly beautiful violin solo about half-way through.  The first note of that solo is still one of my favorite sounds on any album, ever. 

Eventually, we discover the source of the good feelings, when Gano sings "Oh Dear lady, won't you stay with me, just a little longer".  It's a cry for companionship at the end of an album stubbornly devoted to isolation, and suddenly Gano's previous urgency and snarky rejection of those around him feels weak and defensive.  As if to bring that point home, the song ends with the band, for the first time, singing in harmonies together.  It's an outro worthy to be included with the likes of "Hey Jude", and the seemingly meaningless final words say more than meaningful lyrics ever could.

 "Good Feeling" transforms Violent Femmes from a collection of singles into a cohesive and timeless album.  There is a lot on this record about frustrtation, alienation, and anger--emotions often associated with being a teenager--but "Good Feeling" reminds me that all emotions come in cycles, and continue to, long after we grow out of our adolescence.   We may get caught up in them from time to time, but what brings us out is other people.  The connections we make, the love we share, the friendship we hold--these are the things that give context to those darker emotions, and the small strength we often need need to find as we stare inward gives way to the peace we can find when we reach out our hands to someone else.   

I came away from seeing Frightened Rabbit feeling happier and more full of joy than I had from seeing a band in a long time.  As I wrote earlier this year, I was a huge fan of their 2008 album The Midnight Organ Fight.  Unfortunately, all of the things I loved about the record--the almost-humiliating honesty, the exuberance of emotion, and the wild-eyed desperation--seemed like prime candidates for touring fatigue, where the intensity and forthrightness of the recorded sound would gradually dissipate with the necessity of playing the same songs night after night. Some of my favorite bands disappoint for that very reason. 

Thankfully, Frightened Rabbit did not disappoint.  In many ways, the album's spastic emotional bursts exploded even more on stage, with brothers Scott and Grant Hutchinson as the focal points of that energy.  Scott (singer, guitar player, and songwriter) seemed ready to burst at any moment, his voice pushing its own limits, the guitar clasped in his hands like the last rung of a rope ladder above the ocean. 

But the real surprise for me was Grant Hutchinson.  His meticulous drumming on the album provided a rhythmic complexity that the songs, played on their own, might not have suggested.  But with the first few beats of "Modern Leper", once you hear those drums, you can't imagine the songs without them.  Hearing the songs live, I realized how necessary and powerful the drums were, as powerful as Scott Hutchinson's pleading voice--the drums were an emotional counterpoint to the lyrics. And on top of that, Grant's singing would rise out of the speakers, its source not immediately determinable until Scott would thrash away, and you would seem him straining against the mic, his eyes closed and his arms a blur as he pounded out rhythms on the drums.

Between songs they were funny, self-depreciating, and engaged, laughing and joking with each other, and with us.  They invited the audience to sing along on "Poke", which Scott played sans-microphone or amplification, which somehow made the embarrassingly intimate song even more intimate and less embarrassing. 

If you don't have the record, buy it.  If you haven't seen them live yet, find a way to do it. 

I love this clip--it encompasses everything the Daily Show does best, and brings into stark relief why the health care debate (if you want to call name-calling and screaming matches a debate) is a great example of capitalist ideology in action. 

"Ideology" is an interesting concept.  Historically, it came out of the contradictions of the French revolution, as the late anthropologist Eric Wolf pointed out.  In practical terms, it is often used as an epithet, to polemically charge an opponent with what Wolf termed "interested error".  Thus, conservatives see a "liberal ideology", liberals a "conservative ideology", al qaeda terrorists "ideologies of hate", this or that public figure has a "radical ideological agenda", etc..... If you can prove your opponent is "ideological", they lose, and you win. You don't even have to justify whether your own position is also "ideological". This, of course, pre-supposes that there is a purely un-ideological way of looking at the world, and that ideology is deviation from that. And of course, it also supposes that "I" am looking clearly, without warping effects of ideology.

But whenever you try to carry the term beyond whatever shouting match you happen to be in, this version of ideology loses coherence.  This kind of political ideology has no necessary conditions in race, class, gender, age, or geography.  There are some correlations (African Americans tend to identify as liberal, for example), but there are also enough counter examples to make ascribing political ideology to social factors a thorny prospect. 

And if the alternative is that we simply choose our ideologies based on preferences, then which ideology is right? Right now at least, the seems to be something called a "moderate" or "independent". Agreement is reached that both ideologies are extreme, and the goal is common ground. Which is why I reject the idea that ideology comes down to "interested error". If that's true, it means that all the fights, and all the bluster about who's right ultimately in politics comes down to making both people right. Difference, so important polemically, disappears in the face of comprimise.

A broader notion of ideology instead sees it as a way of explaining and justifying the world as it exists, and of maintaining that world.  For us, that means that ideology is ultimately about sustaining and reproducing capitalism.  Under this reading, ideology is not about difference, but about same-ness; about keeping the world, and the people in it, in the same patterns.  Liberalism and conservatism may have disagreements on how to do this, but they ultimately agree that it should be done.  Or, to get back to the clip above--we can disagree on what the death panels should do, but we all know that we need them. The problem of ideology then is not which one you choose, but of the circumstances that make those choices the only ones available. 

If that's a little too  satirical for you, consider this.  The Democrats Health Care bill, H.R. 3200 is called the "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009".  Despite all the talk about socialized medicine, the two salient words in that title are "affordable" and "choice", both of which point toward markets and consumption.  The bill does very little to attack market forces in the health industry--the whole concern about a public option is ultimately about setting up another consumer "choice", in the interests of "keeping costs down".  These are important ideas, but as ideologies, they ultimately tie us to the world as it is, rather than as it could be, or should be.   

Jared Diamond, author of the Pullitzer prize winning book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", as well as "Collapse", and "The Third Chimpanzee", and lessor known, but academically influential articles like "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" (agriculture, by the way) wrote an article last year in the New Yorker Magazine called "Vengeance is ours:  What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?" (registration required).  In this article, he profiles a guy named Daniel Wemp, an indigenous resident of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and uses his life, and quests for revenge, to tell a story about the tragedy of violence in human society.  When it came out, I got into an e-argument with some folks over at Boing Boing because I said that Diamond wasn't an anthropologist, had no formal training in anthropology, and wasn't in an anthropology department (he's trained as an ornithologist, and has a position in the geography program at UCLA). Alongside that argument was a general critique I have of Diamond's work, which basically boils down to him being an ecological-determinist--someone who views human history and social progress as a product of the environmental variation, rather than of human action and inequality. 

Within the last month, it has come to light that Daniel Wemp, the PNG man that Diamond had quoted in his article, is suing Diamond and the New Yorker for $10 million dollars, for slander--Wemp claims that Diamond fabricated huge sections of their conversations, including stories of murder and sexual assault supposedly perpetrated by Wemp in his "primitive" need for revenge.  You can read about Wemp's claims against Diamond at here, at the Website stinkyjournalism.org, run by Rhonda Shearer, the widow of one of my science heroes, Dr. Stephen Jay Gould.  (As an aside, Gould was a brilliant and groundbreaking evolutionary biologist, a tireless crusader against all forms of shoddy science, including racist socio-biology, to which Diamond's eco-determinism is a not-so-distant cousin, and creationism, as well as being a rabid baseball fan.)

At its heart, this lawsuit is tied to anthropology's deeply colonialist legacy.  Anthropology got its start as the science of cataloging people that Western nations had conquered and exploited in other parts of the world.  In America, Anthropology springs from two large roots--the cataloging and documenting of indigenous people, as well as the exhuming of their and their ancestors remains, and the quest to determine the biological fixity of race, in order to perpuate slavery and white supremacy (no links, but see Chapter 2 of Gould's book "The Mismeasure of Man".)  Diamond's books are anthropological, even if he isn't an anthropologist per se, and he is consciously or not, continuing a tradition of exploitation and marginalization of non-white indigenous people across the world. 

What is so ironic to me is that Daniel Wemp is from Papua New Guinea, and Diamond begins "Guns, Germs, Steel" with a conversation he had with another Papua New Guinean--a man named Yali.  The book starts with Yali and Diamond walking on a beach in PNG, and Yali asks Diamond "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"  The title of the book is Diamond's answer to that question, and he spends the next few hundred pages articulating why geography, environment, and resources led to Europe expansion to places like PNG. 

But Diamond glosses over the historical context of the question.  For more on this, you can can read Gewertz and Errington's book "Yali's Question:  Sugar, Culture, and History".  Diamond describes Yali as a "local politican" who had a "role in getting local people to prepare for self government".  This is a gross over-simplification of Yali's place in Papua New Guinean society.  Yali had been a religious and political leader since after WWII, when he had served, with commendation in the Australian Army.  After returning to PNG and attempting to utilize what he had learned in Australia to modernize the country, and re-inspire indigenous religious traditions (the most famous of which is the so-called Cargo Cult, and see also Lawrence's "Road Belong Cargo"), he was deemed a threat by the Australian colonial authority, and put in prison.  While in prison, and afterward, he organized strikes and other protests against the government and capitalist plantation interests whom he felt had turned on him and his people (can't find any web citations, but I think it's documented in Marvin Harris's Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches).  He was one of the central figures in the drive toward New Guinean independence.  In 1972, when Diamond met him, he had become disillusioned with politics, and even though PNG would soon become independent of Australia, he was still concerned with the inequality that the cash-crop system and its capitalist exploitation had wrought in his country.  His question to Diamond was not about why his people didn't have more "things", but why colonialists had more than their fair share, and his people had so much less.  In short, Yali's question was about inequality, not about environment.

Okay, here's a summary of some great pieces providing extensive context on this controversy:

1.)Diamond's original New Yorker article, which unfortunately is by Subscription only, and may have been taken down by the New Yorker after the controversy ensued.

2.)The Summary of Wemp's lawsuit and claims against Diamond's article, written by Shearer and her colleagues.  To my understanding, this is a summary of a much larger report that they have put together, but not yet released.  They also have a good list of articles on this controversy as well, that, I'm happy to say, parallels mine.

3.)Articles on Diamond at Savageminds.org, an anthropology group blog.  These articles, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, have documented the problems and pitfalls of Diamond's article, and are pretty interesting reading on the cultural context of war in New Guinea (itself a long-studied anthropological topic), anthropological ethics, and more.  I don't agree with everything they've written, but there is a lot there, if you're interested in delving.  The comments section is pretty hot right now, and well worth reading for why this is so controversial.

4.)Articles on Diamond by Louis Proyect:  The Unrepentant Marxist.  Proyect is one of my favorite bloggers, and writes with equal skill and verve about socialist party politics, indigenous rights issues, and the latest in cinema.  His articles have contextualized Diamond's work in the larger social history of anthropology, particularly as it relates to state and capitalist exploitation.

And of course, the contradiction for me is that I'm a huge geek, and love all these technologies in a totally un-selfconscious way.  I recognize the power they have, even the power they have over me, but I'm so enthralled with their power and potential that I sometimes lose sight of their social context.  When I saw this, from the Concord Music Group's Playing for Change series, I first got excited from the technological end--here were people all across the world, playing the same song!  But then I listened to the song, and watched the faces of the people playing it, and my geeky excitement faded, into rhythm and melody and joy.

Nothing changes, the world is still as dangerous and deluded as ever.  But for me, for a few minutes, light appeared in a shadowy crevice under my heart...hope it does something for you.