Posts By Crommunist

3 A myth-taken identity

July 29, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · conservativism · crapitalism · critical thinking · history · religion

Longtime readers may remember that religion used to be a primary, rather than incidental focus of this blog. It may be the case that writing for Canadian Atheist and then moving to Freethought Blogs took some of the fun out of being a combative atheist. It could just be that I had more pressing questions rattling around in my brain. At any rate, I haven’t done a pure religious critique in a while, so pardon me if the rust shows through.

I read the Old Testament when I was in high school. Being a longtime fan (and voracious reader) of Greek mythology, I immediately recognized the stamp of myth on the stories of Jonah and the Giant Fish, Noah’s Ark, the Walls of Jericho, you name it. Stories are important cultural signifiers that transcend generations and give us some common ground. It didn’t strike me as particularly peculiar that a group of nomadic people whose written language arrived many generations after many serious events in their history would have kept their history alive in story form. It seems equally non-controversial to imagine that, as stories tend to do, the histories and the fables and legends became blended over multiple tellings. For someone who, even at the time, wasn’t a literalist believer, the idea that a literal super-strong Samson probably didn’t actually exist in the way he’s depicted didn’t matter much to me. What was important were the lessons of the Bible. It would take me a few more years to realize how monstrous many of those lessons actually are.

Similarly and non-coincidentally, I began to view the New Testament as a work of fictionalized history. At the time I thought Jesus was probably literally real, and that the writing in the Gospels needed to be viewed in context of the politics of the time. Understanding the tension that would have existed between, for example, the Pharisees and the Roman Empire at the time, helped put things like the Sermon on the Mount into a reasonable context – Jesus wasn’t speaking for eternal attribution, he was talking about the issues of the time. Judas wasn’t some evil conniver, he was a run-of-the-mill political zealot who sought to install new leadership by betraying the old one. And so on, in a most run-of-the-mill sort of way. … Continue Reading

0 Violondon Grammar (July update)

July 23, 2014
by Crommunist
· Covers · Media · Music · music videos

It’s been a while since my last one, but I’ve recorded another all-viola cover. This one is of London Grammar’s cover of Kavinsky’s “Nightcall”.

Check out the original
And here’s the London Grammar version

The inspiration for doing this tune came from Stavros, an old friend of mine who pledged to sponsor me at my Patreon page at the $12 level. The reward for such a pledge is that I will arrange and record an all-viola cover of a tune of the sponsor’s choosing. This dark and brooding tune was a perfect fit for the viola’s sound. Check it out:

I tried something a bit innovative with this one: I dual-tracked the lead viola part rather than sending it only through the 1/4″ pickup. In English, this means I used a microphone and a patch cable (instead of just the latter) so the track would have some more sonorousness. I am actually really happy with how it turned out. As is the rule for these things, all the parts (including percussion) were played on the viola. For the ‘cello’ pizzicato lines, I used my Line6 effects processor to drop the pitch by an octave.

Want your own all-viola cover? Head over to my Patreon page and pledge. I usually release a new song every couple of months, so your investment will be something like $4-$6 a month. There are also lower levels of pledge with different rewards.

0 It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over (live)

July 21, 2014
by Crommunist
· Covers · Media · Music

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One thing I’ve been doing this summer is getting out on the streets of Vancouver and busking. Here’s a picture of me doing that:

A photo of me with my busking rig

The guy who took that photo is a kind passerby named Fred, who also just happened to have a piece of recording equipment on his person. Because he enjoyed what I was doing, and because he’s a kind and generous person, he recorded me performing one of my new favourite tunes. Check it out:

Because of a few new demands on my time and some fun developments, I’m going to be playing fewer solo shows over the next little while, but I do hope to keep busking as long as the weather allows. Catch me at Kits Beach or in Olympic Village playing this and other covers and originals. If you see me, come say hi!

6 The salience of hatred

July 8, 2014
by Crommunist
· feminism · hate · race · racism

Feminista Jones has the post to read about the events that spawned this post. Please read hers first.

And from the woodwork, another emerges:

Apparently, Anthony Cumia, the shock jock better known as half of the duo “Opie and Anthony,” had a bad Tuesday night in New York. He claims that he was taking pictures when a woman just happened to wander into the frame and then assaulted him. If his account is true, it is highly unfortunate.

…

But whether or not Cumia was assaulted is not actually the point. Cumia himself made sure of that when he took to Twitter in the small hours on Wednesday morning to pontificate on the state of New York and African Americans in a rant amply documented by Gawker. (Both the Gawker post and links to Cumia’s tweets that appear later in this piece contain wildly obscene and offensive language.)

I first caught wind of Anthony Cumia’s tweets when one of my favourite rappers started retweeting them. At first I thought it was parody – some sort of tasteless piece of performance art that would be explained away as “satire”. My next reaction was to remember that the internet is full of people with opinions, and if you want to find hateful stuff out there, you can. But this wasn’t some anonymous nobody tweeting from some basement den for lulz, this was the host of a fairly popular radio show.

Unfortunately, the rest of this piece won’t make much sense if you don’t read the tweets, but for those of you who (wisely, I assure you) avoided clicking on the Gawker link in the pull-quote, I will attempt to summarize. Mr. Cumia claimed to have been taking photos when a black woman happened to enter the frame. She confronted Cumia angrily (allegedly physically assaulting him), and he responded by calling her a name*. A number of black men came to the aid of the young woman, who (again allegedly**) struck him repeatedly. In response to the confrontation, the assault, and the men taking the side of the assaulter rather than the assaultee, Cumia wrote a long and sweeping condemnation of the woman specifically, black people more generally, and (for some reason that eludes ready explanation) “illegals”. … Continue Reading

0 Liquid Sunshine

July 7, 2014
by Crommunist
· Media · Music · Originals

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Most things in life can be changed with effort – whether that’s the concerted effort of a passionate group of people, or the determined effort of an individual. But there remain some things that are beyond the scope of our powers to change. Assuming that we have the wisdom to discern the difference, there’s only one logical approach to things we truly cannot change, and that’s to try and find the positive within them.

This song is about that:

0 June Music Update (Heard It Through The Grapevine)

June 24, 2014
by Crommunist
· Covers · Media · Music · music videos

Lots of stuff going on this month. What this video doesn’t mention is that I’m also playing with a couple of local bands, with a couple of other offers on the table. Things are picking up!

1 Helter Skelter: connecting some of the dots of white supremacist violence

June 10, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · hate · race · racism

These days you can’t see who’s in cahoots, ’cause now the KKK wears 3-piece suits.
– Chuck D, “Rebirth”

In early August, 1969, members of Charles Manson’s “family” murdered Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. Police would find the words “Helter Skelter” written on the walls in the blood of one of the victims – a reference to Manson’s belief that a population of angry and disaffected black people would rise and violently confront their white oppressors. Manson’s intention was to use the murder of the LaBiancas and others to trigger the beginning of the “race war” that he knew was coming. It never materialized.

To this day, despite the track record of who the aggressors are in “race wars” (hint: it’s pretty much never black people), fears abound of an angry mob of savage blacks rising up and waging war on a beleaguered and long-suffering white population. In fact, in preparing to write this piece, I took a little trip through the Google looking glass and found repeated references to “the coming race war”, on pretty much exactly the kinds of sites you’d expect. Many of them made reference to the current “hidden” race war that only the likes of Glenn Beck seem to possess the wisdom to see. Remember the knockout game? Well these guys sure do, judging by the comment threads.

Whether it’s in Detroit or Black Wall Street or at Charles Manson’s house, white America has been in the thrall of its fear of “Helter Skelter” for pretty much forever. The myth, created and nurtured by white supremacy, of the savagery and inherent criminality of black people has resulted in repeated violent backlash against black communities. Backlash, incidentally, not against actual harms or danger, but against the fear of harm and danger that never seem to actually bear fruit. White America segregates itself from its black population, drinks deeply of its own racist stereotyping, becomes drunk on its own panic, and then arms itself to “defend” itself from the Negro bogeymen of its own imagination. With predictably tragic results.

It should be exactly zero surprise, therefore, to see a story like this: … Continue Reading

16 Single? It’s probably because you’re an asshole

May 27, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · gender · personal · privilege

This post is going to be more navel-gazey than is normal for this blog. That’s not a disclaimer of apology, just a ‘heads up’. This piece is also very much rooted in gender binary language, and that is a disclaimer of apology. I am speaking most often from my own experience. As a mono cis hetero guy, my romantic experience falls along a gender binary with a single partner. This is not to elevate or normalize mono cishet relationships above others, but I don’t want to speak too far out of my own depth. I am sure that relationships between queer and poly people have dimensions that I simply cannot address, and I don’t want to do it hamfistedly. I am very interested to hear what parts of this post do and don’t resonate with your own experiences, particularly if they are different from my own.

I am sure that I’ve made oblique reference to this before, perhaps even on this blog, but my sexual and dating history are perhaps a bit atypical. I say ‘perhaps’ because a pretty decent argument can be made that everyone’s dating history is atypical. However, from the standpoint that the average age at which people in Canada have their first sexual encounter is some time in their teens, my history is slightly to noticably atypical. This has a lot of explanations, some of which I am capable of explaining in some detail; others that I am still puzzled over. I’ve talked a bit about this process in a post I wrote a couple of years ago:

After a year spent in a different doomed-to-fail relationship in my first year of undergraduate (this time I ended things, and for what at the time seemed like noble reasons), I embarked on a long journey into my own bruised psyche to try and figure out what it was about me that made me so undesirable while everyone else had girlfriends (author’s note: most of my friends at the time were single). It was an endless pattern: I’d meet someone, we’d hit it off, I’d eventually work up the courage to ask her out, and then I’d get rejected. In my feelings of dejected misery and frustration and need for self-affirmation, and because there was a whole intellectual institution created around it, I embraced the “nice guys don’t get laid” myth wholeheartedly.

So, I didn’t get laid a lot. That “endless pattern” lasted, for the most part, for around 8 years. After I broke up with Jane (not her real name) in fall of 2004, I didn’t enter into another committed relationship until spring of 2012. During that intervening period, I had a small handful of flings with women, but nothing that lasted longer than 6 weeks or so. None of this did anything to disabuse me of the notion that I was, at some deep, fundamental level, incapable of being loved or having a lasting, meaningful relationship. It wasn’t all bad, as I’ll discuss further down the page, but there were a lot of pretty despondent nights. … Continue Reading

0 Sideways (Citizen Cope cover)

May 6, 2014
by Crommunist
· Covers · Media · Music · music videos

I decided to roll the dice and buy an electric viola off the internet. You can get reliably good ones from trusted retailers, but you pay for that assurance. I poked around and found one that resembles my electric guitar Shannon, and was cheap enough that I was willing to take the risk of it being terrible. That’s how I wound up owning my new viola, Michael.

Michael is named for my best friend in high school. The guy is a great musician, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He and I used to collaborate doing prog/rock/classical duets with viola and bass or piano. Working with him is where I burnished a lot of my improvisational chops, so it just made sense to give a funky and experimental instrument his name.

Here’s me, in the company of Shannon and Michael (see the resemblance?) doing a cover of Citizen Cope’s “Sideways”

As I mention in the video’s intro, you can now sponsor me directly on Patreon.com. The way it works is pretty simple: you pledge a few bucks (the minimum pledge is $1). When I write/record/release a song (this happens once every couple of months, on average), your account gets charged, and the money goes into a fund for me to book some professional studio time. You directly support me producing some professional-quality music – no middle man, no hassle.

But that’s not all! Depending on the amount you pledge, you will also receive a reward for being a sponsor. The $1 pledge, for example, gets your name listed in the liner notes of the EP you helped fund. The $5 pledge gets you that, plus a digital copy of the EP, plus a hand-written lyrics sheet. If you pledge $10 for each song I release, you’ll get a physical copy of my next album, plus digital copies of anything I ever release in the future.

So you, for a pretty small investment (starting at between $5-10 a year), can help me get my songs out of my apartment and into the world. Plus you get bonus gifts. Plus you don’t have to pay anything until and unless I write the songs you’re helping to fund! Everybody wins!

Anyway, as always, if you like the video please share it with your friends and help spread the word.

4 The benevolence of white men

April 30, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · conservativism · news · race · racism

By now the vast majority of you will have heard of the racist comments made by Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, an NBA team. Sterling was taped during a phone conversation with his girlfriend V. Stiviano, asking her not to bring black people to games with her. This is, apparently, part of a long history of racist comments made by Sterling over the course of this conversation and over a number of incidents stretching back many years. The response has been quick and severe, with players, owners, sports fans, and team sponsors all moving to condemn the comments and the man who made them.

Is Donald Sterling a racist?

Whether or not Donald Sterling is “a racist” is a question that I find profoundly boring. As I have said many times before, I do not recognize the validity of the category “a racist”. There seems to be no behaviour or set of behaviours that we can agree on to define what “a racist” is. All we know about “racists” are that nobody who is ever accused of being one, nor anyone who supports or is otherwise allied with the accused, will accept the label. Then there is something about how many bones in that person’s body are racist. And then some jiu-jitsu about who is really “a racist”. The pattern is as predictable as it is tiresome.

I am similarly not interested in writing a personal condemnation of Donald Sterling. I doubt he (or anyone else) would care if I did, and that ground is pretty well trod already. If you heard what Sterling said, and you don’t already think he’s a total scumbag, then I doubt that any combination of consonants and vowels could possibly convince you.

What I do want to do, however, is unpack what I think is a really revelatory statement made by Sterling in his recorded conversation. When Stivilano presses Sterling on the blatant racist content of the comments he’s made, and how it stands at odds with the fact that the players of the team he owns are predominantly black, Sterling is recorded as angrily responding: … Continue Reading

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