The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
(the path of least) resistance is futile



what on earth caused TiR, 11 months ago, to save in our notes a handful of links pertaining to the phrase "futility music"?

damned if we can remember

whatever. nothing v. earth shattering therein --

included a couple of late '05 articles w/ meaning & signific of the phrase, from WaPo and the Nation, and a striking post from New Verse News blog

(we now see that several weeks ago, the great Alex Ross provided some additional info on the genre, here)

but now ---------> Hitch!

good for him, at least, for going perhaps where members of the USA's Sentate Armed    Services    Committee (.pdf) should go, to be adequately informed of the matters they discuss -- or where some of the witnesses who have appeared before the committee (some may say) deserve to go.

Hitchens writes:

And some weird music assaulted my ears. (I’m no judge of these things, but I wouldn’t have expected former Special Forces types to be so fond of New Age techno-disco.) The outside world seemed very suddenly very distant indeed.

the video w/ audio is here (via McLemee)

poster "M C Hamster" [*] on the Cecil Adams fangroup seems to be the first (-to-post) correctly to identify the "futility music" in this case as what TiR's own research had independently concluded was Enigma's "Gravity of Love"

video/audio of which is here

(time for a new video mashup? -- Hitch+ Enigma?)

our review of the song's lyrics reveals that it quotes Blake. wonder if some poetry fan close to the White House helped pick out the soundtrack?


yesterday's other torture-related news -- that the USA's methods derive directly from 1950s China -- make us wonder why the Dark Siders don't close the circle by going for their soundtracks to the same source . . .

. . . in this case, the recently    opened (to the West) archives of the China Record Corporation:

Founded 50 years ago, China Record Corp. has an audio and video library of more than 60,000 titles by about 5,000 artists. All told, the collection is said to represent the entire spectrum of Chinese music.

"It's essentially something frozen in time. Since the Communists took power."

there    are    so    many    great    looking    albums    on    the    corporation's    website.

though maybe we'd start with a track from from the generally astoundingly cool album, Interesting Idioms Accompanied By Clappers:

Yang Tianxiang's "False Statement from Majority Will Be Regarded True"

a bit of which can be heard here

because the title might sum up one guiding governmental principle of the past several years in the USA

& speaking of maleability (epistemological, rhetorical, moral, ethical & otherwise), it's nice to see, cited in the above-linked NYT piece, Robert J. Lifton.

from the last chapter of his Protean Self:

The protean self then, becomes a bridge between the modern and the postmodern, a source of continuity that takes in radical discontinuity. The ongoing process is primarily cultural and psychological, though never free of the political.

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM