Dec 29 : "Hothouse Shorts" - Wilma Theater (Philly)

Here are six theater pieces that, if performed on stage before the pandemic, could very well have been called "performance art". But when the pandemic came along, theaters, like everyone else, had to adjust. And a couple of the things some theaters did was to start streaming some of their productions, as well as moving some of the performances themselves off stage to rl settings. And it wasn't long before some theaters added digital enhancements to the streaming productions. And, as we're coming out of lockdowns, some of the new streaming productions seem to have retained those changes as a matter of course.

Such seems to be the case with Wilma Theater's current streaming productions, "Hothouse Shorts", which is a collection of six engaging but unrelated pieces. Some of the digital enhancements include rapid changes of scenes as well as one of the shorts going way off into its own territory and bcoming an interactive experience with the viewer. Fun clicking all the icons! The theater's website describes them as: These shorts are as varied in style as they are in content, reflecting both the diversity of passions and variety of talents of local Philadelphia artists..

Should works like this be encompassed in the larger generic category "videos", or, since they're being created and performed by a theater company, still be called "theater pieces"? Or do they deserve a new name entirely? Technological advances are bringing a blurring of the lines. (or creating new ones?)

"Hothouse Shorts" is playing through this Friday, December 31. The event is free although a donation is requested (Make a donation!), and registration is required. You register only once for all six pieces. And you can even view them a second time if you like. I liked these stories; they make an interesting event as we wrap up the year. Here is the click to Wilma Theater's "Hothouse Shorts" ::: Hothouse Shorts (CLICK HERE).

All pics on this page were "screenshots" I took as I streamed the productions on my device.

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Dec 22 : "Thanks" - Sam Seeger (New York)

New Music / Freshly Written and Recently Released

WHOA! Another call is coming in! Another dicey phone message from Sam's brother Ben!

This is another voicemail video that make up a collection unique to New York musician Sam Seeger. Pre-pandemic I saw Sam do live shows with his full band, but, with these changing times, the videos and animations are turning out to be an area of his concentration.

To visit Sam on Facebook, here is the click ::: Sam Seeger on Facebook (CLICK HERE).

Dec 19 : "War Is Coming" - The Nude Party (Livingston Manor NY)

War is coming ...
... Coming for your sons

War is coming ...
... Coming for your soul

The Nude Party · War Is Coming

A few weeks ago I was able to catch part of The Nude Party's show when they came to Philly and played at Johnny Brenda's. I've seen them several times; they always put on a good show. Here is the link to their Soundcloud page where you can hear more: The Nude Party on Soundcloud (CLICK HERE).

pic from the band's Bandcamp page

Dec 01 : "Dreams" - Scantron (Philly)

SOME DREAMS ARE LIKE A FIRE

Philly Music!

We're getting involved with some complex relationships and maybe with one or two dicey characters along the way. Such is the setup in "Electric City", the most recent album by Philly garage band "Scantron". A few weeks ago I saw Scantron open up the night at Johnny Brenda's. I had seen them once before, several years ago. This time they were much more powerful, instrumentals way more complex.

The band has been in business for several years. While they've always been a "badass" garage rock band, the instrumentals back towards their beginning had more of the characteristics of other traditional rock and roll, with maybe a slightly more easy-going look at life as conveyed through both the lyrics and instrumental arrangements.

Fast forward to now, and the characters and relationships in the songs are becoming more complex, more complicated, less easy, as are the melodic lines in the instrumentals' support. In "Dreams" we want to see our love object cry, in "Tip Top Inn" we're ready to pull out our 45. Not to mention the guy we meet is ready to pull out his knife. This is a most foreboding rendition of the legend of Stagger Lee.

Overall I like the increasing complexity of the music's insttrumentals in the new work. More nuanced while ramping up the force and power, and even moreso with the live performance. (and I hope I never meet the guy with the knife in the song). :) But here is "Dreams", the lead song on Scantron's album "Electric City". Bad-ass no-holds-barred garage rock from South Philly. (p.s. ... Listen for an interesting but brief interlude on the keys at 1:25 on the clock).

SCANTRON · Dreams

Scantron doesn't have any other shows coming up soon, but here is the click to their Bandcamp page where you can hear a full range of their work: Scantron on Bandcamp. Pic at the top is from the band's page.

Nov 28 : "The Swimmer" - Joakim Zander

LOSING A MORAL COMPASS TO FOREVER WARS

Sometimes it can be effective to visualize a scenario through a piece of fiction. While my previous posts, "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets" and "Disaster Capitalism" talked in broad brushstrokes about the justifications that are used to fight and maintain our "forever wars", Swedish writer Joakim Zander puts some of these themes into stories where the reader is emotionally invested in who the characters are and what they're doing.

"The Swimmer" is the first book of his Klara Walldeen trilogy. Each book has some motif that deals with Afghanistan or wars in the Middle East. In each book one or two of the main characters somehow gets drawn into drama, espionage, or even jihad going on at the time (either willingly or unwillingly). And the characters in question always somehow seem to cross paths with Klara, the unifying personality, who has held various positions in the books including an affiliation with some non-profits and the European Union government.

Zander's story itself says that he "has lived in Syria and Israel and graduated from high school in the United States. He earned a PhD in law from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and has worked as a lawyer for the European Union"

I'm mentioning Zander's work as a followup to my previous posts because there are some similar themes. In Zander's second book, "The Believer", private security companies are themselves causing civil disturbances and civil unrest in the attempt to make the police forces look weak, so citizens will think the police are ineffective and then will be more receptive to calls for privatization of the police. The war profiteers we hear about in "Disaster Capitalism" are definitely present in "The Swimmer". How often is any unrest that we see today initially caused by disaster profiteers as a means towards their own financial ends?

And the incongruous religious zealotry that supports murder and mayhem in "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets" is mirrored on the other side by that of the Afghan fighters in "The Swimmer" who try to keep a rigid oppressive society based on their distorted religious views.

The books have very believable and engaging, multi-dimensional characters, many likable, others not. In "The Swimmer" itself, one of the main characters, Mahmoud Shammosh, is in the process of writing and developing a book based on his dissertation, "The Privatization Of War". Will he himself become a target?

I highly recommend "The Swimmer" as well as the trilogy's two that follow ("The Believer" and "The Friend"), so I don't want to give too much away, but I would just say that corporate entities running amock with no credible supervision from the government are frequent players in Zander's books. But, much to the relief of the reader, Klara Walldeen in the end is successful in helping to extricate several characters from their bad situations. But, while we say whew for the characters we have come to love, we all know that the overall threats in real life still remain.

Nov 02 : "Disaster Capitalism" - Antony Loewenstein

LOSING A MORAL COMPASS TO FOREVER WARS

"Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe" is the subtitle of Antony Loewenstein's book "Disaster Capitalism", which I read about the same time I saw the Trash Boy show a few weeks ago. Continuing on the subject of war and fighter jets. In my previous post the artists brought us to look at the intersection of religion as the justification of wars. And in the book "Disaster Capitalism" privatization with little or no oversight turns out to be a major villain.

The book starts right off talking about war profiteers and especially how it related to our presence in Afghanistan, which seems not to have been much different from the point when the book was written in 2015 up through the point where we exited only a few months ago.

And while we did leave Afgahnistan, the USofA is still involved in a number of other wars, so our killing people in other countries is far from over. From the New York Times a few weeks ago: Mr. Biden came to office vowing an end to the “forever wars” — and has firmly defended his decision to pull American troops from Afghanistan in the face of withering criticism from lawmakers of both parties. But administration officials have been clear that combat missions in other countries will continue, namely those that do not involve large deployments of American troops or draw intense news media scrutiny. Here's a link to the full article: Biden Declared the War Over. But Wars Go On

The book talks about the outsourcing of the "war" to private contractors. The writer goes to Afghanistan and Pakistan and interviews officials of the contractor companies, the contractor foot-soldiers on the ground, as well as Afghans on the ground who were simultaneously the victims and beneficiaries of our presence. We had a very complex relationship with the Afghan people. While some who were interviewed liked some of the benefits of our presence in terms of support jobs and opportunities that the contractors brought, they were dead set against the methods employed by the contractors, including the way the contractors could kill people or make them "disappear" with complete impunity, never being held accountable.

The book goes on to talk about Haiti and other countries that are recipients of large amounts of aid that winds up being administered by corporate contractors. After talking about Afghanistan, Haiti, and other foreign locales, the book discusses what's going on in the major industrialized countries, such as the USofA, Great Britain, and Australia, with much attention being paid to the privatization of prisons.

In the post 9/11 world, we're in the middle of outsourcing gone wild, where private companies repeat the mantra that they can get the job done better than the government. The government then outsources to them, gives them lots of money, and follows up too little about what's going on with the money. Out of sight, out of mind. And maybe the plans were not thought out well enough to begin with. Maybe the outsourcing was more for the benefit of the companies involved than for the people on the ground that they were allegedly there to help. The book has a long list of documentation, references, and links.

In all these cases, whether it's the unaccountable war contractors killing people with complete impunity, or the prison contractors, who, for the sake of profit, deny medical care or food to those incarcerated, a recurring theme seems to be that there's no responsible oversight of these operations, some of which are questionable to begin with. Human life is placed as being less important than corporate profits. Losing a moral compass.

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NOV 28 2021 UPDATE Next look at how a work of fiction touches on religious zealotry and war profiteers in my next post are involved in the war machine.

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Sep 20 : "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets" - Trash Boy (Philly)

LOSING A MORAL COMPASS TO FOREVER WARS

Philly Music!

Recently saw Trash Boy's show at PhilaMOCA. It was their first big show since the pandemic and my first indoor show since March 2020. Trash Boy is still Trash Boy and it was great to see them on stage again. They even had a surprise for everybody, a new band member! Just a few songs into the show, they played "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets".

I picked this song to feature with this writeup because it certainly resonates with what's been on people's minds over the last month, as it relates to both Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Why do we fight wars? As the song says, for our own protection and security. And, slippery slope, society has broadened the concept of "security" to include a nebulous fear of others including refugees.

In the frenzy after 9/11, Bush took us into Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama, even after assuring us he would be a man of peace, expanded our involvement into more than double the number of Bush's wars. Trump and Biden have started to pull us out, although the logistics could have been going better. Our increasing involvement with wars is a slippery slope; they've become too regular; we don't give them a second throught. Would Jesus condone this many wars, this many fighter jets, or, in these wars' parlance, this many drones? ... In just the past few days we learned of ten innocent civilians, including seven children, who were killed in one of our drone attacks, while the intended target appears to have been unharmed. Saturday's "Guardian" reports "Three days after a US drone obliterated a car in a Kabul street, General Mark Milley, shrugged off reports of civilian casualties, insisting it was a “righteous strike”." (1) Say what? Righteousness and bombing are connected even at our highest levels of government.

I'm a Christian, and I would say "NO", Jesus would not love fighter jets or righteous strikes on children and other innocent civilians.

Wars have become so de rigueur in our world today, that our leaders don't even seem to break a sweat in trying to justify them or convince us of their moraility. The discussion or even the concept of a "just war" now seems almost quaint; the threshold to start one is very high, but Congress infamously gave all presidents a "blank check" back in 2001, so no one even uses that term any more. The security state keeps us in a state of such perpetual fear of each other and of everybody else in the world, that we just know that these measures must be acceptable, must be moral.

This song is maybe a satire (or not) about losing a moral compass and trying to create God in our own image, trying to create a God who will sanction war and killing, a God that will keep our fences high and others away, and mirror exactly what's in our psyche. Worshipping the God we created brings us self-justificstion for what we already believed.

The song itself is on the band's excellent sophomore album, "Who Will Take the Trash Out When We're Gone?", which was released in 2019. Unfortunately, the pandemic started soon after. During the past year and a half the band did a livestream concert for Bernie in the primaries as well as a live recordng session at WXPN.

Here is "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets" :::

To hear more tracks from this great album, and get links to everything else Trash Boy, here is the click ::: Who Wil Take the Trash Out When We're Gone (CLICKHERE).

Warning! Pics on this page are Fake News!. Pics don't show the new band member who just joined. Top pic is from WXPN's site, and bottom pic is from band's Facebook page.

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NOV 2 2021 UPDATEIn addition to the intersection of religion and war-making, check out my next post for an author's look about bad corporate players involved in the war machine.

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NOV 28 2021 UPDATE Next look at how a work of fiction touches on religious zealotry and war profiteers being involved in the war machine.

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Footnote: (1) The Guardian, Sep 18 2021.

Jun 06 : "Troubled Mind" - Dreaming Thomas (Philly)

Philly Music!

What first usually attracts me to a band's music is the instrumentals. And if the instrumentals have some vibrant and unexpected chord progressions, then it's a lock! Such was the case Saturday when I heard the music of Philly band "Dreaming Thomas". I was looking around at possible shows to attend at West Philly Porchfest. .

Dreaming Thomas played the porch at a house along Baltimore Avenue. Pedestrians, cars, and trolleys provided the backups. The band did a number of covers from a surprisingly wide range of styles. But there was more texture in their original pieces, and when they announced at the beginning of a song, "This is an original", I seemed to like those the most.

The band played a long show with only one very short break. Starting at Noon, the band was still going strong when I left at 1:30p (short window; had to leave for a previously-planned hangout).

My favorite song on their Soundcloud page is "Troubled Mind" :::

Dreaming Thomas · Troubled Mind

Dreaming Thomas doesn't have any other shows coming up soon, but here is the click to their Facebook page where you can see pics of their Porchfest show ::: Dreaming Thomas on Facebook (CLICK HERE).

pic from band's web page

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p.s. ... Tech difficulties; this is the second time I've posted this; first time (yesterday), it disappeared.