Posts Tagged ‘The Guardian’
This week’s video is from a CBS appearance Davis did in 1958, the same year as his adaptation of Porgy & Bess. He performs So What, from the Kind Of Blue album. Jimmy Cobb is on drums and, oh yeah, some guy named John Coltrane is playing saxophone as well.
Half Off never had an issue with straight edge. I was straight edge (and I suppose I still am). We had an issue with people that were turning straight edge into a fashion statement or a club/gang. It was disturbing to see something so important being turned into a commodity. That commodity was being used as a wedge to exclude people from the punk/hardcore scene rather than embrace the diversity fostered by the DIY attitude that had made punk rock a force to be reckoned with. It seemed to me that the straight ege thing to do was embrace the people with drug/alcohol problems (not attack them). The other thing that became prevalent in the scene was the “tough guy” image that went along with being “hard”. I still don’t know what that means outside of a description of a penis.
This week’s video is of the excellent band Saccharine Trust. I am a big fan of their first album, Pagan Icons. It is a great combination of early hardcore, rock, and some of the free jazz influence a lot of bands on SST Records had at the time. Here they are playing at the University Of Connecticut in 1984 (with Black Flag by the way):
Is there ever a time when a leader shouldn’t sit down and talk with an enemy?
If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. The apartheid government in South Africa used to say they didn’t talk to terrorists, and they said Madiba [Nelson Mandela] was one of those. But of course, there’s no point in talking to someone else—someone who is not a leader, who has really no constituency—when that “terrorist,” so-called, is almost certainly the person that the oppressed regard as their leader. If you choose to talk with somebody else, the people will say, “That’s a stooge.” Any agreements you have with that one will have no credence.
How does peace come? Peace doesn’t come because allies agree. Allies are allies—they already agree! Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency. Then, when you do things that are risky, your people know that you are not likely to do something reckless. If you are doing something that is a bit dodgy, they will give you the benefit of the doubt.
This week’s video is from Black Flag’s very hard (as in, I can’t even find a full copy on the Internet hard to find) “Live 86″ video. Here they are playing the song In My Head:
My first post in WP 2.7…I love the new dashboard…
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