petebrunelli

Author: petebrunelli

  • HEBBY ROTAYSHUM!!!

    fuchsprellen update:

    Fuchsprellen Fever! Catch It!  Our friend Ernst shot a video at the January 3, 2013 Best Video show and it is currently experiencing “hebby rotayshum” on New Haven Cable Access…

    Two videos up, and a few more in the pipeline:

    https://www.youtube.com/user/fuchsprellen3000

    Audio from 3 January, 2013 at Best Video now free, or best offer at:

    http://fuchsprellen.bandcamp.com/

    And one track from best Video, plus some archival stuff, free for the streaming at:

    Coming soon: bandcamp album from 13 January at the Outer Space, Comp of the first two fuchsprellen recordings, reboot of some material from early 2012 “proto-fuchsprellen”, and perhaps a new studio/ambient piece.

  • Meta-spam! It’s shelf-stable!

    If you want to know what NRA talking points were circulated after Newtown, just look at the comments in any forum like Facebook, or Huffpo, or NYT, or a “gunner” forum.  A few examples:

    An AR-15 isn’t an assault weapon because it isn’t full-auto!  Yes, Virginia, it is an assault weapon.  If it makes you feel better to split hairs, sleep tight.  But the real deal is that a military-spec weapon designed to inflict maximum carnage is an assault weapon.  If you think it is the same thing as a 3-shot fixed mag hunting rifle, then why don’t law enforcement officials carry those to defend against AR-15s?

    The real problem is that we have a “mental health crisis”!  Tell me more!  Please hand over a list of dates where the NRA gave testimony on mental health issues to anyone, ever.  Who is their lead lobbyist on mental health issues?  Credentials?  Produce a single mention of “mental health crisis” from an NRA publication prior to 12/14/12.  I spent the past 12 years receiving American Rifleman, so please keep the photoshopped crap in your mom’s basement where you made it.

    The last assault weapons ban was a failure!  Really!  That is shocking since the NRA spent considerable funds and effort gutting it and ensuring that it would be toothless and counterproductive.

    And that is my “top 3” from the meta-spam crystal ball.  You might not believe it but I have a great deal of sympathy for gun owners and gun retailers.  The shift in attitudes on gun ownership is happening, and it will be accompanied by a shift in public policy.  Ever try to register an ATV for road use?  A Caterham?  How about a road-legal race car?  If you have, have you been able to insure it, as required by law?  See, you can drive an Ariel Atom, legally, but there are rules and a cost and some of those costs are dictated by accident data and actuarial tables.  That’s why you don’t just wobble on down to the Cessna dealer and take off in a small plane.  That’s why you see a lot of golden-agers driving supercars and M5-class sedans, but not so many 19 year-olds.  Regulation happens.  Cars.  Airplanes.  Alcohol.  Tobacco.  Firearms.  Explosives.

    Extra Credit: The focus of the NRA on the concept of a “ban” is a red herring.  A “ban” is a non-starter, but keeping the narrative on a “ban” means that bandwidth is being stolen from productive dialogue.  When you hear “ban” it might help to picture Wayne LaPierre with his fingers in his ears, shouting “NANANANANANA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!!!!!”

  • Why you should ignore Lance Armstrong

    There is a habit among many in the mainstream media, and an outright addiction in sports journalism: “pacing the story”

    If you go to the heart of the matter up front you undercut your ability to milk a story using incremental updates over a week or more, filling a lot of column inches or hours of talking-head TV and radio programming.  I hate that, which is one of many reasons I am a bad candidate for conventional journalism.

    So I’ll condense Lance-gate: The people who want to use the legal system to recover money from Lance can’t get their money if he is prevented from being Lance Armstrong, Inc.  So get off his back and let him earn a living, and then US Postal and the Times of London and all the other people whinging about how they were “taken” can find some meat on the bones if they win in court.  Otherwise they get symbolic victories, and no actual cash.

    Got it?  Good.  Now we can all avoid being taken for a ride on the Lance-coaster, and not have to watch him tightrope his way through his half-assed “confession” with Oprah.

    This whole Lance-charade is a personal-scale take on “too big to fail”.  Remember that if I owe you a few hundred dollars you might just have me whacked and cut your losses.  If I owe you a million(s) you are going to to put much more value on my continued well being.  Consider it “Citizens United” through the looking glass. Personal Corporate-hood.

    You can read all about it next week after the requisite media buffet-line has been satisfied.

  • Fuchsprellen follow-up and thoughts on 2012

    As luck wold have it we were jumped by a snow storm on December 26, resulting in a cancellation of the Fuchsprellen gig at Best Video in Hamden. The forecast called for aout an inch, maybe, and mostly rain, and we got half a foot of snow instead. That is typical of southern New England, where the rain/snow line can be fickle and turn a drizzle into a whiteout in short order. Good call by BV to shut the tig down. The roads were a complete mess.

    The rescheduled gig went down on January 3, but I am counting it as a 2012 event. Because I can. The folks at Best Video have done a super job of retooling one of the best video rental shops in the state into a video/cafe/performance venue, and the kicker is that their performance area sounds great. That has a lot to do with the baffle effect of the video racks and the false beams in the ceiling. Anyhow, thanks to Hank Hoffman for making it happen.

    The whole event provided a symmetrical closing to the year-that-was. The project that was to become Fuchsprellen kicked off in January with Peter Riccio and Me playing a duo set on a snowy night, when the gig should have been canceled, at Never Ending Books. We followed that up with a short run of gigs based on my sample/synth/guitar setup and Peter’s drum kit. That led to a run of shows and workshops with New Haven Improvisers Collective, which gave me some time to think about my own projects while still playing and performing. And that led to expanding the instrumentation, which allowed me to cut back on the scope of my live rig, and created space for additional voices. The culmination was was having Richard Brown sit in on sax, alongside Stephen Chillemi on various reeds and percussion (including vibraphone). My live rig? Animoog for iPad, with Moog Filtatron for iPhone, run though a Mackie mixer to the house PA. Delightfully minimalist. The results were beyond my expectations and I believe that the stage has been set for a noisy and productive 2013. I like it like that 🙂

    Coming Soon: Fuchsprellen clips on Soundcloud, and a Fuchsprellen EP on Bandcamp.

  • Music Update!

    Exclamation points aside, there is nothing really shocking going on with my tenuous grasp on vibrating air molecules.  Tonight I get to play another set with my “fuchsprellen” project.  That alone is good news.  If it is nothing else it is my way of saying that “music” is like “wine” or “food” in that the noun covers such a huge swath of material and experience that it becomes almost meaningless.  Do I like “music”?  Sure, except when I am hating it, or ambivalent about it, or using a lot of mental energy to filter out some sonic wallpaper.  Do I like “Jazz”? Uh, yeah, except that I find most of what passes for Jazz to be repulsive, or worse, boring.  And that isn’t just me… I think that model describes most people.  I might reflect on it more because I like engaging in the performance of music.

    I tend to categorize music by its level of organization.  In general, the greater the number of independent voices in a piece of music, the greater the level of organization.  On the maximum end of the organizational-axis: A symphony orchestra must work like a machine in order to produce a coherent “music”.  That requires a hierarchy of control from the composer, through the conductor, via music notation, backed up by a high degree of training by the individual musicians.   In between is a spectrum that merges varying elements of structure and freedom, though I feel that a Motown hit single requires no less perfect execution than Bach, or Mahler, or Ives for that matter.  On the minimal end we might find Cecil Taylor on a solo piano excursion… his own composer, his own conductor, his own orchestra, and existing in a universe of his own abilities.  Depending on your personal sensibilities you might see the first as a militaristic display of goose-stepping emotional dominance, and the latter as a solipsistic dancer in a field of flowers.  You might not.

    I have a greater affinity for the latter end of the spectrum, the freedom to create on the spot, and explore, and discover the music world anew with each performance.  That is not to say that I dismiss organization in music, or that I don’t want organization in free music.  The best free music has strong organization without strong preconception, open to surprise and invention.  In free music the surprise is a transitional element, like a fortune in a fortune cookie, but you build the fortune and the cookie in plain view, on the spot.  The analogies are all around us: The Novel vs. Free Verse; Shakespeare vs. Improv Comedy; and so on.

    Speaking of… I read the recent NYTimes piece on Jerry Seinfeld, and while it is not groundbreaking, I was struck by one passage in particular:

    When he can’t tinker, he grows anxious. “If I don’t do a set in two weeks, I feel it,” he said. “I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”

    And it made reading that massive and bloated piece of NYT celebrity fellatio worth the effort (for once).  Actually, fellatio is a bad analogy because the NYT piece goes on for eight pages and much of it is trivial and boring.  Maybe a romance novel for NYC social voyeurs…

    Once you get that pathway opened up it becomes necessary to feed and nurture it.  When that pathway begins to close it can be akin to withdrawal… you want to, need to, feed your habit.  You can make that bad feeling go away, and in most cases nobody gets their TV stolen and the chances of accidental OD are virtually nil.  Yet another reason I prefer music to drugs.

    So the plan for this evening is to engage in some “Lancer de Renard“, or maybe to”Lancer le Renard” and see where it lands.  There is a three-word directive behind this project: “Listen and Play”, and if it were a word graphic it would have LISTEN in 60 point type, and Play in lower case 8 point italics, well below.  I’ll be sure to report back, and there will be some audio links forthcoming.

  • Don’t blame the messenger

    I want to say this up front: I often find filmmaker Michael Moore to be a pain in the ass and I also find his opinions cringeworthy at times.  But he is also taking on issues that border on taboo and that can mean having to cringe occasionally.  If there were more like him we might be more open and less cringey about things.

    Here is a great example:  Celebrating the Prince of Peace in the Land of Guns

    I have been nibbling at these issues for a while, but Moore does a great job at bringing them into a cohesive narrative.  Small excerpt:

    I’m not saying it’s perfect anywhere else, but I have noticed, in my travels, that other civilized countries see a national benefit to taking care of each other. Free medical care, free or low-cost college, mental health help. And I wonder — why can’t we do that? I think it’s because in many other countries people see each other not as separate and alone but rather together, on the path of life, with each person existing as an integral part of the whole. And you help them when they’re in need, not punish them because they’ve had some misfortune or bad break. I have to believe one of the reasons gun murders in other countries are so rare is because there’s less of the lone wolf mentality amongst their citizens. Most are raised with a sense of connection, if not outright solidarity. And that makes it harder to kill one another.

  • Gun Control is a Process

    As the NRA responds to the murders in Newtown, Connecticut with a call for armed “good guys” in schools, it is important to shine as bright a light as possible on the linkage of government, lobbying organizations like the NRA, and gun manufacturing. There is no way to do all of that in one post, or with one voice on one tiny blog, but it needs to happen on a large scale if there is to be any change in American obsession with guns and tolerance for gun-related murder. A side-effect of the Newtown murders is the exposure of communities across the country that are ravaged by gun violence. Chicago is front and center, but there are many more in similar situations.

    As much as I applaud the calls for gun control, as they indicate a degree of concern and awareness, they represent a goal, not a policy. Gun control is the result of policy, and good policy requires good information. I see some glaringly obvious steps that need to be taken, and I hope to enumerate and expand on them in the upcoming weeks. Here is the first:

    Job #1 is: remove all barriers to BATFE gun-crime data collection, analysis and distribution.

    As it stands the BATFE is prohibited from using any money or resources to manage or distribute their data on gun crimes in the US. That includes location, gun mode and make, ammunition type, rounds fired, etc… All data that would allow the public, including policy makers, to assess the impact of these devices and how they might be regulated. It should be no surprise that groups like the NRA have put a lot of effort into restricting data that will make their arguments weak or plainly ridiculous. ANALOGY ALERT!!!!

    Once upon a time there was a company called Johns Manville that was heavily invested in the asbestos business. Exposure to their product caused premature death. JM knew this full well, but considered it Confidential Business Information. They altered their hiring practices to compensate for the high death and disability rate among their workers. Their clients, most prominently shipyard workers, followed suit. It took the exposure of internal memoranda, oroof that they knew they were killing their workers, for any meaningful action to occur. Instead of being shut down they were ordered to remain in business… the fiberglass business, and deal with the liability issues related to their product.

    In the case of guns, there is a major twist: It is the US Government, specifically Congress, that is keeping the public safety data out of public view. In a way, that is horrible. But it presents a golden opportunity for Congress to act unilaterally to reverse these policies. That is what the President and Congress can do in the next 90 days to move this process forward. The NRA can squawk all they want, but the reality is that if their position is as strong as they believe, then they have nothing to fear from the truth. It also puts elected officials in the position of having to defend a policy of keeping the public uninformed on a massive public health and safety crisis.

    Jobs 1a, 1b…. are to unify record keeping and reporting of firearms sale and transfer data at the state and/or county level and consolidate that data on a national level. This would also go for detailed manufacturing and import data on guns.

    One reason we have shitty public policy on guns is that we have shitty public data on guns. GIGO is the technical term.

    More soon. Here is a wish for a happy and peaceful holiday season.

    [I will backfill links later, or collect related links in a separate post]

  • Quick Note on CT Gun Law

    When I applied for a concealed carry permit in CT it was apparent that this wasn’t some rubber stamp process.

    • Town, State and Federal background checks with fingerprinting.
    • Three written reference letters.
    • NRA Safety Certificate.
    • Local and State review before approval.
    • 5-year review and renewal process

    For the reference letters I needed to involve friends and family in the process.  For the prints and background checks I needed to meet with my local police department.  In short, I went through everything involved in a major crimes arrest except for the arrest record, and had to deal with law enforcement in-person to get through that process.

    Note that in CT you do not need a carry permit to purchase a rifle or shotgun, though it does help out on the paperwork.  You do have to have your ID run though a background check database.  As long as you come up clean you can buy all you can afford.  So on one hand, Connecticut is a strict state from a Gun Control perspective.  On the other it is not a lot harder to purchase an AR-15 than it is to purchase a lawnmower.

    The only control over gun storage occurs “after the fact”.  In the case of the Newtown shootings Nancy Lanza might be in jail right now if she had not been murdered by her son, but there is no up-front control over storage of and access to guns.  No limits on quantity of ammunition.  As well, the limits on magazine capacity and ammunition type are only enforced ex post facto.  That is true across the nation.  Can we as a nation tolerate the intrusion necessary to separate gun control over ownership limits?  According to the NRA, the answer is no.  Maybe that is where the front line on this conversation might be best drawn.

     

  • The Third Way

    Front and center in the debate-storm over American Gun Policy is a standoff between variations on two polar opposite opinions:

    • Arm Everyone, as a deterrent to those with intent to do harm/crime
    • Disarm Everyone and remove the tools of these violent acts

    We can see this in action between Piers Morgan and Larry Pratt.

    On the first point you have a technological solution to the fear of victimization.  In the second you have a technological solution to the fear of perpetrators.  It is vastly more complex than that, but that is the bold heading that I see above each.

    There is one obvious problem with the “mo’ guns, less crime” argument, not counting the statistical reality that it does not work at all: It does nothing to address the psychological impact of surrounding very young children with armed “teachers”.  Much of the experience in formal education revolves around developing a working concept of authority and independence.  An armed teacher is symbolizing a very different kind of authority figure.  Full stop.  The argument also falls flat when looking at the reality of armed intervention by regular citizens (vigilantism).  For every successful deterrent there are many accidental shootings of friends and family, like the one in Oklahoma that happened on December 18.  I encourage anyone to stop using Google for “Asian Ass Porn” for just a minute and search for “accidental shooting“, and feel free to add your city or state.  The results are shocking.

    On the “less guns, less crime” side you have a very different set of issues.  First, there are a staggering number of assault weapons in the hands of Americans at this point in our history.  Sales of AR15-pattern rifles surged after the presidential election of 2008, and at each and every twitch of anti-gun sentiment since.  Freedom Group (parent company of Bushmaster) turned out more than 1-MILLION rifles (multiple makes) and sold 2-BILLION rounds of .223 ammo in the past 12 months.  That is one company of many.  I have personally witnessed the lines of gun buyers “getting theirs” before some threat of a “gun grab”.  The sales spike in AR15 weapons in the immediate aftermath of the Newtown shooting should stand as a monument to our priorities as a society.

    The second problem with technological solutions is that the human animal is an “apex” tool builder and tool user.  Time after time we are shocked by both highly technical solutions, and the highly crude but effective solutions, that mankind turns to when faced with a “problem”.  A “gun ban” is not as simple as some promoters of the approach would make it seem.  As well as some gun-ban approaches have worked in other countries like Australia and Japan, they didn’t have a 0.88 gun/capita ownership rate (which I believe is a low estimate in the US), and they didn’t have the NRA pushing a mantra with the words “cold dead hands” front and center.  As well, if you think the armed massacres we have endured are bad, wait until you have an endless stream of armed resistance faced by Federal agents.  If you think I am joking you would do well to get out of the house more often.  I’m not saying that restrictions won’t be effective, but I am saying that they won’t be easy and they have the potential of sizable blowback.

    Not to lay the whole debate on numbers, but this is widely accepted as accurate data.  I wish there was a better overlap of countries in the two graphs.  I will work on finding a better dataset and report back.

    firearm-OECD-UN-data3

    gun_ownership_rate

    So what about the “third way”?  The third way is to rearrange our priorities as a nation, with a greater focus on physical health, mental health, fiscal security, jobs, and overall wellness.  If you know anyone who has sought mental health treatment the odds are that they found very limited resources, long waits for treatment, and inadequate treatment once they made it in the door.  They also may have feared the social and professional stigma of having been treated for a mental illness.  If they ran the treatment gauntlet, they may have encountered a system heavily biased towards pharmacological intervention.  That may or may not have provided any kind of real relief.

    We also have issues with the role of simulated and glorified gun violence in our culture.  The lack of realistic depictions and a “reset button” mentality toward killing aside, the greater message is “eliminate, not negotiate”.   The widespread dispersion of this culture through television, cinema and video games makes it difficult to assess causation since it forms a kind of background noise.  Still, you would not be faulted for thinking that a generation with heavy exposure to first person shooter gameplay, and access to real assault weapons, might be on a playing field biased towards gun violence.

    Once again, we are in a nation with massive social and fiscal issues, and great damage inflicted as a result, and our socio-political system is proving to be too broken to move toward a solution.  I hope that the bigger issue of “emotional infrastructure” gets a fair hearing in the coming months.  I dare to dream, knowing that it is not much more than shadows of what could have been.

  • Gimme that old time religion…

    I’ll give you the link up front:

    Garry Wills at NY Review of Books drops some knowledge on us

    Very Required Reading, that.

    And speaking of required reading…

    big-books

    My own checkered religious past, not to mention my present, allows me to nod in agreement and soak Garry Wills’ analogy in with ease.  I was raised catholic, and made the mistake of actually reading the bible as a kid, and then attending four years of catholic high school.  I would have been better off and better received as a student if I had chose a path of shooting dope, or in the case of the current pope, being a nazi.  That kind of stuff is easily forgiven.  Reading the bible without close supervision on the other hand, is unforgivable.  Catholics hate nothing more than the complete text of their holy bible.  What they like are the 52 biblical sound-bites that make up their annual liturgy.  Everything else is marked with a huge “Here Be Dragons” sign.  The bulk of the bible is either contradicting their soundbites, or simply not to be trusted.  And if it is in the old testament, well, there is always the “other guys” wink, wink.  I know this firsthand because I faced a seemingly endless course of discipline for asking honest questions about the bible in a catholic high school.  It wasn’t completely in vain… I did, however, become adept at a catholic variation of the “jedi mind trick”.  Nuff Said.

    The past 60 hours or so have been a roller-coaster of tears, choked=back-tears, disbelief, gratitude, and reflection.  I have been through the gamut from crystalline rationalization to emotional white-out.  I don’t want to get any deeper into this subject for a while.  I am sure that there will be plenty of fodder for my snark-assault weapon of a blog in the weeks and months to come.  But the article above is the closest thing I have seen to scalar context.  The American Gun Control argument is a religious argument.  And in a country based on religious freedom, no matter how badly applied, the gun mob has leveraged that spirit as cover for their gun worship.

    As the world at large watches: please have mercy and pity on us because it is very likely that we as a nation will fuck this up very badly.  Kirk Out.