From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V4 #62 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Monday, March 1 2004 Volume 04 : Number 062 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [loud-fans] Re: loud-fans-digest V4 #61 ["Vallor" ] RE: [loud-fans] Here They Come ["Angela Bennett & Ian Runeckles" Subject: [loud-fans] Re: loud-fans-digest V4 #61 > Well, since it's been brought up here, I might as well add LoudFans to the > people who are being asked this. (Replies offlist, of course). I know a lesbian > who's very eager to marry her female partner. Also, she's anxious to marry her > male slave, and is hoping that current events will allow her to fulfill her > dream of doing both. This is no hypothetical slippery slope. This is an > educated, professional woman who's anxiously following the court rulings in > California. Personally, given those same current events, I can't explain to her why she > shouldn't expect to be able to fulfill her vision of a loving marriage. I've > talked to some fairly prominent gays in the movement, and they've all dodged > the question. Typically, they just joke about how she should move to Utah. > Anyway, I'm certainly interested in hearing how supporters of gay marriage would > explain to this woman that she shouldn't be allowed to be married as she sees > fit...if, in fact, anyone thinks so. (And, please, no comments based on how a > slave can't be an equal partner. That'll just prompt long, droning discussions > about the Submissive's Bill of Rights.) It's easy. Marry the partner, adopt the slave = happy family ! > I'm just trying to find a decent explanation for why this woman can't get > married in the way that refleccts how she's chosen to love. It seems a little > strange to bring up concerns about business partners (or entire firms!) rushing > to get married for whatever reasons. I've never even heard that brought up in > terms of a slippery slope. And just how judgmental is it for the courts to say > that more than two people shouldn't be allowed to form one married unit? It seems like a metaphorical "friend" here is seemingly presented to blast holes in the logic of allowing same sex marriage. If this is the case and you choose to define a man and a woman as the definition of a legal marriage simply because the way they "choose to love" fulfills the "appropriate" anotomical connections, then I can tell you of a few people I've met who've ended up married to someone of the opposite sex who "chooses to love" simply by controlling and beating them. That America has always had more room for that definition of marriage that one between a gay couple is dishearetining. This issue is not the post-modern deconstruction of the definition of marriage, it's simply recognition that the fundamental definition of marriage as two people bonding with romantic love doesn't mean they have to be a man and a woman. Prove to me that a man and a man or a woman and a woman can't possibly love each other in a romantic way and then I'll accept what ever wild deconstructions you can think of. Besides, you're a conservative, you're supposed to fight for less government and that's should be the ideological end of it. Offlist is boring- Dan ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:00:49 -0000 From: "Angela Bennett & Ian Runeckles" Subject: RE: [loud-fans] Here They Come Bradley wrote: > I'm starting to get used to the fact that most of the cool > band reunions are happening over in England where I don't get > to see them (House of Love, Dexy's Midnight Runners). News > that The La's (or, at least, Mavers and Powers) have gotten > back together is the most exciting yet, though. Maybe I > should start saving for plane tickets! Yeah, the Long Ryders are touring the UK shortly too. How about a Loud Family reunion over here? Speaking of whom, culled this from audities... St. Louis' pre-eminent expert on pop music tries his hand at a new venture BY RENi SPENCER SALLER From the Week of Wednesday, January 1, 2003 Every new year, music junkies -- a reassuringly predictable lot -- start sniffing around for the next big thing, the fresh new sound, the name to drop when positioning themselves as up-to-the-minute, down-with-the-scene crazy-future individuals. "Dude, glitchcore was, like, so last year," they loudly proclaim to one another while standing in line at the record store, hoping against hope that the hot girl in the Kid 606 T-shirt will notice them. "Neorevisionist deconstructed Slovenian two-step -- that's pretty much all I'm feelin' these days." (Glance casually at Hot Girl, who's sure to be intrigued by such fascinating against-the-graininess. Nope, she's still reading Magnet -- damn her!) Fortunately for these forward-thinking, futurecentric fans, crit-geeks get off on inventing subgenres and microscenes. Magazines sell this bullshit to identity-challenged junior consumers, until eventually a character on Dawson's Creek mentions it or something, and then it's time for the who! le nauseating cycle to start up again. Other music fans look to the past for inspiration and couldn't care less whether they're ahead of the curve. In this category is Jordan Oakes, who's arguably St. Louis' most devoted and knowledgeable power-pop scholar. Wondering what the last Shoes album sounded like? Jonesing for a good long rant about the relative merits of Badfinger and the Raspberries? If the names Let's Active, the Bongos, the dBs and the Grays mean anything to you, you probably already know who Jordan Oakes is. In the mid-'80s, when we first made his acquaintance, he was into making mix tapes: Radar Station owes him big for turning us on to Big Star and Game Theory, and surely we weren't the sole beneficiary of his sonic largesse. In any case, Oakes wasn't content to merely shape the tastes of impressionable teenage girls from Webster Groves. He went on to publish an internationally distributed fanzine, Yellow Pills; mastermind several great Yellow Pills compilations; pose for pictures with worshipful ! Japanese strangers; and, most recently, start his own label, Yellow Pills Incorporated. ("Yellow Pills," by the way, is the title of a 20/20 song -- but if you're still reading, you probably already knew that.) The first Yellow Pills release is actually a reissue of the 1982 debut of an obscure Miami trio called the Wind, who fell desperately in love with the first two Beatles albums and took it from there. A member of the band ran into Rolling Stone critic Kurt Loder in an elevator and gave him a copy of the Wind's self-released, totally mono record. After Loder did a nice write-up, in which he compared the Wind to Big Star, Oakes, along with approximately 8,000 others, bought a copy of the LP. Now, some twenty years later, Oakes is reissuing Where It's at With the Wind, along with bonus tracks taken from the less successful, Mitch Easter-produced follow-up. We caught up with Oakes recently at Yellow Pills world headquarters, a small South City walkup that also serves as home to Oakes, approximately 6,000 records and three adorable mutts. "I want to find albums that are worth putting out that no one else is putting out," Oakes explains. "I don't want to be predictable." For years, Oakes had an outlet for his music-missionary inclinations. He chose the artists and songs for all the Yellow Pills comps; he came up with the track order and wrote the liner notes. But Big Deal, the label that commissioned his services and licensed his fanzine's name, went kaput a couple of years ago, leaving some ruffled feathers and unpaid royalty checks. "I felt bad," he says. "That's one mistake I don't want to make -- I don't want to be a record-label jerk." Right now, Oakes -- who freely admits he's not the world's most organized guy -- is trying his damnedest to learn the business on the fly. After a nine-month struggle with an incompetent manufacturer, he's finally got 1,000 copies of the CD, which he's selling by mail order and on consignment at local record stores. With any luck, he'll move them all by the end of the decade and press up another batch. Oakes, who currently ekes out a living thanks to eBay, isn't laboring under the impression that he's gon! na be the Irv Gotti of underground pop. "When you think about it, no one ever makes it big in power-pop," he says with a soft chuckle. "My favorite, almost my ideal, is Scott Miller [of Game Theory and the Loud Family] -- even to call him power-pop is wrong because he's kinda beyond that. He has a cult following, yeah, but even with him, all his albums are out of print. That doesn't bode well for anybody. And in terms of fame, the Wind makes the dBs look like the Beatles." Ian ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:55:13 -0000 From: "RichardBlatherwick" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Here They Come > Yeah, the Long Ryders are touring the UK shortly too. How shortly is this? I can't find any mention of it among my usual sources, including Sid Griffin's own web site. Richard ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 11:08:28 -0500 From: glenn mcdonald Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Good news for some... heck, for all! Morally speaking, it seems pretty clear and simple to me that informed and consenting adults ought to be free to enter into any social contracts they desire. For practical reasons, a society may be well-advised to add a few rules to this ideal equation to protect disadvantaged people from "voluntarily" giving up freedoms under some kind of pressure, but that's a small caveat. And in the abstract, these contracts can cover whatever they can conceivably be devised to describe. A contract between two people can say that if one of them dies, the other gets their stuff. So can a contract between three people, or 25,000. Likewise about child custody, likewise about consent to make decisions for another signatory when they are incapacitated, etc. These contracts get trickier if an individual wants to enter into ones with overlapping implications, but that's a logistical issue, not a moral one. Property can be divided fractionally somewhat more easily than children, for example. In theory, a government could stick to establishing the framework and safeguards for the social contract system, and arbitrating disputes within it. In practice, it's somewhat helpful for the government to define a few of the standard types of social contracts, so that they don't have to be reinvented from scratch by every new set of participants, and so that non-signatories don't have to decipher the complete unique social-contract context of every individual they have to deal with. So this is a practical justification for taking a particular set of social contracts, encoding them into laws, and giving the whole thing a name. Like "marriage". Defining what gender-configurations can enter into social contracts has no moral *or* practical justification in a society where "moral" is secularly defined. Same-sex marriages are civilly and logistically equivalent to interracial marriages, which are civilly and logistically equivalent to every other kind of two-person marriage, and I'm confident that we will live to see gender restrictions eliminated from the marriage laws for this reason, over the objections of people whose personal moral codes differ from the ones on which we've agreed to operate our society. Any law that grants specific rights to "husbands" or "wives", as opposed simply to "spouses", is already obsolete and immoral, so no up-to-date laws about the civil administration of marriage should need to be changed. Marriages of more than two people are morally straightforward, but practically more difficult. The key legal simplication would be saying that marriage is transitive in the mathematic sense. That is, you can be married to as many people as you want, but only if they are all married to each other, and you're married to everybody anybody you're married to is married to, etc. Which is to say, also, that an individual can be involved in zero marriages or one. This, it seems to me, both establishes the moral principle of shared lives (not that "shared lives" has to be the moral principle, but I think it gets at the soul of the idea of marraige), and reduces the logistical problem to going through the current marriage laws and fixing the places where they have hard-coded the assumption that the number of spouses is two. That seems perfectly doable. So no, I don't see any reason why JRT's three friends shouldn't be able to marry if they want. I don't see any reason why fundamentalist Mormons shouldn't be able to marry the way they want. I don't see any reason why 25,000 people who decide to believe in communalism on a town-scale shouldn't be able to marry in one big group. The political process for getting to *this* will, as Aaron says, be much less straightforward than the one to allow same-sex marriages. That is, it's definitely a slope, and moral gravity is definitely pulling us down it, but this particular slope is precisely the opposite of slippery. glenn ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:31:31 -0500 From: Dave Walker Subject: Re: [loud-fans] the man in the grey vinyl lawsuit On Feb 28, 2004, at 9:44 PM, Fortissimo wrote: > One more note on the Grey Album thing: it seems that no one ever > actually > asked permission of EMI or anyone else to use the Beatles material. > While > precedent suggests the answer would have been "no," and the argument I > mentioned earlier does suggest that, legally, EMI at least has no > particular rights to it, I kind of wish someone had asked...if only so > they could definitely say that "no" was the real answer, not just the > hypothetical one. I saw an interview with DJ Dangermouse on TechTV. He says he wasn't selling copies, but that he burned a few dozen CDs for friends and fellow denizens of the bootleg/mashup scene. The CDR he was holding during the interview had a plain grey cover (sans the pretty cool artwork that was embedded in the MP3s I got) and a "for promotional use only" tag. Interestingly, he's gotten no Cease & Desist static from Jay-Z's label at all, but then, you have to assume that they expected that, by releasing a-capellas of the Black Album that samples from it would be turning up everywhere. (besides, there's a long tradition in hip-hop and underground dance circles of people doing white labels and promo-only remixes based on artist released loops and a-capellas) It could be argued that what we're seeing here is just another culture clash between the traditional pop approach to creation and the "sample it loop it fuck it and eat it" culture of DJ friendly music. http://www.discogs.com/release/3368 http://www.discogs.com/release/52139 http://tinyurl.com/2h8ta -d.w. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:50:16 -0000 From: "Angela Bennett & Ian Runeckles" Subject: RE: [loud-fans] Here They Come From Tom Steven's posting to paisley pop list: "Thought I'd let all of you know - the cat's out of the bag. Looking at Greg Sowders' e-mail from Tuesday, remembering our phone conversation and now Sid's website confirms: "A Long Ryders tour of Europe, their first gigs in seventeen years, is scheduled for June 25 to July 11." First date is tentatively Glastonbury, followed by dates in the UK, Spain and possibly Amsterdam. Griffin, McCarthy, Sowders and me, hitting the road again. More as I know it." It's on the home page at the end of the intro blurb on http://www.sidgriffin.com/ Ian > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-loud-fans@smoe.org > [mailto:owner-loud-fans@smoe.org] On Behalf Of RichardBlatherwick > Sent: 29 February 2004 12:55 > To: loud-fans@smoe.org > Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Here They Come > > > > Yeah, the Long Ryders are touring the UK shortly too. > > How shortly is this? I can't find any mention of it among my > usual sources, including Sid Griffin's own web site. > > Richard ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 15:55:28 EST From: JRT456@aol.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Re: loud-fans-digest V4 #61 In a message dated 2/29/04 5:24:26 AM, vallor@comcast.net writes: > It seems like a metaphorical "friend" here is seemingly presented to blast > holes in the logic of allowing same sex marriage. > My metaphorical friend is real enough to have already heard plenty of patronizing comments about adopting a grown man. Thanks for adding to them, though. However, I'll spare her the joy of hearing that she's a "wild deconstruction." ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:13:14 -0800 From: "Bradley Skaught" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Re: loud-fans-digest V4 #61 And to think I was going to stay out of it! > My metaphorical friend is real enough to have already > heard plenty of > patronizing comments about adopting a grown man. > Thanks for adding to them, though. > However, I'll spare her the joy of hearing that she's a > "wild deconstruction." I think she should get used to it. I'm alway baffled that some people who enjoy and incorporate S&M (and related practices) into their lives feel the need to pursue some kind of legal and social acceptance/recocgnition of those practices. There may, perhaps, come a time when that community becomes enough of a vocal, public presence that legal issues concerning their practices will, indeed, become pressing public issues. But they sure aren't now! I feel like the massive controversy over gay marriage hasn't come about because of an increase in heated opposition to it, but because gay culture has reached such a degree of public influence and acceptance that its very proximity to "mainstream" culture necessitates the kind of grand scale self-analysis we're going through. Isn't that basically where all real social change comes from? When something becomes an important issue to most everyone, it's ready to be put to the test? The "friend" is partaking of a lifestyle that's allowed and perfectly acceptable according to my perimiters of acceptable behavior, but she is so completely off the chart of behaviour the general public is willing, or even interested in dealing with that her right to marry in the way she'd like isn't particularily relevant. I'm fairly certain her community has neither the numbers, the benefit of a socially visible and explosive presence, or even, frankly, the will to do anything about it. Which is partly why I think JRT made this manipulative and transparent story up. If she is real, however, I would recommend diligent community building, patience and a willingness to band together with others of her lifestyle to campaign for their rights. And accept that her time may never come. And know that S&M can't possibly be as much fun if it's legally sanctioned and publically acceptable. I mean, what's the point then? And I think she should also maybe accept that society might never say anything but "yuck" and ignore her plea forever. Okay, now i'm going to stay out of it! love, B ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 00:38:04 EST From: JRT456@aol.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Re: loud-fans-digest V4 #61 In a message dated 2/29/04 9:16:54 PM, treesprite@earthlink.net writes: > Which is partly why I think JRT made this manipulative and transparent > story > up. > Well, Queen Victoria, that's certainly a simple way to deal with a situation that's really not that unique amongst her social circles. Sorry to bring up a matter that's not an important issue to you, though. I'm sure she (and many others) feel really bad to bother you with their having the nerve to try and live their lives as they see fit. ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V4 #62 ******************************