Warning, this is long. If you only have the tolerance to read 140 characters or less you may want to skip to the end where you will find the TL;DR.
In the interest of self improvement I recently decided to take a digital photography course. For the last ten weeks I have been learning the ins-and-outs of digital photography. While I have always had an interest in photography and picture taking I wanted to learn more about using a camera. More specifically I have wanted to make the jump from shooting on iAuto mode to shooting in the ever intimidating Manual mode. Just a few short weeks into the class, I was already more comfortable with shooting in Manual mode, so much so that my camera is never on any other setting, ever.
What are you taking a picture of there?
One of the fun aspects of the course has been shooting weekly assignments. Every week the instructor would give assignments and each of the students were left to their own devices to fulfill the requirements. First assignment, we shot flowers. The flower assignment was easy enough. How could it be difficult, shoot some flowers and share them with the class. Next up, portraits. Again, cake assignment. Snap some pictures of people’s faces. Boom, boom, boom. Done. After finishing up the first few weeks of the course I felt pretty confident in my abilities as an amateur photog. Give me a concept to shoot and I am creative enough to come up with something that will both fulfill the assignment and give it a certain flair to make it my own.
All was well as I made my way through the course work and then came the ‘Urban/Landscape’ assignment. Undaunted by the challenge I set out to capture some images that consisted of my take on ‘Urban/Landscape.’ How difficult do you think it could be? Shoot some pictures of buildings, water fountains, city parks and the homework is done. Right?
In a world where, on the day when parts of the internet went dark to protest potential government censorship, Rob Lowe of all people tweeted the “scoop” that Peyton Manning is retiring (he’s not) and Mark Wahlberg claimed he would have prevented 9/11 (he didn’t), it’s not too silly for me to look way too far into the new Bruce Springsteen song that suddenly dropped at midnight.
In the music community, Bruce Springsteen is the stuff of rock legend: he’s certainly one of the greatest live acts of all time and among the most respected American songwriters south of Bob Dylan. But culturally, like his hero Dylan, Bruce has essentially become a political football.
Somewhere along the line, perhaps tiring of being punted back and forth, Bruce jumped off the sidelines (where he’d watched his song “Born in the USA” get co-opted as a patriotic anthem by Ronald Reagan and others) and jumped into the game by campaigning for John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.
By early 2009, the guy who once used to shun any specific political affiliation and refuse TV appearances was now at the Presidential Inauguration and then the Super Bowl singing his latest jingle/anthem, “Working on a Dream.” That was an optimistic time, and the song was a hollow attempt to bring us all together for some kumba-ya call to roll up our sleeves and fix all that had broken in the Bush years. There was even some whistling in the song. Whistling.
Anyway, I didn’t like the song and thought the album was one of Springsteen’s worst ever. I’m a Bruce fanatic, but I’m not a total homer.
So now Bruce is coming back with what’s being described as his “angriest” album in a long time. Guess he woke up from that dream. The new single “We Take Care of Our Own,” is from the forthcoming March release Wrecking Ball. The title track was originally written to mark the closing of the old Giants Stadium in New Jersey, but the title fits as a symbol of destruction for an album that we’re told addresses the current economic strife. The cover art, with Bruce and his signature Fender guitar behind the scrawled lettering of the title, evokes a “This Machine Kills Fascists” vibe, perhaps a nod to his other hero Woody Guthrie.
On first listen, “We Take Care of Our Own” chugs its way down E Street like most catchy Bruce songs. On the surface, it sounds like just a trite anthem: “Wherever this flag is flown,” he dares to sing as an echo to the “We take care of our own” refrain. The guy has been misunderstood as a jingoistic flag-waver for the last 25 years and now he’s gonna literally fly a flag right there in the hook of his new hit single? Really?
Ah, we forget (and some don’t realize) how sly Bruce can be. He knows his songs will be scrutinized and examined through a sociopolitical lens, and possibly co-opted yet again in an election year. So while the title and the flag imagery sound like a rah-rah yay America platitudes about how awesome we are…. Listen closely and you’ll hear the everyman rocker bearing witness to every man for himself; really wondering why we don’t actually take care of our own. And the only ones doing so are the politicians and the corporations that own them. They’re certainly taking care of their own (each other) while the rest of us are left to whistle while we work on a dream.
On 1980’s The River, Bruce asked “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?” Well 2012 Bruce isn’t quite ready to overtly call out President Obama as a liar (at least on this track), but he does sing “I’ve been stumbling on good hearts turned to stone, those good intentions have gone dry as a bone” in the first verse.
The track starts with pounding drums and high-pitched guitar noise. Compared to the safe pop/schlock of “Working on a Dream,” this sounds like battle drums and sirens. As it settles into that first verse, there’s a subtle percussion shuffling akin to a Simon & Garfunkel track almost buried in the mix. Once the song kicks in and the guitars get a little heavier, Bruce knifes through America, not the right or left, but slicing right down the center: “From Chicago to New Orleans/From the muscle to the bone.”
The very next lines get specific, as he reminds us “From the shotgun shack to the Superdome, we needed help but the cavalry stayed home.” He’s invoking Katrina, 2005, but the next line updates the message and generalizes it to apply to our tone-deaf politicians who only take care of themselves and the special interests who pay their way into office while the economic storm floods us all out of our homes: “There aint no one hearing the bugle blowin’.”
A generation ago, Springsteen followed the optimism of “pulling out of here to win” in “Thunder Road” by writing a gloomy response called “The Promise” (and what happens when it’s broken). This time he follows the hope of “Working on a Dream” with a line that repeats “Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?” The everyman rocker winces at every man for himself. Again he toys with patriotic language to essentially ask “What the fuck happened to the American dream? Where’s the promise?” Just like he used the pride of chanting “Born in the USA” to wonder why people who were born here and fought in Vietnam were abandoned upon their return.
That’s what I mean about Bruce being sly. He’s dressing up this new song with lines like “wherever this flag is flown” and “sea to shining sea,” this time knowing and expecting that it will be misunderstood. And if/when some politician tries to play this at a rally or make this anthem their own, they’ll end up admitting the obvious: “We Take Care of Our Own.”
Musically, this is classic (even if somewhat generic) Springsteen from the standpoint of the piano/glockenspiel sound tinkling atop the pulsing guitars and drums. It’s got a bounce not unlike “Badlands” and “The Rising,” but with the late Clarence Clemons’ saxophone noticeably absent.
If you don’t like Bruce Springsteen, there’s plenty here not to like: the usual Bruce-isms like the la-la’s in the outro tailor-made to be echoed in concert arenas, the aforementioned flag imagery and faux patriotism, and that rich-man-in-a-poor-mans-shirt shtick he’s been riding for most of his career. But for Bruce fans from the fanatic to the casual, it’s a welcome return to respectability and perhaps a sign that he might have one more great album left in him.
I rarely wax poetic about politics on Bums Logic but for an instance as grand as the news today I will make an exception.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell died today. That is a good thing.
The biggest example of why this is a good thing: Imagine being gay and your partner is serving in combat operations oversees when the unthinkable happens and they are killed in action. Under the old rules you would never be officially notified. Ever.
If you oppose the ban being overturned, think about that for a while.
We’re proud to announce and welcome you to BUMS LOGIC, a new online-magazine styled blog, mostly about music, featuring original articles by Steve (Jaded Bitterman), Todd (Todd.Levinson.Frank), Victor (Jr. Worthy), Bill (Lennsakata), Bear, Mike-Eddy, and other special guests. This loose collective has been collaborating on music, film, writing, art, and brewing on and off (we try to always be on) for the last 20 years, and now we plan to throw it all in a digital blender for public viewing.
The concept isn’t necessarily to have all the latest links to news, performances, or downloads, or blurbs about blurbs. Our hope is that it will be a place to read some (hopefully) thought-provoking stuff about music, film, sports, television, politics, books, art, technology, and culture. Maybe we’ll have a few laughs and maybe you’ll write for us someday too.
We call it a magazine, mostly as a nod to the not-too-distant past when we held stuff in our hands, not just the magazines, but the albums and tapes and CD’s they wrote about. While still essentially a blog (and BUMS LOGIC is an anagram for “music blog”), we’ll try to write our own jokes and do our own stunts.
Please visit us today, check out what we have going so far, and bookmark the site so you can check back in. Also, we’d be eternally grateful if you share our link on facebook, twitter, and wherever else you share cool webstuff. In return, we’ll try our best to be cool webstuff.
I have a 5-comment theory on political internet chatter. The theory goes that (once commenters start a post-article dialogue) somewhere after the first to the fifth comment, the line of argument will either have gone completely off-course or will have devolved into pure id-driven rage or eroticism.
The latter usually happens when commenters can remain anonymous. The former just usually happens.
So, I say, why bother? You won’t convince someone to change their core beliefs in an online conversation. So, all you can do is give them the information that you think is important and let them absorb it over time. Eventually, even if you were the catalyst, they will convince themselves over time that this is their own idea or belief and consistent with their past thoughts. And they will also be convinced that any change was completely self-driven and rational, given a propensity of evidence to which they’ve been exposed.
Here is a network analytic picture of the right/left blogosphere and their connections (via links) to other political sights. As you see, there really isn’t a lot of cross-polination going on, or an open debate of ideas. We are all “guilty” of this phenomenon. Daily Kos and Salon are not exactly tapping ideas from Reason or Commentary magazines.
We aren’t apt to expose ourselves to information that counters the causal theories of our core moral attitudes and beliefs. And if we do, we need a propensity of evidence and gentle prodding to recognize the validity of it.
I don’t propose an end to debate, of course. What I propose is that everyone stop taking their side so seriously without being prepared to defend their arguments in a formally structured debate format.
BUMS LOGIC 