05-31-09 LA CA: 1318 hrs. At the office. I have been working on radio pre-tapes for the Saturdays I will be away in the next several weeks. I will go into the studio tomorrow and put down all the voice stuff and Engineer X will assemble it all later. There are a lot of new records out and so the shows will have a lot of cool stuff.
Last night’s radio show was fun but as always, went too fast for me. It’s overcast in Los Angeles today, strange but not bad. I was hoping for some sun though. My dryer is broke so I hang wet laundry all over the place and wait for the sun to dry it but it looks like I’ll have to wait. I have bee listening to music all morning. I started with Throats Filled With Concrete by Wolf Eyes and am now listening to Cluster ’71. I had the music going in here until the early hours this morning before sleep wore me down.
I guess it’s a combination of events in the news and my current reading material but I have been thinking a lot about torture, or enhanced interrogation if you will. Ex vice president Dick Cheney has been making the rounds on television, defending the Bush administration’s use of these techniques, his daughter has been on television as well, sticking up for her father. Jesse Ventura has been making the rounds as well. He was a Navy SEAL and was water boarded in SERE training and insists the method is torture. Mancow, the conservative talk show host, was actually water boarded and after six seconds, he had enough and admitted that it was torture, even though it pained him to do so. I finished Charlie Savage’s book Takeover, which I found to be fascinating, and immediately picked up Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by Philippe Sands, which I am finding hard to put down. Tough material but well rendered. The aspect of all this that really catches me up is what all this is doing to the collective psyche of those aware and concerned of what was done to the detainees. There are a lot of strong opinions about all of this flying around. It’s not necessarily the actual opinions that interest me as much as what they say about the one who holds them. It is interesting to me that those who interrogate for a living and those who actually go out and fight wars seem to have almost perfectly opposite opinions as to the benefits of enhanced interrogation techniques as a method of getting actionable intelligence as the ones who gave the orders to administer the methods. Boy, that sentence ran on, didn’t it? I wonder if the torture debate won’t have more lasting damage than the September 11 attacks.
Like many of you, I am a book fanatic, want to read all the time. I have been taking breaks from Torture Team and re-reading Open Up And Bleed by Paul Trynka. It’s about Iggy Pop. What a life! I had forgotten what a connection Iggy had to Los Angeles and how much he spent here in the 1970’s. Reading the book again made me pull out all those 80’s Iggy records and listen to them again differently. I have not heard his new one, Preliminaires, it comes out Tuesday. Engineer X already has a copy of course and says he really likes it. I have only heard one song and thought it was ok. The album gives me an excuse to go to the record store, oh, twist my arm! Apparently, the songs for the album were inspired in part by Iggy reading the work of Michel Houellebecq. I read a couple of his books years ago and they blew my mind. Platform and Atomised were the ones I have read so far and they were excellent, some of the best modern fiction I have ever read.
Last night, I read that president Obama will be giving a speech in Egypt next week. I am looking forward to hearing this one. I want to hear what he has to say the Muslim world and am so glad that Bush didn’t try to do anything like that before he left office as I think it would have only made things more tense. I don’t know what day Obama is delivering the speech but I will be watching for it.
I have shows coming up this weekend.
05 Friday: Montclair NJ @ The Wellmont Theater 8 pm stage time
06 Saturday: Hartford CT @ The Webster Theater 8 pm stage time
07 Sunday: Wilmington DE @ The Grand Opera House 7 pm stage time
It will be good to get out of LA and be back on the road again, even if it is only for a few days. It’s been great to have these weekend shows now and then. I don’t believe I have done a show in Delaware before, looking forward to it. See you at the show!
Thanks for reading this. Henry