Silent All These Years (live, 1991)
Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1991)
Silent All These Years (music video, 1992)
Silent All These Years (TV performance. 1992)
Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1994)
Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1996)
Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1997)
Silent All These Years (live, 1997)
Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1998)
Silent All These Years (TV performance, 2003)
Silent All These Years (live, 2005 official bootleg)
Silent All These Years (radio performance, 2007)
Silent All These Years (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori set)
Silent All These Years (radio performance, 2014)
Silent All These Years (TV performance, 2017)
In many ways, it is Amos’s signature song. It’s not her biggest hit but it’s the song one turns to in order to encapsulate her. It was the one picked for rerelease as a single to benefit RAINN in 1997, the one she’s played on scads of TV and radio performances across her career, and the one picked as the leading single for the album in both the US and UK (even if the first UK release was titled “Me and a Gun ...
Sweet Dreams (official bootleg, 2007, Isabel set)
A political song (973.928—History of North America:Politics of Illusion, according to Tales of a Librarian), but let’s immediately be cautious of treating that as a way of distinguishing it from other songs we’ve talked about, as if “Crucify,” “Leather,” or “Silent All These Years” are not also political. The more accurate assessment is that “Sweet Dreams” is a song that is overtly about electoral politics, with a second verse that makes overt reference to George Bush’s “thousand points of light” speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention.
For the most part, there is something vaguely unsatisfying about this sort of thing. It’s not that there aren’t good songs about electoral politics in pop music. But it’s a routine quagmire in which artists turn out badly over-earnest and strident songs about how bad the President is. The problem is not that Amos is wrong that George Bush is “a constipated man” whose friends “got the earth in a sling / the world on her knees / they even got [his] zipper between their ...
Mother (live, 2005, official bootleg)
Mother (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori Set)
“Mother” unfolds with strange formality, opening with a minute-long instrumental prelude in Cm before the song proper begins in Gb. (The official sheet music omits this entirely, beginning at the start of the main piano line.) It’s scarcely the only time Amos will use an approach like this—she’ll use the same trick next album on “Icicle,”for instance. But it grounds the song more in Amos’s classical training than anything else on Little Earthquakes, giving the song a strange and almost ritualistic feel when compared to anything around it.
This fits the strange confrontation within it. “Mother” is structured around a relationship of authority—it opens in the imperative: “go, go, go, go now / out of the nest it’s time,” and with instructions to “tuck those ribbons under / your helmet be a good soldier.” But Amos is in no way content to play the submissive underling. The song’s narrative voice bleeds from mother to daughter, shifting midway through the first verse. And the daughter is far from compliant, keeping secrets and plotting her escape. ...
Calder's Room
Thomas Calder, a lieutenant in the 1st Surreys, was sent back to England in autumn 1917 after being injured during the Battle of the Somme. He spent a week or so in a conventional military hospital in France, but his wounds were primarily psychic rather than physical, so he was sent back to England, and to Sandilands.
Sandilands had by that time come under the directorship of Dr. K. J. Ravichandra. Ravichandra was marked out by his universally acknowledged skill, and by his advanced and humane ideas. Before his advent, Sandilands had effectively been a torture chamber for men who were considered weak and cowardly, in need of being shocked or bullied back to obedience. Whatever our modern opinion of Ravichandra’s approach, there can be little doubt that his informal and conversational style represented an improvement on treatment through freezing cold water, or electric shock, or cigarette burn. The men who came under Ravichandra’s care at Sandilands - an Elizabethan manor in East Anglia, bought by the government and converted for use as an Army psychiatric hospital - generally showed great improvement. Calder turned out to be something of an exception.
One ...
Leather (official bootleg, 2005)
Leather (TV performance, 2005)
Leather (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)
Leather (live w/orchestra, 2012)
The confessional mode of songwriting is full of pitfalls for a critic, and “Leather” offers us opportunities to topple into all of them. The song creates as aggressive an intimacy as is possible: “Look I’m standing naked before you,” it opens, immediately making its singer vulnerable with regards to the listener. From there we plunge into debasement: “don’t you want more than my sex? / I can scream as loud as your last one / but I can’t claim innocence.” There is an immediate sense of knowing more than we should—a feeling that we’ve been brought into a space we do not belong.
It’s a trick, of course. To state the obvious, Amos is not standing naked before us. The line is a sly game of medium. “Look,” Amos proclaims in an entirely auditory form. “I’m standing,” she says on a recording that was already two years old when it was released to the public. “Naked before you,” she declares from a ...
This week, we look at a bit more Nazi infighting, and talk a little bit about some reactions we've had...
Content Warning.
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Show Notes:
"This Podcaster Dug Into the World of Neo-Nazis. Now They've Put a Target on His Back." https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-dont-speak-german-podcaster-daniel-herman-exposed-neo-nazis-now-he-has-a-target-on-his-back
"In early September, Harper and his co-host released a pair of episodes that focused on the adherents of an obscure neo-Nazi author named James Mason. A book Mason wrote has become a bible of sorts for terroristic neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen Division, and it has helped spawn a new wave of so-called accelerationists—people who believe societal collapse is the quickest way to create an all-white ethnostate.
Many of those adherents flocked to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, in recent months after getting booted from other social media platforms. And they’ve created their own enclave there, which they refer to as “Terrorgram.”
It was there, in the Terrorgram community, that the threats against Harper took shape.
On Sept. 11, an anonymous post appeared on one of the Terrorgram channels, telling people to send Harper “fan mail” at his address in Michigan.
The following day, the same channel published a video ...
Boys in Their Dresses will be around later this week. For now... something new. You may find yourself wanting a link to my Patreon for this...
A critic once, in a moment of naiveté that hovers between sweet and pathetic, once asserted that "as long as there are stories, there are Doctor Who stories. When the stars go out and the universe freezes, around the last fire on the last world, there will still be Doctor Who stories to tell. And when we are done telling them, at long and final last, in the distance will be a strange wheezing, groaning sound. And out will step an impossible man, and he will save the day." Perhaps it's true that Doctor Who will last until the end of stories, but the reality is that this threshold is very likely a couple of decades away, and will happen right here on this planet as manmade climate change triggers a civilizational apocalypse. In which case there's really not a lot that an imperial adventure hero with a busted-up time machine is going to do for us.
Nevertheless, Doctor Who provides a fascinating record of the fall. The 20th century, particularly the ...
Daniel updates Jack on the latest round of infighting among the fascists.
Content Warning
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Show Notes:
Southern Dingo, "I Don't Speak Bitch," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHdv8JsbhQM
ABC News: "FBI arrests Army soldier who allegedly discussed plans to bomb major American news network" https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fbi-arrests-army-soldier-allegedly-discussed-plans-bomb/story?id=65802902
Jarrett Smith indictment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6431405-Jarrett-William-Smith-indictment-September-2019.html
Christopher Cantwell, "Reponse to Motion 20190925." https://christophercantwell.com/2019/09/25/response-to-motion-20190925/
"The Accelerationists believe that all is lost for White America, and that the only hope we have for salvation is to bring the existing system crashing down by helping the Democrat Party and engaging in shocking acts of terrorism and mass murder. Their thinking on this is roughly that once the system is collapsed, the citizenry will welcome the iron fisted rule of Nazis who will restore order by force.
Though they make a compelling case, I differ from their view on this. I support the President of the United States, they do not. I support the Republican Party, they do not. I want to save America from collapse, they do not. We are part of rival factions, and ...
Sweet Dreams (demo, 1990)
Mother (1992)
Leather (live, 1991)