First Ammendment Porn: Free Speech and Free Language

Ben Bush

18.08.10

No, not the First Ammendment as it applies to pornography but pornography for those who love the First Ammendment. Read Village Voice columnist Tom Robbins’ recent piece on Mayor Bloomberg’s speech about the downtown New York mosque. It’s not so much Bloomberg’s words, which aren’t bad, but it was the first I had actually heard about the would-be founder of the mosque, Sharif El-Gamal. Read at least as far as the part about eyes puffing up from metallic fumes.

This week was a democracy porn double-whammy with the outdoor screening of 12 Angry Men in Bryant Park.

Heavy-handed by current standards, its preachiness and idealism seem almost like assets in some weird way because of its age.

I guess I’ve had a couple occasions recently to hang out with some stoner, anarchist AARP-eligible folks. There’s this funny cognitive dissonance where as soon as someone turns 65, I expect them to have survived the Great Depression and fought in World War II. But, of course, your friend’s stoner uncle is still your friend’s stoner uncle, no matter how old he gets. While this doesn’t always have that “Greatest Generation” gravitas, it seems entirely positive that getting older is a little less monolithic.

Courtesy of Anarchy Planet.

I was thinking the other night about Pavlov’s dog. It’s odd how much that has become associated with mind control, when it seems to be just as much an experiment about language. The ringing of the bell seems to me to be rudimentary symbolic communication. The dog understands the bell as a symbol of upcoming food. I’m tempted to go for the reductive “language-and-mind-control-are-really-one-in-the-same, dude!” but that doesn’t seem quite right either.

A friend used to own a cassete recorded under the name Rosetta Stone, which was reputedly the solo project of a guy who claimed to be a disaffected former member of The Residents. The album was a continuous song interrupted only by side one and two of the tape and was intended to emulate a child’s language acquisition and how sound would literally change for a child as it learned to understand — from glittering murkiness into sounds that could be differentiated as words. I can’t help but thinking now that this seems like such a great idea for an album. -BB

 

The cover of the Ralph Records’ childrens’ music album Goobers, including songs by Eric Drew Feldman, the Stinky Puffs, Half Japanese and Daniel Johnston.

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