We're Eleven Names. We Can Do Whatever the Fuck We Want.

Hi everyone. Tonight is the last night in a while for Eleven Names updates, because:

Blogger isn't supporting our native method of uploading new content to the site, which I understand to be some crazy homebrew shit involving FTP. So. It is up to Zach to migrate the content, because only he has the root access. Suffice to say that right now, Zach has other things on his mind and will probably get the time to do it starting in about a month.

Which means, there will be no new content on Eleven Names after tonight for the next couple months. We briefly talked about killing Eleven Names and just having tonight be the goodbye post. It makes sense. Zach doesn't have the time to devote to it, Tom hasn't posted in years and I, in theory, should be finding more ways to write for blogs that have a larger audience.

And if reading that, you honestly thought we'd shut Eleven Names down, you have less patience for unprofitable fun and you will go very far in life and we're proud of you for it. This is Eleven Names. Of course we're coming back. We're too disorganized to stay dead, anyway.

Hell: I'm running a thirteen part series about an oft-ignored melodic punk record in which I compare the songs to lessons in my life. The title is not just wishful thinking, it's the truth: We can do whatever the fuck we want.

Yes, I will be getting my own blog as a result of this, because my words need some kind of outlet that's not subject to the whims of anyone else, whether it's my wonderful friends and comrades at Pastepunk or Issue Oriented. There's something that goes unexpressed in that statement and it's this: Eleven Names is bigger than me. Eleven Names is bigger than Zach. Eleven Names is bigger than Tom.

Here's what Zach tells me about the ETA of the new site: "[I]t won't be all that long until it's running again. Promise. (I liked the Valve Time description, though.) " Odds are, "[the new site will be] Nothing too extravagant. Just maybe migrating content to Wordpress."

So. You have now heard what I've heard. It may be that I run out of time to update Eleven Names later on, or I say everything I wanted to say in the Eleven Names venue in the future, but rest assured: I have at least 8 posts, minimum, if I leave Eleven Names.

We're still not dead. Social media links to capture our spasms follow. Thanks everybody.

You can follow our YouTube channel at: elevennames.

You can follow Zach on Twitter at: iconoclastzach.

You can follow me on Twitter at: elevenjames.

Mission Convincers.

I've written pretty often about Trap Them, about how they're absolutely wonderful and about how they make me happy. Well, the title is the last track on their much venerated (by me) 2008 record, Seizures in Barren Praise, it's seven minutes long and might count as a d-beat opus.

Anyway. I wrote this originally for the Loyola Phoenix, but cleaned it up a little for here. A person called Michael Coyne wrote in pretty much saying that Guantanamo Bay was reasonably comparable to a Hyatt. We disagree.

You can find the original here. But! This is a cleaned up version. With links! And me talking.

I feel compelled to respond to last week’s Letter to the Editor from Michael Coyne.

It is my opinion that the Guantanamo Bay prison is not as comfortable as Mr. Coyne believes. First and foremost: He says the U.S. Congress has reviewed the facility and deemed it fair. Given that Congress reviewed the evidence for the war in Iraq and found it sufficient, their approval does not satisfy me.

Second, whatever the formal religious accommodations are, they’re undercut by the guards spraying urine on the Qur'an and sexually assaulting the prisoners, according to an internal U.S. military review and the FBI, respectively.

Third, the Red Cross has reviewed the detention center and is far less charitable than Mr. Coyne, specifically using the phrase “tantamount to torture.” But ignoring the Red Cross, most striking is what the FBI (and the Department of Defense) allege about the facility: That the prisoners were shackled for 18 hours at a time and forced to urinate and defecate on themselves.

As for the idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be tried in a civilian court and kept in maximum security prisons like any other criminal, I say yes. The point is not to throw suspected terrorists in a gulag that resembles limbo or a relatively high circle of hell, but to expedite justice.

Apparently, the increased security supposedly needed for the trial will cost more money. It’s money well spent, in my eyes. The U.S. has a budget of trillions of dollars. Money can be found. This is about the vindication of our justice system when the entire world is watching. This is what you spend money on. And yes, we have a sizable deficit. At this point, another couple million is comparative pocket change.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be held in the super maximum security prison in Illinois. The building was created to detain the most dangerous criminals we can apprehend. The idea that it’s going to make the prison or the surrounding communities a target is a bit late. The prison created to detain the the worst offenders we can find and capture is already built. It is a target, by virtue of its existence, even if it didn't house people from Guantanamo Bay. And I do mean people. Specifically, human beings, to whom we have an obligation.

Mr. Coyne ends his letter throwing his support behind the execution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I believe this to be unwise. Killing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed brings back no victims from the grave and gives our enemies another martyr and recruiting tool.

In short, I think Mr. Coyne is mistaking revenge for justice. Our criminal justice system makes tragic mistakes on a daily basis, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed doesn’t have to be one of them. As much as it hurts, I believe this country ought to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a better trial than he deserves, and, if at the end of it he is found guilty, then we let the rule of law decide what to do with him.

Revenge is cheap. Justice is time-consuming, boring and expensive.

2010

Well, it's just past five in the morning and I'm awake and relatively clear-headed for some awful reason, so I might as well.

This, then, is 2010, the year when everything changes. (I've just made that up. Or, more likely, someone else made that up and I've just made it up again.) From the perspective of about an hour and a half of consciousness: it's not bad. The eggs are quite good, and going back to sleep will be lovely. I feel hopeful for the rest of the year.

And it's not hard to being feeling a bit of hope right now, not least because 2009 is, to slip into the parlance of the times, finally fucking dead in the ground, and we can get on with it. The 'it' is, I believe, living and growing and loving and pushing ourselves to do more and better.

2009! It wasn't the best year for me, but it certainly wasn't the worst. I've had major accomplishments and fuck-ups, but a lot of my friends have had it really bad. Things haven't gone right, and people and institutions were, and still are in some cases, collapsing all around us. There is fear and unease in the air, and the change promised us seems less real every day.

Winter showed up late this year, or maybe never left at all: if you think of centuries as having seasons, of hundred year cycles of growth, abundance, harvest and decay, or perhaps sleep, then we''re somewhere in February of the new century, marching on through the slush and ice.

On this scale, I've been in winter for my entire adult life. The whole world has. We've just come through the coldest, hardest part of winter: January into February, when trees explode and every living thing barely clings to life, when your breath freezes in your lungs and your face goes numb the second you step outside.

We're tired, but we aren't exhausted. And ahead--past the groaning ice--is the coming Spring. It's not quite here yet, and we're going to have to work hard to make it through, but on this day especially, you can feel that it might be true, that we are perched at the beginning of a new century, waiting to rise up out of the snow.

There is, of course, no reason to think about centuries having seasons. I've just been playing the oldest trick in the book on you, and myself: telling you a pretty story about how the sun is going to come back and there will be deer and blackberries and warm summer light again, here, in the dark and the cold and the ice. It's the oldest holiday tradition. Singing to keep the dark at bay.

But the sun does come back, and the world can get better. Spring is the sweetest season. Let's bring it.

An Accumulation of Albatrosses

It has come to my attention that it may be possible to carry this shambling persona, this self-indulgent, measured engagement, or lack thereof, with the world too far--that there may be responsibilities I am not addressing, opportunities that are lost as I lay in a pile of my own filth, gazing at my navel. (Or worse yet, reading online forum threads about videogames.)

These things have always gone in cycles, for me, and perhaps it is time to begin a new one. In short, I have decided, with no small amount of prompting from the world and my friends, that it is probably time to wake up.

There are a million things I have not told you about. Love, second-hand death, the rising tide of madness and a car crash, to name a few. It has been a year and a day since my last post produced exclusively for this blog. I know because my good friends called me on it at the bar. There have been things that I tried to tell to you, and could not bring myself to complete. Eventually, the weight of unwritten words around my neck made it difficult to even look at the website, let alone type anything.

That was a nonsensical, self-indulgent sentence, summarizing a nonsensical, self-indulgent state of affairs that has, I believe, ended.

Tonight, I have missed a movie, driven the back roads, shot pool, been thanked by a bartender and spoken words of truth and import with dear friends. I promised that I would do something, not something specific but something nonetheless, and I intend to keep that promise. I have been letting failures, or at least mismanagements and projects that drag on and on, accumulate and weigh me down, leaving the things I care about to rot in the field. It just won't do.

If you're reading this, thank you for giving our confused little website your time. Thank you for putting up with my self-indulgent nonsense, and my arrogance, and my ambitions. And thank you for putting up with my absences, all too frequent.

It is a much easier thing to read than to write, to think than to speak, and to sleep than to learn. (Which is not to say I have slept well lately, on the whole.) The world around us is ever fascinating, perhaps now more than ever, and it is so much easier for me to watch it go by than to act, even in the tiniest of ways.

But it is only through acting on the world that I can truly understand it, and myself. And perhaps I have some responsibility, both to understand and to act on that understanding.

So.

Hello, internet! It's been a long time. I think I am going to begin to write to you again. James is still here, as is my good friend the Gentlebeast, and Thom, and perhaps others will be drummed up as things begin, again, to roll.

Thank you, as always, for your time. I hope to be stealing more of it soon.

Everything is Fine, Nothing is Ruined

Dammit, James.

More later.

Inspiration Only Lasts a Few Rounds.

I'm nothing without my influences


The title is a wise piece of advice that Brandi Filumena gave me regarding a girl. I took it, eventually, and used it, even if I had to spit it out over the phone late at night. Anyway. On with the update!

For our non-American readers and for most of our readers from this country as well, one of the most prolific and deepest reaching chroniclers of our time, Studs Terkel, died yesterday. He wrote about the lives of ordinary people in a way that made you feel their lives. He won a Pulitzer for his oral history of the Second World War, if (as they should) such things matter to you.

If you want to know about ordinary Americans (that phrase has more and more of a cachet to it these days) from a person that wrote about them for most of his life, then pick up one of his books and you'll get the real story, without enough pandering to provoke nausea.

I saw Bane last night. I'm still glowing. To give you an idea of how much I enjoy seeing them live, my friends (we being college students) often tease me about it, asking would I rather watch Bane or have sex, and I tell them that the two aren't good to directly compare, which is true. The experiences are quite different and I enjoy both for very different reasons, though I will say that I feel less self-conscious at a Bane performance than during intercourse. Then again, I am terribly self-conscious at any given moment.


I'm nothing without my friends


I've called Eleven Names dead before, but now, at least as I type this, I don't find it to be true. As long as it is linked to one of our credit cards, it can't ever die, it will persist, but I think more importantly, I've acknowledged that it is not near the top of my priority list anymore. Like the Hope Conspiracy, who'se new full length, Death Knows Your Name, I have grown to love, this site appears to be something a little more casual and less rigid in having updates, and going from a "okay, we're going to put something out every week" to "we'll write when we write" is a hell of a shift in gears.

The RZA once said "How can hip-hop be dead if Wu-Tang is forever?" I guess, in one of the only ways Eleven Names is like the Wu-Tang Clan, as long as we continue to write something, every so often, this won't die. Happy Halloween.

In short: We're back.



I can't help but love this life again. -Crime In Stereo