Dispatches From The Edge

Gonzo Journalism; Politics, Lifestyle and Weirdness. Written by self-proclaimed journalist and award-wanting writer Finley Daniels.

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A Committee Of Affairs

How the Kafkaesque machinations of an unelected judiciary have conspired to spearhead the Re-Birth of a Nation drenched in the blood of the

Here's my latest article about the recent wave of horrifying Supreme Court decisions. Enjoy! 🔥✊

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Overcoming Fundamental Laziness

I am finally back, and with an amazing album by The Uncluded - Kimya Dawson and Aesop Rock - whose message of self-help and love mesh well with the topic of motivation. Enjoy! #blog #rap #aesoprock #motivation #selfhelp #mentalhealth

It’s been a while. Against all my hopes and aspirations I have neglected this blog for weeks on end. This post will explore some of the underlying reasons for this irrational behavior and also provide an insight into how I personally am going about fixing it. So, after the music recommendation, we will discuss some of my personal shortcomings and the ways in which I try to subdue my worst…

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Calm, Or Obedient?

It's been a while but I'm back! Here's a new post discussing activist burnout and reviewing a fantastic album by Jazz pianist Ray Bryant. Enjoy!

I know it’s been like three weeks since my last post, and I am sorry about that. I sprained my ankle a week and a half ago and have been very unproductive since; I’m trying to get back into my regular schedule as the ankle heals. I’ve also been struggling to find a job or vocational training or college course or anything long-term for me to start doing, so that’s been weighing on me. Anyway, just…

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No Queers Allowed!

New post is here. This one deals with the recent horrid anti-queer legislation in Texas and Florida, and reviews a legendary Souls album by Freddy Briggs. Enjoy!

I have a well-researched and in-depth post about Aleksandr Dugin – a fascist piece of shit – in the works, but, since I need to read the fucking drivel he published to have an informed opinion, it’ll take a while to complete. So, in the meantime, I figured I’d just vent about the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and the horrid anti-trans legislation in Texas. So, consider this your content warning…

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Sad Days, Lonely Nights

I've finally managed to finish a new post; it deals with the Ukraine-Russia war and showcases one of the best Blues albums of all time. Enjoy!

Today’s post will be a bit of a bummer again, as the title suggests. It’s both a reference to the album I’ll recommend and to my general state of mind in regard to the geopolitical clusterfuck that is Europe right now. Before we get into all that, let us start with today’s music recommendation: the 1994 album ‘Sad Days, Lonely Nights’ by Junior Kimbrough. I was first introduced to Kimbrough’s…

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Life 0.1

New post is up; this one gets a lot more personal but also has my most obscure music recommendation to date. Enjoy!

This is the first post in a new series called “Life”, in which I will not talk about a specific sociopolitical topic but rather discuss whatever’s going on in my personal life. Obviously, this will at times intersect with political and social issues, but they won’t be the main focus. These posts will still feature a music recommendation, so if you understandably don’t care about my personal life…

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How I learned to stop worrying and love the reaper.

Originally published on https://soundtrackthoughts.wordpress.com/

We're all going to die. Literally. We as individuals are all going to die, that's just a fact of life, and we are all also collectively, as a species, going to die out from the effects of man-made climate change. After the music recommendation, I want to look at the spiritual, social, and economic side of death, and also put forth what I believe are the sociopolitical changes necessary to combat climate change and give our species a fighting chance.

For today's music recommendation, I have an absolute banger: the incredible "Juice" from 1976 by jazz fusion legend, the late Ryo Kawasaki. He unfortunately passed in 2020, but his legacy certainly lives on. Kawasaki was one of the founding fathers of the fusion genre, and he regularly rubbed shoulders and shared stages with Jazz legends like Bobbi Humphrey. He also created the very first guitar synthesizers and created an all-synthesized album called "Images" in 1987. The man was always at the forefront of new technology and innovations in recording and producing, going back to 1981 when he was the first-ever artist to record on the then-newly created A8 quarter-inch tape, eight-track recorder developed by Fostex. Ryo Kawasaki was an incredibly gifted, talented, and intelligent person whose contributions not only to Jazz-Fusion but to music as a whole sadly often go overlooked.

The album we're looking at today, "Juice", is a brilliant showcase of Kawasaki's musical prowess. It is very funky, with groovy basslines and psychedelic sound effects, yet it retains a jazzy edge with very playful instrumentation and slower beats. The sound varies wildly from relaxed and stoned to energetic and frantic, almost manic at times, but in spite of these contradictions, the whole album still feels like a cohesive and coherent whole. The guitar work needs to be mentioned specifically, as it is a driving force throughout many of the songs, providing either a rock-like foundation for other instruments to play on, or using pedals to create a funky and otherworldly soundscape. This album definitely oozes both jazz and funk influences, and will satisfy both those to whom jazz's improvisational tone is challenging to get into and those who are die-hard jazz fans; it keeps the rhythmic structures and melodic conventions a more mainstream-attuned listener expects while not compromising the artistic and free-flow improvisational energy that audiophiles love. It is a truly monumental piece of art, and I sincerely urge you to take the time and give it a listen; you won't regret it!

Here's a link to the highest-quality version I could find on YouTube:

With the music recommended, let's dive into our topic for today: death. Bummer, I know. We are, however, stuck in a society - cue The Joker memes - that has a deep sense of false propriety when it comes to the topic of dying; we don't really want to talk or think about ourselves or the people we love dying and ceasing to exist forever. Understandably so, to an extent. It isn't a pretty thought and it makes us deeply uncomfortable because it so violently and bluntly confronts us with our own mortality. We're all living on borrowed time, in a sense. I think that a certain disquiet when dealing with the subject of death is perfectly natural, but the way in which we ignore and demonize this natural decay is troubling to me. Death is as much a part of life as birth, but emotionally they register as something entirely different, for very obvious reasons. I am therefore in no way saying that we should strive to treat death with indifference. We are human, after all. We should, however, strive to fully embrace the inevitability of death because otherwise, we are likely to fall prey to conmen and charlatans who try to profit from the grief of others.

For one, there are the typical "mediums" that use cold reading techniques to guesstimate the names and cause of death of your loved ones, but most will recognize these frauds a mile away. The more insidious and predatory elements however are funeral homes themselves, whose predecessors embalmed bodies on battlefields during the Civil War and then convinced the entirety of the post-war nation that this was a necessary step for which they should keep being compensated. Suddenly, the job of hosting a wake and organizing the burial was no longer done by families but by businesses; capitalists had from then on successfully monetized our deaths, literally getting their money over our dead bodies. Now, of course, it is reductive to claim that there is no reason whatsoever for funeral parlors and embalming services, but it is true that unless your loved one died from an infectious disease of some kind - in which case the CDC would come to dispose of the body anyway - there is no real reason to be in a hurry, to get them embalmed, or to even call anyone. A dead body is not inherently unhygienic or dangerous; the danger comes from bodily fluids, and corpses are no longer actively producing or expelling those. Look, I'm not saying you should be in a rush to bury granddad in your own backyard, but I do feel like, as a society, we need to become a lot more comfortable with our dead; normalize sitting with the body, normalize discussing funeral arrangements with elderly relatives, and generally normalize death as a topic of discussion.

So much of our lives are dominated by this background radiation of fear of our own mortality, so much effort is expended just to momentarily stave off the inevitable; it is ridiculous how much mental real estate and effort is put into something we'd rather not even discuss. Yes, death is often sad. Yes, death can and should make you feel out of the norm; be it angry, sad, or just numb. Death can often come way too soon and would just as often have been preventable - looking at the American healthcare system and every landlord - but none of that really matters when it comes to dealing with it personally. Dealing with death on a personal level in an honest way requires breaking down the stigma surrounding conversations about our own mortality and that of others. It requires a mindful and detached look at it, a look unclouded by anger or judgment. We are too conditioned to shy away from the grim reaper, partly due to evolutionary mechanisms, but greatly due to societal molding. We cannot contemplate bearing the unbearable and so we shut ourselves into a cocoon of blissful ignorance. Unfortunately, this cocoon bursts wide open once we experience the first death of a loved one, and rebuilding becomes impossible. The only way in which we can personally and societally move forward and develop a healthy relationship with death is to return to a cautious but embracing respect for death instead of the paranoid ignorance we all currently exhibit.

While I strongly believe that meeting death as described, with grace and mindfulness, is paramount on a personal level, I equally strongly argue against such passivity when faced with the extinction of our species. The death of a loved one is not comparable to the apocalyptic reality of climate change, of course, but I do think that the underlying fear and anxiety at least feel similar, and are thus worth observing side-by-side. The most glaring difference between the two is of course that death within your personal circle is inevitable while the worst effects of climate change can hopefully, maybe still be partially reversed. Surrendering to death is healthy, surrendering in the face of climate change spells doom. The thing with death, on a personal level, is that we have no choice but to accept it one way or the other, but climate change is being actively caused by other humans and it is thus within our power to put a stop to it. But only if we all work together. In essence, death as a personal phenomenon is an individual struggle to be solved individually, but death on a global scale in the form of climate change affects us collectively and can only be solved through collectivist action. 'System change, not climate change' is a popular slogan for a reason, because it so succinctly summarizes this need for a collectivist, societal approach to this unprecedented threat.

Obviously, there is no panacea and the daunting task of reorganizing society and the economy so as to be in sustainable harmony with our ecosystems is one that will take decades of dedicated work by everyone.

However, there are some obvious changes that will need to happen soon if we want a fighting chance. First and foremost, all major industries must be placed under democratic control by the public at large and either dismantled or restructured with the help of ecological committees and under the supervision of the workers. Major shareholders, owners, and other capitalists must be expropriated. Workers whose livelihood was dependent on dismantled industries need to be compensated and keep receiving 100% of their former wages adjusted for inflation until such time as they have found a new career. Secondly, cars and fossil fuels need to be phased out as public transit is expanded, made free for everyone, and improved to the point where working-class people no longer bear the brunt of car bans and other pseudo-progressive individualistic "solutions" to climate change that ignore the systemic issues. Thirdly, renewable energy production needs to be massively subsidized and expanded. Finally, Indigenous people need to be given back the land colonizing nations stole. This will ensure that uncontrollable wildfires, overfishing, and general ecological destruction become relics of a shameful past.

The key to saving our planet lies not with the individual but with the end of capitalism and a collective restructuring of society through a new mode of production.

Naturally, the four points listed above are merely the outline of a foundation upon which we can build a movement that actually challenges the status quo in a meaningful way. The actual plan will not be handed down but organized from the ground up, or at least so I hope. I'll be perfectly honest with you all, I have been oscillating between 'everything is doomed forever' and 'there is still hope' for years now, and I'm still not sure where I actually stand. I have learned, however, that defeatism is a losing battle by definition, so I will just keep trying to educate, agitate, and organize until we all choke to death on Jeff Bezos's Amazon Spaceship's exhaust gas while he blasts off of a dying rock engulfed in flames. Ah, I'm being cynical and needlessly grim and apocalyptic. We are right on the edge, though.

Anyway, to recap this whole screed; don't fear the reaper, and abolish capitalism!

Thanks for reading; it looks like I'm turning this blog into a weekly thing, which should work quite well with my schedule. I hope you liked this more in-depth look at death and climate change, and I especially hope that you found the music recommendation enjoyable!