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Truly Awesome
June 17th, 2006 -- Being scolded by a racist for not being a racist is surprisingly rewarding. (Start here if you want to get more of the context)
Keith,
That’s a really slick little attempt to twist the kinist position (“your kin is comprised of people who are like-minded, not like-skinned. By your definition, a black man who also agrees with kinism is your brother, and I am not”), but if you want to get a square shake from us, you’re going to have to stop lying and playing word games. And here’s a bit of guidance for you and your cohorts on here: you’re going to have to do some homework. I’ve noticed that so many of y’all come on our blogs and start asking us to re-re-re-explain everything we believe and hold dear, just for little ol’ you. Well, it’s all out there in black and white (I know those distinctions are hateful to you, but the print medium just works better that way). Read Harry’s definitive statement on kinism at the Little Geneva site. Read Badonicus’ posts. Read JLH. Read Barn Cat. Pick any kinist and read. When you’ve done your work, come back and be ready for substantive discussion. We’re not going to start from scratch just because you’re used to being spoon fed pabulum from your pulpits.
So you think I’ve painted myself into a semantic corner, and that I’m implying that a Negro who agrees with kinism is my brother, etc.? Let me say it again: I respect any Negro (or Japanese, or Hottentot, or whatever) who loves his family, loves his race, loves his nation, wants to see them prosper, and wants his grandchildren to have the same things in common with him that he had in common with his grandparents. Any Negro with this mindset IS a functional kinist, yes, he is. And I applaud what he’s doing, and I say, “Go to it, sir.” But he is not my brother. If he’s a true Christian, he is a fellow believer, a “brother in Christ,” as it were. His salvation is not dependent on the color of his skin, just as mine is not. But God drew boundaries between the nation of his fathers and the nation of my fathers. And we each function best when we follow God’s design, not ours, just as a woman functions best as a beloved helper for her husband, not as a beskirted co-leader. The hypothetical Negro you mentioned is like-minded, and to be admired for what he believes (as long as he puts real action to his beliefs). But that’s all he is. But you, Keith? You? A man who declares, “If, when [my daughters] are grown, they bring home a Godly man they would like to marry, I don’t mind at all if he has more melanin in his skin than I do?” You may have White skin, but you certainly are not my brother, not if you really believe that. Ah, but there’s the rub. I don’t for a moment believe that you really do think that way. I think you’re either a liar (out of fear of being called a racist, or intolerant, or hateful, or old-fashioned, or whatever), or you’re deluded (because, like most White men, you’ve spent too much time letting Jews do your thinking for you via the mass media and popular culture and the modern emasculated pulpit). I think that if you felt really free to say what you believe in your heart, you’d bellow in rage and horror if your pretty little White daughter (I’m assuming you’re not married to a stranger) came home with a baptized Tiger Woods or Denzel Washington on her arm…much less a Flava Flav or a Fitty Cent. I sat on a PCA pastor’s back porch one evening a few years ago and listened to him say, almost verbatim, what you’ve written here, that he wouldn’t care if his daughter brought a Negro home, “as long as he was a godly young man.” But this pastor continued with a more chilling statement. He said, “And I have to tell you, I can’t really say that if the White race were to die out tomorrow, I’d be particularly upset about it.” See, he was being consistent. And if you’re being consistent, you share his nonchalance about the death of a race that God ordained and created and blessed. And if you can’t see that, you’re worse than a liar. You’re literally a damned fool, and generations after you will have cause to hiss and spit when they see a fading picture of you. If you can’t understand that your self-professed faith in Christ will mean little to your own children if you throw them to the savages, then there’s no reaching you. You’re unteachable. And that, Keith, is why you are not MY brother.
I mean, come on, Keith. REALLY, now. Walk away from the keyboard and look at your daughters right now and ask yourself, “Do I want them to marry someone who is a stranger to my blood? Do I want to dishonor my fathers (who would have condemned me to a man) by sacrificing her and her future and her childrens’ future on the altar of current social trends?” Look at their skin, their hair, their eyes. Think about that skin being pawed and mauled by a foreign hand while you stand meekly by and say, “That’s my new son!” If you can do this and answer yes, you are to be pitied. But you are not to be excused, and you are not to be embraced. I don’t know you, and I don’t want to know you. If you can do that to your daughters, then you’re not a man, and you’re certainly not a White man. Not the type of White man who can fall into line behind the White men on whose shoulders you stand every time you vote or buy groceries or look at your own White wife. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Keith. You ought to be ashamed.
OH THE SHAME!!!!!!!!!! THE HORROR!!!!!!!!!!!! Ha ha ha ha!!
One of the funniest things I've noticed is that when I've posted over there I get this uncontrollable urge to talk like a fifteen year-old girl arguing with someone over how "hott" Jake Gyllenhaal is. "UR DUM!! WHAT A STUPID LOOSER!! can't you see how hot (OMG HE IS SO HOT!) he is????!!!!" But these guys want, pray, hope desperately for intelligent people to take them seriously. Just look at this guy's post, where he asks me to go read all of the posts from his fellow "kinists" before I argue with them. I've tried, I've really tried to take it seriously, and I just can't. It's like your little brother letting you read his eighteen-page hand-written Star Trek fan fiction short story about Captain Kirk going into the neutral zone to fight a race of beautiful women and he ends up "falling in love" and going to a mating planet where all the women wear these skimpy bikinis and they each have perfect bodies and a pair of enormous HA HA HA THIS IS SO FUNNY BUT I SHOULDN'T LAUGH and he asks you what you think, but it's so ridiculous, so transparently motivated by alternate desires that you can't take it seriously.
Keith
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I Became A Musician So I Could Work In Sales
June 13th, 2006 -- I guess I shouldn't complain. Every type of artisan and craftsman and professional has to do some sales at some point. I have friends who are lawyers and carpentars and artists who all dislike constantly trying to sell themselves to potential buyers. It's humbling but at the same time you feel guilty for bragging about yourself. None of the sin but all of the guilt. Perfect.
Okay, random things:
The most inept insult in the world must be "mouth-breather". Actually, "mouth-breathing moron" seems to be a favored construction among these oh-so-ineffective insult-slingers. We all breathe through our mouths on occasion. Calling someone a "mouth-breather" is like making fun of a guy with two legs. Possible, but hardly satisfying.
I learned a little about a new concept in racism technology, called "kinism". Basically, "kinist" is to "racist" as "Person of Color" is to "Negro", "little person" is to "midget", "handicapable" is to "crippled", and "Tommy Gunn" is to "Keith Groover". Kinism is racism2k6, fo' the kids, yo. It's kind of funny, because they go to great lengths to say they aren't racists (visit some of the links from that link up there, if you dare . . . ), but you start to read their arguments and it's pretty clear that they're basically racists who know how to use Wordpress. "Oh, but we don't hate, we just prefer white people." Find me a bigot who actually says "I hate [insert whatever here]", and I'll show you a person who is new to the movement, or isn't in it. First rule of justification: be subtle.
My college room mate Paul, who I've written about before, just told me this week that he made it into the National Symphony Orchestra. That's huuuuuge. Congratualations, Paul. For people who aren't in classical music, and don't know how big of a deal this is, getting into one of the major orchestras is like becoming a starting player for a major league team. In fact, the National Symphony is the orchestra you always see on PBS for all of the big presidential events and for commemorative celebrations like Memorial Day and Independence Day, so, just like the big leagues, we'll be able to watch him play. Very cool.
Nothing much has happened as far as recording goes. I guarantee that I will have very solid news about this by next week.
Tommy Gunn
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Substance vs. Style
June 6th, 2006 -- This is a big subject for me, so I'm just going to touch on one aspect of it. I remember reading Old Man and the Sea back when I was a freshman in high school. I enjoyed it. The book was short. The storyline was interesting. Hemingway's style is unique. His sentences are terse. He doesn't like commas. He likes periods. He edited his writing a lot. He doesn't like adverbs. If a word ends in "ly" it's probably "fly" or "ply". Or maybe "probably". He was big on substance. Not so big on style.
Style is kind of hard to describe. So is substance, but style is a little harder to describe. The reason is that style is ever-changing. What could have been enthralling, even scandalous to someone 100 years ago might barely register as entertainment to us today. Annie and I watched The Blue Angel, which is a movie made in 1930 about a professor who, well, here's the plot synopsis from Amazon:

The Blue Angel deals with the humiliation and breakdown an inhibited, overbearing, sexually-repressed instructor at a boys' prep school. Professor Immanuel Rath discovers some of his students passing round seductive photographs of a sexy cabaret singer. His best pupil confesses that Lola Lola sings and dances at the "Blue Angel," a variety club near the docks. Rath visits the club that night to put a stop to all this indecency, but is entranced by his first glimpse of Dietrich straddling a chair crooning "Falling in Love Again" in top hat, stockings, and bare thighs. Rath's self-righteousness cannot survive the seductive, throaty voice of the siren. Three of Rath's pupils are watching from the dark, though they duck out of sight of their teacher. Rath decides to corner Lola for "misleading" his pupils while she is in the dressing room preparing for her next appearance. One of the boys smuggles Lola's panties into the teacher's coat pocket. Rath uses the "garment" as a pretext to see her again. They spend the night together; for the first time in his life, he arrives late for school the next morning to find his class in an uproar. When the principal shows up to investigate the goings-on, Rath leaves his job and marries Lola. The mismatched couple enjoy themselves until they have spent every cent of Rath's bank account. Consumed by desire and tormented by his rigid propriety, Rath's morality degenerates. Lola finally forces him to return to his home town and appear as a clown there. The performance ends scandalously. Lola leaves him for another man. A broken old man unable to bear the humiliation any longer, Rath returns to his old classroom and falls dead on the floor.
Sounds exciting, right? It's not. Not even close. It's coma-inducingly boring. The substance is there, or at least there's enough substance that a pretty decent movie could be made of it today. But the substance alone isn't enough to carry it. Scenes are slow and repetitive, the acting is overwraught, and the editing is clumsy. By today's standards. Back then it probably caused riots.
One of the most important things to note about our culture in the last hundred or so years is that we've been obsessed about technology. Movies with great special effects are considered better than movies like this. Music that does new things with computerized effects or interesting instruments, or maybe interesting things with a traditional instrument often get a leg up on the more traditional music-makers. Just look at our band, we consist of three instruments which didn't really exist 100 years ago. Some of the parts of my guitar didn't exist twenty years ago, and one part didn't exist one year ago.
Just think, that horrible "I Believe" song by Cher was a hit almost solely for the reason that they used the new (at the time) Anteres Autotune. Actually, there was a second hit, Blue by Eiffel 65, also carried completely by that one effect. The problem is, of course, that relying on style over substance has a pretty short shelf life. But, when you think about it, substance doesn't have a terribly long shelf-life either. No one who, having never listened to classical music, listens to Beethoven for the first time and thinks "this music is amazing! Just listen to those transitions and his advanced (for the time) use of rhythm!" Some people, after getting acclimated to classical music and music of the 19th century, might be able to understand what's incredible about the music and it might have an enormous effect on them, but the effect isn't as immediate as it would have been to someone of that time.
So, if style is ever-changing, and substance is also ever-changing, then what should an art-maker do? I guess it's ultimately to not rely on too much of one or the other, and to get your music out as soon as you can.
And, speaking of which, we are in the process of trying to get our music out right now. I'm hoping that within the next week we'll be able to work out the final details and to head into the studio by the end of this month. Awesome.
Luke (just kidding, it's Keith)
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