My friend Holly Herdon just became a member of the electroclash band “Electrocute.” She’s from Tennessee and and lived on my floor freshman year in Mitchell Hall at GWU. During her senior year she took the Electronic & Computer Music class that Steve Hilmy taught (I was in the class too, but a different year- listen to my final piece), and for the final project she and Jason Halal had to make a visual portion for their music composition and they asked me to make their video. The final product is on my website in the video section, it’s titled Friseur, which means haircutter in German. The name came from my source footage of George Bush getting his hair combed prior to announcing the Iraq war. It’s the same footage that Michael Moore used in Fahrenheit 9-11, only made one year prior (thank you Indymedia for the Portuguese footage). Anyways, I saw Electrocute play at Club 5 last year, and liked their show a lot. Their CD at WRGW wasn’t all that great (in my opinion), they put on a rockin’ show, so I’m definitely excited to see how much flava Holly adds.
Today I bought some blank media and I’m making a 2004 DVD archive. So far using iDVD I’ve archived Kerry’s speech at the DNC, Kerry on the Daily Show, and Mayor Anthony Williams giving DC’s 39 delegates for Kerry (this is my favorite clip because at the end you can hear a chant of “Free DC” in the back ground. I also like it because Williams whines about DC’s “Taxation Without Representation“). Up next I’m archiving some of Adam’s clips I’ve got saved. It’s all in the name of freeing up hard drive space for 2005. The lesson learned here is to archive on the go! It take FOREVER to encode the DV footage to MPEG2 video, but I am blessed with patience.
Speaking of blessed, I’ve been listening to this nice mix by Rob Paine & the Solomonic Sound System for the last couple days. I really like the “Let’s Unite” tune (its about 17:17 into the mix). For the last 3 months I’ve been listening to more and more reggae, dancehall, & dub, and this sonic endeavor has been a completely organic one too. I think its a slow movement out of almost totally electronic to music with more of a message. Or at least a message I can understand… This morning I took the Muslim call to prayer, the Athan, and started making my own holy dub , by layering it with the beats from the Rob Paine mix. Rastafarian meets Islam conducted my evangelical Christian. Merry Christmas. Happy day of the Sun God…
Sun Worship, Roman Official Cult in Constantine’s Day
Source: Frederick H. Cramer, Astrology in Roman Law and Politics, p. 4. Copyright 1954 by the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Used by permission.
A star cult, sun-worship, became (in the third century a.d.) the dominant official creed, paving the road for the ultimate triumph of Judaeo-Christian monotheism. So strong was the belief in the Invincible Sun (Sol Invictus) that for example Constantine I (d. 337), himself at first a devotee of the sun cult, found it, indeed perfectly compatible with his pro-Christian sympathies to authorize his own portrayal as Helios. And in 354 the ascendant Christian church in the reign of his pious but unsavory son, Constantius II, found it prudent to change the celebration of the birth of Jesus from the traditional date (January 6) to December 25, in order to combat the pagan Sun god’s popularity—his “birthday” being December 25.
[Editors’ note: December 25 is mentioned here, but an earlier example of the influence of this official sun worship on Christianity is Constantine’s law of a.d. 321 uniting Christians and pagans in the observance of the “venerable day of the sun” (see Nos. 1642, 1644). It is to be noted that this official solar worship, the final form of paganism in the empire (see No. 1571), was not the traditional Roman-Greek religion of Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and the other Olympian deities. It was a product of the mingling Hellenistic-Oriental elements, exemplified in Aurelian’s establishment of Eastern Sun worship at Rome as the official religion of the empire, and in his new temple enshrining Syrian statutes statues of Bel and the sun (see Nos. 154, 1344). Thus at last Bel, the god of Babylon, came into the official imperial temple of Rome, the center of the imperial religion. It was this late Roman-Oriental worship of one supreme god, symbolized by the sun and absording lesser divinities as by the sun and absorbing lesser divinities as subordinates or manifestations of the universal deity, that competed with young Christianity. This was the Roman religion that went down in defeat but infiltrated and colored the victorious church with its own elements, some of which can be seen to this day.]
We are all blessed to be alive.
