KMFDM's 'Hau Ruck'

When you’ve reached the industrial peaks that veterans KMFDM have climbed, finding relative success in the mid-1990s with back-to-back Angst and Nihil, the best you can hope for after a breakup and a few so-so albums is to maintain some sort of plateau.

Or at least coast along, in stride, and use a formula that has worked so well.

That is what KMFDM (MySpace profile and song samples here) have accomplished with their latest album, Hau Ruck (“Heave Ho!” in German). Sloganeering, shredding guitars, and danceable backbeats – with a live drum sound that has added an organic dynamic to the sound – have delivered on the promise of Xtort and Naïve for two decades now, and they manage to sound fresh on the new offering.

For one thing, this is the tightest, most focused-sounding album KMFDM has produced in years. The core group of Sascha Konietzko (vocals, samples), Lucia Cifarelli (vocals), Jules Hodgson and Steve White (guitars), and Andy Selway (drums/percurssion) have made three albums and have toured extensively together. They know their stuff, they know each other, and they have settled into a noticeable groove. No more of the revolving-door, guest-appearances-galore policy KMFDM adhered to throughout the ‘90s. The only downfall is the lack of Pig leader Raymond Watts, who added a sleazy, hyper-sexual sound to the group.

Konietzko returns to his German vocals on the machine-gun stomper “Hau Ruck,” rambunctious “Mini Mini Mini,” and closing with “Auf Wiederseh’n,” while Konietzko and Cifarelli tag-team on the slick and seductive “Ready to Blow” and “Professional Killer.”

While there were claims that Hau Ruck (a departure from the typically five-lettered album titles) was going to be more tongue-in-cheek, KMFDM haven’t let up on the liberal politics found in “Free Your Hate” and “New American Century.” The group still manages to have fun, however, never letting its passion outstrip its characteristic playfulness. While other industrial outfits suffer from a morbid self-righteousness, KMFDM never take themselves too seriously – as on “Feed Our Fame.”

Hau Ruck is no heave-ho to the typical KMFDM sound, but it does offer a polished, unified assault. That may be a disappointment to some – gone are the experimental days of the Symbols album or Adios – but this is the do-it-yourself album, and band, fans grew to love before they broke up in 1999.

KMFDM - better than the best.

Origin of the feces

"So you want to change the definition of science to include the supernatural?"

"Yes," Thompson says, "we need a total paradigm shift in science."


- - - - -

The above was from an exchange between Salon.com reporter Gordy Slack and Richard Thompson, who is representing the Dover School Board (in Pennsylvania) in the "Scopes 2" Intelligent Design trial - currently underway.

Now, there are two ways you can read and react to the quotes above. Either you can say, "Amen, brother!" Or you can say, "What is this world coming to?"

I would scream the latter.

The arguments have been there for years. You see a watch, you assume there was a watchmaker. Design begets designer. There are biological process too complex to explain with mere chance. And these are all fine arguments - they raise serious questions about the world in which we exist.

ID supporters also claim that even the Big Bang theory was once laughed at (even Einstein didn't believe his universe exploded billions of years ago - he was a "static universe" advocate), as ID theorgy is now, so why not support it?

Sorry, but Bozo the Clown was laughed at. That doesn't mean I'm going to listen to any of his cosmological arguments any time soon.

If you support teaching ID theory in public schools, you are basically arguing for teaching a form of religion in the classroom. And you can't do that in this country - so says the Supreme Court.

Say what you will about the faults of evolution, the "controversy" over whether it's the accepted form of biological study in the scientific world, or even whether evolution is a disprovable science at all. That debate should be had. After all, the nature of science is to question, to dive deeper, to foster understanding and truth.

But saying that a scientific alternative is out there - ID - is flat out silly.

For one, science begins with questions and tries to find the answers. Why is the sky blue? How long does it take for Neptune to orbit the sun? When do chimpanzees use primitive tools? Seek, study, think, understand.

ID, however, starts with the answer. God exists (or, sorry, a "designer" exists). Now how can we show it?

That's not science. Fundamentally, absolutely not. It stops science dead in its tracks, in fact. Why do some bacteria have a little tail that wiggles and allows locomotion? Gosh, I don't know. Must be God's will.

That, to me, is the wimp's way out.

Even to this day, there are some who believe that the Giza pyramids of ancient Egypt couldn't possibly have been designed, built, or maintained by mere humans. The job was too big, too complex, to allow for us puny mortals. Aliens must've helped.

I really think these kinds of arguments shortchange us people. I think we're smart enough, we're capable enough - we can do anything we set our minds to. Our ancestors built Stonehenge, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Giza pyramids, and the Eiffel Tower - and what evidence can you give me that they didn't that's beyond basic human capability and will?

The same thing, I think, is true for our understanding of our basic biological roots. Just because we can't understand how something works, or why something is the way it is, doesn't mean we never will.

Do we stop and just say, "God did it - good enough for me."

Or will we do the truly human thing: keep asking, keep looking, and eventually, maybe, find the answer.

If you're content with "God did it," then we don't speak the same language. "God did it" doesn't help me understand the world around me any better than "Aliens did it."

And that's why ID isn't science.

I'm willing to accept ID, Aliens, whatever as truth only if its scrutinized, tested, researched, debated, and put through the scientific method rigors any other theory is screened through.

But because no one can prove or disprove whether a designer built us as we are, it can't be called science. Call it religion, teach it in church, and let the rest of us actually learn something.

Maybe we can never really know anything, but I do know this: ID shouldn't be taught in any science class in this country.

Art in our time

In her Atlantic Monthly article "Moral Fiction," Mary Gordon, wonders whether fictional characters or real-worlders (both historical and familial) gave her the moral compass that guides her actions. "Does true art really establish models of human action?" she asks.

Then, she wonders, why we put so much stock into characters that are really nothing more than "black marks on a white page that perform the trick of making us believe that people who have never existed are as real as our best friends?" Sure, we should learn that the manic obsession with a hint of revenge we see in Ahab can be tragic - but Ahab never existed. Not really. So what does it matter?

It matters, Gordon argues, because fiction and art can provide us with examples of people from which to learn our lessons. For instance - I don't know what my co-workers think or do from day-to-day, but with a novel I'm involved in the mundane details, fantastic adventures, and deepest thoughts of the protagonist.

And often art serves as nothing more than around-the-campfire storytelling, with lessons and morals and didactic narratives that help us discern right from wrong, just from unjust, and norm from abnormal. Art can go deeper of course - and it often does, as Gordon says, exposing the ever-present grey areas of life.

But then she reasons that, in her own life, she more often looks to real-life friends and family members - and often historical and political figures - to gather the dos-and-do-nots of life.

"My models of right action - the ones who have really helped me in the struggle to be good - are not fictional characters," Gordon says. "But my moral exemplars have tended to be people I know, such as my uncle Joe, who probably never heard of Melville, though the name Moby-Dick might have rung a bell."

Instead, art and literature shows us that moral certainties are rare indeed. They break between moral certainty and moral complexity. One could argue that, at his heart, Gatsby was a cool guy to party with. But someone else could argue he was a manipulative bastard. Who can say?

"The novel has never been very good at shaping people up in predictable and orderly ways," Gordon says. "It says to us that the truth of human beings is often more complicated than we think."

Especially, I would say, if you think human standard operating procedure was not handed down to us mortals by a lightning bolt. For those who believe it was, the right choices can be prescribed and referenced to that striking point where the wavering sand turned to strict and rigid glass.

For the rest of us, we can look to art to help us - not with fire and brimstone, but with beauty and delicacy - to find our way in the world.

"You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat," Renoir said. So it goes with us humans, I suppose. Just when you think you have it all figured out, you read about someone else.

Satan has longhorns

I'm making popcorn in our credit union lobby to celebrate the big Michigan/Michigan State game tomorrow at noon.

"Do you have a bag that's maroon?" a gentleman - rich cabernet-colored shirt, blue jeans, deep southern accept - asks.

No sir, I say, just MSU and Michigan colors today.

"Well, do you read the Bible?" he asks.

Not enough to pick my sports teams, I answer.

"In Genesis, around the beginning - I don't remember the verse - it says God built Texas A&M University for Jesus to go to school," he says. "It's in there - you can read it when you get home. So I was hoping you'd have a maroon-colored bag for me."

So the Longhorns fell to Earth with Satan?

"We don't speak of such things indoors," he says. "My mother would wash my mouth out with soap if I ever mentioned the University of Texas."

Amen, I say.

The future belongs to those willing to get their hands dirty

Back in mid August, I had tickets to a Detroit Tigers baseball game. The tickets came courtesy of work – good, behind-home-plate seats – and I spoiled a few friends by taking them along. A good summer evening to enjoy a game and some friendly fellowship.

After the game, when the four of us piled into my car to head home, my car wouldn’t start. In downtown Detroit, not more than two blocks from Comerica Park.

It had always been one of my worst fears – to be stuck in downtown D-town. And as often as I go there, it was an ever-present fear. It’s why I bought a cell phone.

We were messing with the car, when down the street walks Carl. Carl asked us to try and start the car, fiddled around with some connection cables to my battery, and diagnosed the problem. “Do you have a flat-head screwdriver?” he asked. I did, in my toolkit in the drunk. He stuck the flat-head in a slot near my battery. He told us to start the car.

It rumbled to life like nothing ever happened.

All of us rode most of the way home in stunned silence. Here comes Carl, Jesus in disguise, and after only listening to my car (and perhaps consulting some long-deceased auto god), knew what was wrong. But here were four college students. Why couldn’t we figure out the problem? We had four bachelor’s and one and a half master’s degrees between us, and we were impotent.

What was our problem?

- - - - -

Garrison Keillor wrote a column on Salon.com today about his mother canning vegetables during his childhood, pressure cooker steaming and glass jars filled with foodstuff to get the family through the winter. He also wrote about his father, stooped over the engine block of the family Ford, fiddling with this and that. Keillor ignored the skills his parents could’ve passed on to become a writer (and radio host). But those handy skills can come in…well…handy, especially when civilization starts to break down, or even if all you can depend on for survival is your two hands.

“Beware of losing basic skills,” Keillor writes. “Hang on to that pressure cooker.”

I remember my own grandmother, steeped in the traditions of her home states of Arkansas and Missouri, canning her own vegetables, fresh from the garden, and storing them in the basement for the winter. She always warned me of that pressure cooker – wheezing as loud as a school bus braking – and told me never to touch it. “It could blow us all up,” she warned.

And I also remember my father working on cars and trucks – especially my own. I’ve never had a new, or even semi-new, vehicle in my life. As a teenager, my cars would need constant repair. Instead of taking it to a mechanic or dealer, my dad would take it to his friend Scott’s, and together they would work out whatever was wrong with it. My dad always encouraged me to watch – “You might learn something,” he told me; none of what I saw stuck. I’m car illiterate; always have been.

In fact, much like Keillor, my mind was built for more artistic passions. I did well in school, I was active in my community, and I worked all through my teenage years. But I never learned such essential and elementary tasks as changing my own oil. Or changing a tire.

Confession: I’ve never changed my own tire, and am scared I don’t know how.

I got another wake-up call last night, on the way to the bar with friends. My driver-side headlight seemed dimmer than the passenger-side light. My first thought: I have a headlight out. My second thought: I don’t know how to change a headlight.

(My third thought: I hope we don’t get pulled over on the way home)

That, combined with Keillor’s article, got me thinking about what skills I do possess. I can cook. I can put simple things together with my meager tool set. I can play guitar. I can design graphically. I can write.

But if I were to crash-land on a desert island somewhere, would I have the skill required to survive for more than a week or so?

Probably not.

- - - - -

I have a deep-held respect for DIY people. My grandmother can garden. My uncle can make his own wine. My grandfather could put together bikes from scraps he bought at yard sales and sell the complete bike in his front yard for profit.

One acquires the necessary skills to survive over the course of ones life, I figure. Eventually, my car will have broken down so many times that I’ll have a mental encyclopedia of all that could go wrong with a post-1981 American-made car. Right?

Keillor’s right. In a sort of anti-yesterday’s-post vision, I came to realize that the skills of our previous generations are slowly being lost. We can’t even remember the phone numbers of our best friends – our cell phones remember them for us. Should the world go to shit, I think the mechanics, the janitors, the country cooks, and the hunters of this world won’t have too much to worry about.

The rest of us? We’d be in our own pressure cooker – struggling to think of all our parents and grandparents had taught us that we either ignored or forgot.

On childhood.

Today at lunch, while enjoying my quiet dish of tuna-cheezy noodle casserole, a few co-workers reminisced about the time when they had similar dishes as poor kids; when they couldn’t afford milk to put on their shredded wheat.

I knew what was coming.

"Kids today don’t appreciate anything," one woman said. I think she heard my eyes rolling, because she and another co-worker addressed me - and the fun began.

Stories of children who didn’t appreciate their $100 tennis shoes or who demanded a cell phone at age 13. Stories about, when they were kids, working night and day, all summer long, to afford a pair of pants for school in the fall. Up-hill both ways.

"And isn’t it weird," I said, "that your parents probably said the same thing when you were kids. ‘Our kids have no respect.’"

Oh no. Not their parents. Our generation was apparently special. We are selfish, spoiled brats, demanding a TV in our room and a Lexus when we graduate.

As in Macbeth, a lot of sound and fury signifying bullshit.

First, I don’t think there’s anything about our "entitlement generation" that bucks trends from the last - oh, I don’t know - umpteen generations before us. Our parents wanted more from their parents, who wanted more from their parents, and on and on. And our parents gave in. They wanted to give more to their kids then they had. It’s the American Dream.

Second, any glorification of one’s childhood amounts to a pissing contest. "Well, we had it worse" and "You don’t know how bad we had it" just becomes a silly boxing match, neither side giving ground until they end up barefoot in the snow, tilling fields for pennies a day (if they were lucky) and enjoying a rare ice cream cone on Sundays.

I don’t care how bad you had it as a kid. You made it out alive.

And if you’re using your woe-betrodden childhood to make your life legit, you deserve the rotten kids you have now.

I was diagnosed type 1 diabetic at age seven. I went to about 15 different schools up until high school. I had an unfit mother.

These are my experiences, and they make me who I am. But I don’t trot them out for the world to stand up, take notice, and identify with my suffering. In fact, I rarely share instances of my childhood. Because they’re mine.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe when I have kids, as those women in the lunchroom say, I’ll "understand." Understand this: I’m going to spoil my kids rotten. Why? Because, like my parents were supposed to do, I’m going to give my offspring a better life than I had growing up. It’s the greatest legacy you can give to the world, my grandmother says - a well-off, responsible, loved child.

Why complain about giving your kids the world, even if comes in the form of a Playstation? I think if you do your job as a parent, your kids will care about the things that matter. And, after their selfish teenage years, they’ll appreciate you as a parent when they reach adulthood.

You don’t, after all, have to buy a new car for your kid when they graduate. You can make them earn it with an after-school job.

But I can just hear it: "Junior’s job isn’t nearly as tough as the one I had as a kid."

On Wisconsin.

Being a semi-celebrity at a Rotary district conference is kind of humbling.

Dropping the average age of all the attendees to, say, 35 or so is even more humbling. Or weird. Even the Rotarians themselves ask me "What are you doing here."

I wish I had an answer. One that made sense on this brisk Friday night, three Spotted Cows and an Oberon later.

I wish this was a true vacation, one where I could explore the wonderful city of Madison on my own terms. Instead, I'm forced to study State St. on a limited time budged while the rest of my time is spent in breakout sessions and plenary speeches.

...at least I have Adrian alumni to keep me busy as I bar-hop solo.

Tomorrow I think I'm skipping one of the morning speeches to (a) sleep in and (b) enjoy the farmer's market on the steps of the capital building not more than a block away. I've earned it. I'm the youngest bastard here, and I'm going to hump it for all it's worth.

This was supposed to be the Great Awakening for my Rotary career. Instead, it's more like forced geriatric isolation. I'm the only young fool to sign up for this trip, and the vibes are starting to get to me.

It could be the beer. It could be that.