cheese it, the cops!

just watched quite the film: "in bruges," with ralph fiennes, colin farrell, and in a best-actor-type turn, an utterly convincing brendan gleeson (mad-eye moody from harry potter). it seems to have been produced by the bruges (belgium) tourist bureau, until it ends up identifying bruges with hell. three suicidal hit men bouncing off the medieval walls. midget jokes galore (it broaches a devastating future in which there is a race war among the little people), and an interpretation of hieronymous bosch. a comedy of errors until it unfolds with the irony, inevitability, and extreme seriousness of a greek tragedy.

i added a one-disc best-of list to the pretenders post. every song fucking slays me. then it revives me and slays me again.

she was the electric chair on which i reclined, twitched, and smoked during happy hour; the gas chamber - decorated in questionable taste - in which i inhaled the unadulterated zyklon b of jive; my lethal injection of pure fun. she was the cuisinart in which i was thoroughly liquefied; the microwave in which i was cooked to my inmost molecule; the whisk that made of my brains a tasty blueberry pancake batter; and the red-hot skillet over which i flipped. she, she was my alexander the grate; my slobodan milosevic of love; my very, er, mariah carey. she was the meteor, dropped by god himself, that rendered me over into a pinkish puddle at the bottom of a smoking crater; the human eyeball floating up in my glass of chocolate milk; my cure: hemaboloids, arseniated with strychnia. nevertheless, she has written a really amazing book.

i was antiquing and quilt-shopping in lancaster county today with the redoubtable ms. judith s, and i bought a little dovetailed wooden box that once evidently contained a patent medicine: "hemaboloids, arseniated with strychnia." feel better, honey?

what actually has put me off palin is just her implication in mccain's miserable campaign. it is to her, for example, that we owe the "paling around with terrorists" crap. now "the traditional role of the vp nominee is to be attack dog," and no doubt she was specifically assigned these tasks by mccain's people. still, she coulda said no. and she also did it with obvious relish and if reports are to be believed, thought there should be considerably more of it. doing that at any moment would have been a bad thing. but concentrating on it every day as the economy melts down, federal spending doubles, afghanistan explodes, etc, was just unconscionable. it was also completely anti-effective.

me on reason tv::

you know saying over and over again that your opponents are stupid is itself stupid. i'd suggest, instead, trying to give reasons to think your opponents are wrong. monbiot writes: "Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency)." i think the most important qualification is, rather, some sort of moral goodness, decency etc. and let me just say again, our cerebral elites are iincapable of independent thought (they all have the same politics, because their most important standard of truth is unanimity). they're trained in these institutions which are all about sheephood. their opinions are no more critical, independent, or reasoned than you'd find down at the dew drop inn, or perhaps far less so. and if john kerry is the american intellectual elite, we really are as stupid as monbiot thinks.

rik challenges me to name one non-stupid thing that sarah palin has ever said. i think the whole speech, embedded in this post, is lovely and thoughtful. i'll take one line: "the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who are most vulnerable." now, though the formulation in terms of vulnerablity is a bit unusual, this is a fairly common sentiment. john rawls built his theory of justice around this thought. it is central to obama's construction of his own mission. so: would you say that this statement is false? would you say it's stupid? when obama delivered the same idea at the democratic convention, did you say "what a fucking idiot"? aren't you a bit surprised, and shouldn't you be a bit pleased, that a republican is saying it? and she's backing it up with both her own experience with her son, and with a set of policy initiatives. maybe you think she's being hypocritical cause republicans don't actually care about that. but it's hard to doubt her sincerity when she's looking at her own down syndrome baby as she's talking.
it's not what she says; it's who she is. "stupid" means: wrong class, wrong college, wrong outfit, wrong state, wrong accent. it is not about her i.q. or something. at any rate this idea that we live in an i.q. aristocracy where the people with the best sat's should (obviously) be telling us all how to live, is profoundly anti-democratic and self-congratulatory. and even if it were true or decent, i doubt that it would get you joe biden over sarah palin.

so teenage white supremacists planned to decapitate black people, and then assassinate obama. that's not good. but what is truly, deeply disturbing - indeed, monstrous - is that they planned to do these things in white tuxedoes and top hats.

i was listening to robert draper (whom i know slightly) today on fresh air, talking about his piece on mccain from the nytimes mag. interesting stuff. but i bet they used the term "narrative" 50 times in a half hour, and draper's piece is "framed" in terms of the narratives constructed by campaigns. now maybe this is the way 'narrative' is used by political consultants or something, but terri and robert were certainly using the term wrongly. "maverick" or "conciliator" or "foreign policy expert" or "hockey mom" or "joe the plumber" or "change" are not narratives; they're single words or phrases. they're tags, catch-phrases, code words, at most slogans. a narrative is a plot, a build through complications to a climax and denouement, etc. i'm not insisting that these people go read paul ricoeur or something, just that they give some meaning to the central term of their analysis. the fact that my whole campaign is a single word - which again i insist has something to do with how stupid college communications courses are - is a problem, but it's not a narrative. in fact, anything like a narrative would be far too complex, nuanced, and lengthy for any campaign at this moment.

ted stevens' defense was utterly implausible: i got hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free stuff, but i didn't know i was getting it. now, say you were giving a politician hundreds of $k. there is no point in that at al if he doesn't know he's getting it (as if this were something you could miss anyway).

if you'll permit me, let me rave for a moment about chrissie hynde (=the pretenders). the new album, "break up the concrete" is wonderful, which is good, because the last, "viva el amor," was disappointing, at least to me, and then she's been silent since then (2004). i think chrissie has been an important and deeply innovative artist since "the pretenders" (1980). here are some reasons why. chrissie, when she came out, was surprising, though not without some parallels (joan jett, for instance), as a super-tough guitar-slingin woman fronting a rock band. that wouldn't mean much, but the music was shockingly good, for my money. chrissie could be a snarling punkette running through tuneless hyper-aggressive material. but on the other hand, she has a beautiful and completely unique voice with her wildly huge vibrato, and from the start the s&m bitch from hell ("bad boys get spanked") has been accompanied by a ravishingly beautiful songstress (try "i go to sleep," e.g.). no one else i can think of has two such profoundly different modes, presented as coherently, and the albums were neither unrelieved aggression nor unrelieved loveliness, but always both. her songwriting has been outstanding, and often dispensed, for example, with the verse/chorus form entirely, and yet still created really accessible, whole pop music. the lyrics always flirted with cliches ("love's a mystery" on this one, e.g.), but also always had a bend that made you sit up. again, she fed all kinds of styles (rockabilly, country, blues etc) through a punkish, warping intelligence. whomever's playing guitar for her is at once throwing down trad riffs and inverting or twisting them, and i have to think this reflects chrissie's aesthetic, more clearly present on "break up the concrete" than perhaps on any previous.
"butc" does all of these things. of course this is not 1980, and it can't give you the shock of the new, and chrissie's at this point a thoroughly professional exponent of a style she's always prosecuted; you hear echoes of everything she's ever done. however, there's no sense that she's merely repeating herself or going through the motions, which i guess i did think was happening in "viva el amor." i'd particularly recommend the title cut and "boots of chinese plastic," a hilarious lyric about reincarnation in a strong rock setting. "every drop of blood flowing through a vein makes its way to the heart again. illusion fills my head like an empty can; i've spent a million lifetimes loving the same man." there's a beautiful cover of "i can't help falling in love with you," which now that you mention it sounds like it was written with chrissie's voice in mind.
in 1983 i was living in london, writing for melody maker. i covered the first show on the "learning to crawl" tour at the hammersmith odeon. mm often expressed different views on the same material, and the ed had just slammed the album unmercifully that day (i thought it was great, despite the recent deaths of the previous bass and guitar players; in fact i think i was assigned the show specifically because everyone knew i loved the pretenders). i was supposed (i believed) to interview chrissie after the show, which is never the best moment. when i said "melody maker" she slammed a door in my face. that just enhanced my already fully-engorged crush.
i heard that when she was living in londonin '77, she was supposed to meet johnny rotten at the town hall and get married. apparently johnny sent sid vicious in his place, which didn't go over so well.
i'd strongly recommend all the early albums (1, 2, learning to crawl), but also the hideously underrated "packed!" and "last of the independents." (actually "pretenders 2" was also wildly underappreciated). "isle of view" is a beautiful unplugged set. for my money, avoid "get close" and, again, "viva el amor."

if you're downloading, here's a one-disc best of pretenders. plus you really should get "break up the concrete." i do favor her beautiful mode. but then, i'm 50.

i go to sleep
977
mystery achievement
message of love
i hurt you
i'm a mother
how do i miss you?
kid
stop your sobbing
middle of the road
birds of paradise
back on the chain gang
2000 miles
never do that
millionaires
night in my veins
sense of purpose
money talk
hollywood perfume
brass in pocket

if olbermann or rich were concerned with whether or not what they're saying is true, you'd hear things like this: obviously, i'm hoping sarah palin loses. but you know, she's right about x. or: that was a good speech, etc. now i guess if you confronted them (or the other hundred million liberal ditto-heads) with this notion, they'd say: i'd agree with sarah palin, but she's never right. i'd respect sarah palin but everything she says happens to be stupid. what i'm saying is: they are people without integrity. they are people who are speaking angrily, vociferously, definitely, and continually, but they are saying nothing. they're gutless herd animals. they might write fairly well, but they can't think at all. or it's not that: it's that they have sworn off thinking as a dangerous distraction from the real work: being at the center of a herd and achieving power.

you know, there was a time - gearing up for 2000, for example - when the american right was insanely dogmatic and absolutely herd-like: little political peons. "ditto-heads" - limbaugh fans - were well-named in that they just recited the script. it was the "echo chamber" where everyone said the same thing as everyone else and they all reinforced each other in their mindless unanimity. if you want to see what's become of the political left, just hit kos or keith olbermann or frank rich: sites of completely uncritical unanimity. everything that mccain says is wrong; everything obama says is inspired. everything palin ever said is a confirmation of her evil stupidity. that's not about her; it has no reference to anything in the world at all: it's about the fact that we feel so good saying the same thing together over and over. olbermann's enemy bill-o is less partisan and more thoughtful than olbermann these days, which i wouldn't have thought possible.
now: if whatever happens shows that republicans are evil idiots, you are not operating empirically; you're just reciting the implications of your a priori structure. it is literally impossible to take the crap seriously, because the commitment is obviously entirely to having a certain effect; the connection on the other side of any given assertion to the way the world actually is - to truth, that is - has been entirely severed. it's incapable of convincing anyone who's not already convinced, but that's not what it's for: it's a strategy for the construction of a group: every empty yapyap is only a declaration of solidarity, like the lowing of cows. it's not...semantic: it doesn't refer to the world. in every way and on both sides, it's a sheer expression of epistemic cowardice: 'true' means what we all say, not what's out there. i hope people take comfort in their group membership, but there is really no point in, like, talking or apparently making assertions: olbermann and his audience should just retreat to inarticulate simultaneous grunting, because what they say - really - has no meaning. it fails to refer.
speaking the truth requires that you're thinking about the content of what you're saying and how it emerges from and is substantiated by the facts. if you are focused exclusively on the effect of what you say on the audience, on the other hand, you're not asserting anything about the world, you're just trying to shape a social group so you can belong. that's how you end up in collective madness where you're all muttering antisemitic slogans or whatever it may be and there's no sense that any claim could be false (since truth is basically not in question at all). at any rate, if you watch olbermann every night and just nod and enthuse no matter what happens, you are an empty, dangerous human being, or maybe sheep.
part of this results from the observation by the left of the right in its political success. you might say they realized that they were too divided etc. but what they realized is that power matters and truth doesn't.
the right isn't there right now, because losing divides, and the right has been resolving into its component fractions.
i think this unanimity fueled the disaster that was the bush administration. no one was saying from within: know what? this is where i jump ship. the evidence of weapons of mass destruction is pathetic. it didn't matter that the evidence was pathetic; all that mattered was who belonged and who didn't, readable from their nodding along as we murmured our little catchphrases. and now i propose to you that we might just see what this danger is like from the left.

on palin's clothes etc: you know, after the rnc, palin basically disappeared for a couple of weeks, got intensely briefed on various issues and mccain's positions, and made over for the national stage. this was completely legit, if you ask me: no one is going to deny that she took a hell of a leap and had to work to make it plausibly. now there are a lot of women (and some men) who, if you gave them an endless credit line at neiman-marcus, would go a bit overboard, especially if they're going to be on stage for the next couple of months and doing interviews with katie couric. on the other hand, $150,000 is completely stupid and ridiculous.
now on the third hand, i think palin has basically acquitted herself very well. you can keep saying she's an idiot all you like, evidencing every single slip of the tongue etc, but she's not. at all. this morning i heard her speaking in pittsburgh on "special needs" kids, her son trig and what he's taught her. it had this religious undertow, but that has got to be fine. it had policy implications: she specifically talked about increasing the funding for various programs. but more: it was moving, genuine, and inspiring. i think you're likely to find that she'll be an important leader in the republican party for the foreseeable future (though not vice president of the united states).
so you can make fun of this if you like, because it's a republican speaking, because it's a christian speaking, because it's sarah palin speaking. but maybe you should listen to the intensity and importance of what she's saying. this is exactly why we need all kinds of people running the state, and it's why some of them ought to be moms.

so i've been thinking about this palin remark/approach about "pro-american parts of the country," pro or anti-american candidates etc. one thing this expresses is some kind of pretty mindless patriotism: like we just can't be wrong when we're torturing people or invading other countries etc.: a plea for uncritical chauvinism. but on the other hand, i actually do believe that there's something(s) that it means to be an american, that we do have a distinctive history, and, emerging from that, a rough set of values. the country originates in rebellion against authority, as a defense of rights against the incursions of overwhelming state power. it develops a distinctive variety of individualism out of this concept of rights and perhaps out of the isolation of much of the population from world cosmopolitan capitals, people trying to live on a frontier or a wilderness. to me, the essence of the american ethos is expressed in emerson and thoreau. (but, you know, also jefferson and abbie hoffman.) we have had a constant compromise ever since with collectivism and the increase in state power (the overwhelming world political development of the last century), including things like the re-distribution of wealth, m/p's theme of late. now you might think this ideology is wrong or ineffective or anachronistic, but you can't say it's not at the center of american identity. to my way of thinking, an ever-expanding state, a state that takes care of you from cradle to grave (keeping an eye on you throughout), is exactly what this country exists to resist. among, you know, cosmopolitan, educated people, there's not much left of american identity: the only question is whether a, say swedish-style healthcare system works better, whatever that means exactly. all that's left of "americanism" in members of the democratic party is that they vaguely think there should be opportunity (that's what barack says america means). that is, it does make sense to call some regions, especially rural etc "pro-american" and connect this with an attack on the "socialistic" policies suggested by obama. it makes sense to connect this with, perhaps, guns, or tax policy. and also with arts" country music, truck styles, interior decorating, clothing etc: get these right and you're definitely expressing your americanism.
on the other hand, no one in politics is really an emersonian, and of course mccain/palin seem to support adding trillions of dollars to the fed budget etc. in fact, when mccain or palin start opposing drug laws, for example, or an overwhelmingly huge military establishment, then i'll call them pro-american without shuddering at the term.

don't tell anyone, but i'm posting the last chapter of my next book. the chapter is on black nationalism emerging from the marcus garvey movement in relation to the religion and popular music and arts of the twentieth century: in rastafarianism and reggae; nation of islam/fivepercenters and hip hop, etc. i think the story is fundamentally new and coherent.

another book i'm reading, which traverses much the same region as chytry's *aesthetic state* is *the ideology of the aesthetic* by terry eagleton. now this is a book of great scope, studded with insights. but these insights are buried under tons of marxist and freudian horseshit. indeed, i should think the book would cure anyone of wanting to do marxist or freudian theory, much less both at once, which leads to many a comical moment. here is eagleton on, believe it or not, kant: "If there is finally no reason to fear the punitive phallic law of the father, it is because each of us carries the phallus securely lodged within ourselves." what that kind of mind-numbing lacanian crapola is doing lodged in my kant is anyone's guess. and he might just as well have thrown in that each of us has the *bourgeois* phallus lodged in our kant, since the marxism generally degenerates into random insertion of the term "bourgeois" in any given sentence. no doubt somewhere eagleton has tried to render the mommymommy/phallus/mirror-stage crap compatible with the bourgeoisie/superstructure/material conditions of production crap, but they are not, in fact, compatible. and neither one of them helps much with kant; eagleton demonstrates that clearly, if nothing else. how someone so knowledgeable, so clever etc could be this enmired in jive is a hard sad question to face.

actually the ayers thing is horseshit. they got to shut up. and, yes, i'd say the same if we had a republican candidate sharing the stage or something with some pretty far-right freak. i mean, you're not responsible for your whole half of the spectrum, and these people are there in political movements.

i always thought levi stubbs was the best of the male motown singers (as martha reeves of the female). he was the most soulish: connected more to sam and dave or wilson pickett than to smokey robinson. "reach out (i'll be there)" is one of the top ten songs of the "rock era."

headlines: Ostrich sandwich record attempt appears to have failed after evidence eaten by hungry watching crowds

so enforced lassitude has been kind of productive. vis-a-vis a big re-write of the next book, *political aesthetics*, i've been reading anthony ashley cooper, third earl of shaftesbury; schiller; herder; some newly translated notebooks of nietzsche, etc. i guess what it's teaching me is that aesthetics, the modern discipline, actually originates within political speculation.
shaftesbury, by the way, might be the most underrated major philosopher in the western trad. i've got a beautiful editionof *characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times* (a compendium of his works of inestimable influence on the eighteenth century) from liberty fund (a whole world of amazing books). shaftesbury's work is at once very feet-on-the-ground english and soaringly platonic: a remarkable synthesis, perhaps partly a response to the work of his childhood tutor, um, john locke. a reasonable structure, with amazing flashes of insight. and an aesthetic understanding of man and the universe, in terms of a beautiful ordering of elements (sentiments, matter, idea).
re-reading schiller's *letters on the aesthetic education of man* is really quite a remarkable experience: the book is a moment at which beauty is understood as liberatory politics: an aesthetic politics of creativity and synthesizing imagination. it's of course bound up with the almost comical cult of antiquity characteristic of the late eighteenth century. it immeasurably clarifies the emergence of hegel, schopenhauer, kierkegaard and nietzsche.
i'm reading all this under the aegis of josef chytry's book *the aesthetic state* (from the late 1980s; now extremely out of print). this thing, which does holderlin, schelling, hegel, wagner, nietzsche, heidegger, marcuse from the angle of an aesthetic politics, is a true *tour de force* of intellectual history. studded in it, find paragraphs explaining whole huge difficult swathes of nietzsche or heidegger in remarkably clear terms. and dry wit: the section on wagner gets quite hilarious, if you ask me. i got hold of it at the suggestion of one of the anonymous reviewers of *political aesthetics* for cornell.

this is what mccain should have been doing; more or less just talking. good effort to distance himself from the bush administration.

still there's no ruffling obama: always at least emitting coherent sentences.

it's a dilemma of democratic politics that it rewards both spending and tax cuts, simultaneously. that's why neither of these positions is fundamentally coherent or connected to reality. they just move from hundreds of billions in spending to hundreds of billions in tax cuts.

i'll probably try to blog the debate tonight to some extent.

so the irony of the mccain campaign. he coulda won, if he'd stayed true to himself. if he'd run a non-scurrilous campaign. if he'd rejected the initial bailout when the pork was larded on. now he's out there proposing further, deeper tax cuts, which is absurd if you endorse the bailout, incompatible with mccain's career in the senate, which has shown a marked tendency toward fiscal responsibility. at a minimum he needed some principles to lend the campaign shape and coherence. he had them at hand, and abandoned them in an ecstasy of win-at-any-price. dude. you lose.

dudes, i'm being bitch-slapped by pneumonia. i feel like i've been nailgunned to my bed, while my chest rattles in a disconcerting way. now i know how jimmy rogers felt. ma, i gots the consumption. put me on a slow train back to meridian.

headlines: Boy George Pays Tribute to Barack Obama by Means of Disco

also all debt, credit card to gov. bond is liquid, flowing in a single system, secured and securitized. which is also the same stream of cash. now if only no one makes any real bad mistakes...