cheese it, the cops!

watching the hillary confirmation hearings. john kerry is an insufferable drip, and his rhetoric just a non-stop barrage of cliches. one thing he came up with in the interminable mumbling: "global warming is a national security issue." in that sense, everything is a national security issue: for example, the mumbo-jumbo crisis.

here's a seemingly realistic moment on national debt.

washpost today:

The election of Barack Obama, who will become the first African American president when he is inaugurated Jan. 20, prompted a short-term burst of hateful incidents including racist graffiti, cross burnings and violence from New York to California, according to news reports and criminal indictments. On Wednesday, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn indicted three Staten Island men on hate crimes charges, alleging that they assaulted black residents "in retaliation for President-elect Barack Obama's election victory."

i think we are seeing a little burst of the concept of race in the face of its apparent decline or erasure. one thing that's worth saying: when there's no such thing as blackness anymore, something important will be lost, though something important will be gained, and the end of race would mark the end of a movement and a culture as well as of a burden and a nightmare. that's why jesse jackson, for example, is ambivalent about obama, not in the sense of being indifferent, but of being hyper-intense on both sides. but watch bobby rush at the blagojevich/burris news conference. or look what's happening in oakland etc, on both sides. perhaps race is twitching after its death. or perhaps it will now re-assert itself in scary and inspiring ways.

while we're at it, i might say i've been re-reading and re-thinking nietzsche (both he and arendt apropos of my political aesthetics project). he's what turned me to philosophy, while i was a teenager. i loved his particular form of genius: inversion. then, just maybe, an inversion of the inversion. of all the great values of the west: truth and morality and democracy. i find him a little less charming now, let's say. he forced himself to be a genius, manufactured his own genius,declared his own genius: it's hard not to see that as the center of the whole authorship. he willed himself to be a genius, had to turn out to be a genius, maybe still to impress cosima wagner or someone. something pathetic underlies the incredible self-aggrandizement, and sometimes the perversity is just willful and almost purposeless. the lightning rhythm of the prose is amazing at times. at others it's just pretentious (thus spoke zarathustra, which i once loved and now find unreadable) or almost...mechanical, like a reflex. his drive toward, need for, love of, affirmation, and his discovery of it precisely in tragedy, or in the face of pain, is a beautiful contribution. his incredible self-congratulation for this discovery is insufferable.

reading a bunch of hannah arendt: between past and future and life of the mind. one of those things i've always meant to do, i suppose. she's admirable, and i guess if a fifty-year-old dude can still be gathering models, she's one. her depth of scholarship is immense, and she shares a number of orientations with her mentor/lover heidegger, including a good soaking in greek philosophy and german idealism. but unlike heidegger, she was not a mystic, not an obscurantist, and not a fascist. (i do not, i should say, dismiss or merely deride heidegger: there's no doubt about the depth and innovation, at many moments in many ways). her politics is admirable or at least sensible in a liberal/republican vein. her prose, considering the seriousness of the thought and scholarship, is marvelously lucid: i would say it pointedly rejects the hermeticism not only of heidegger but of much of the german tradition from which she emerged). and her standpoint is synoptic: she's got an angle on the whole thing. hard, in a way, to think of any comparable figure. i'd particularly recommend between past and future: basically a collection of interlocked essays on the idea of history and the development of political ideas such as freedom and authority.

on this earmarks thing: obviously the basic debate is how much to spend on the stimulus package, not how to spend it. that is, the thing is basically indiscriminate. it might as well be random: the idea is to shove cash into the economy every which way. so why not everyone's pet project? it's gonna be everyone's pet project anyway. now the fact that this bold, decisive action is going to devour the economy as a whole from within is just part of the fun. the conception is that the state just invents or conjures wealth from nothing, a perpetual-motion machine producing more energy than it uses (infinitely more). it strikes me as possible that the obama presidency - partly because of what was happening when he ascended, partly due to his response - might be remembered as one of the signal disasters of american history.

so obama (henceforward bo) is going to "ban" earmarks on the stimulus package, how? by passing a law? by vetoing the stimulus package that emerges from the democratic congress? please.

i want to say a word about the epidemic of hoax memoirs, or at least the epidemic of their detection. one factor, it seems to me, is the pervasiveness of the idea that stories are central to human lives: all human lives everywhere. or even that human lives just are stories, a bizarre, patently false truism of everything from high-end pomo philosophy to nike ads ("we are the stories we tell": well i guess by definition that makes the false narrative memoir impossible; you told it; hence, you are it). stories are artifacts we shape, by extrusion, exaggeration, invention: a way we shape the world and ourselves in order to present them to others at a moment that demands stories. it is a shape, among others. every story is partly false: false to the chaotic incomprehensibility of experience and identity. this is not to say that there are not stories more or less connected to facts. it's to say that when oprah demands the story of redemption, over and over and over, it has to be manufactured to be effective. stories are artifacts: carved out of reality.

i'm glad to hear obama talking about fiscal responsibility and worrying about the trillion dollar deficit (which i would think will balloon beyond even that). but of course his basic policies = infinite increases in spending.  

that the israeli government won't allow journalists to cover what they're doing in gaza basically tells you what you need to know: that it is brutal. shameful. apparently they're firing on..schools, ambulances, and so on. they won't even have to defend these actions, just achieve unclarity and contradiction.

last in the beauty series: the decline of beauty: politics and art.

the idea that the u.s. is going to help negotiate some kind of israel/palestinian peace is absurd, given that we begin with unconditional approval of israeli policies. we are utterly allied against the palestinians, even on the point of refusing to speak directly to hamas at all. the unanimity of the american polity on this is disturbing, to say the least. one could easily, even, say that it's necessary for israel to eliminate the rocket fire, and still also point out that hamas is a democratically-elected government in gaza, and that direct negotiations should be undertaken immediately. try an independent operation to deliver humanitarian aid to gaza, etc: detach our policies from the state of israel. failing something like that, there's no role for the u.s. as a negotiator (only as a slavish, an unconditional, ally) and also no possibility of enduring peace. that obama, and bush, rice and clinton are completely agreed on a subordination of american policy to whatever the state of israel may do is sad. where the hell is the opposition, or the openness to actual information, or the creativity? why does the american democracy appear to speak with one unanimous voice? this is futile and sad and stupid.

fourth in beauty series: subjectivity and pleasure: hume, kant, santyana.

third in the video series on beauty: classical conceptions.

christiane amanpour on cnn this morning, reporting on her interview with an israeli official (i think the foreign minister): she asked her: what about the humanitarian situation in gaza? the response: there is no humanitarian situation. i suppose the grounds for that is that there are no human beings in gaza.

second in the beauty series: idealist theories (plato, plotinus, hegel).

a bit underoccupied on my break, i'm doing a series of youtube vids on the nature, history, and politics of beauty.

this was obvious. so, i guess i have a question. is deficit spending/nationalized debt an actual problem? or just a hypothetical problem. i remember in the eighties and early nineties people were saying, as they say now (even obama, which is absurd given his actual policies) "we're leaving a terrible burden behind for our children," and so on. and yet the burden never seems actually to be imposed. alexander hamilton argued in favor of national debt for a variety of reasons; for one, when you sell bonds etc, you make people, esp rich people, dependent on the government and its finances; as it were, you assure their loyalty, even as you keep the government growing. and perhaps now this could be extended to international bondholders, including states like china; they have a stake in our economy in a way that keeps them roughly in line with our interests. now i have this vague feeling of impending doom as we blithely add trillions to the debt, with more and more trillions on the way. but maybe i'm just kind of confusing the principles of household budgeting with the principles of fiscal policy for a mega-state? so is deficit spending/debt an actual problem, or are there any limits to it as a long-term strategy etc?

if you'd asked me at different times in my life who was my very favorite musical act, i might have said muddy waters, tammy wynette, billie holiday (who got me through my first big love disaster), the pretenders, seldom scene, ramones, stones, iird tyme out. if you ask me right now, i'll say augustus pablo (who's getting me through the most recent), the great reggae producer/melodica player. the list below is two discs of the best, partly constructed for me to noodle along on melodica. there is no reasonable "best of" so one should download these individual songs. all his albums are uneven, if you ask me, and he's far better in a spooky minor key mode than in others: all of these are the former. in a way my love of pablo (like a lot of love) is eccentric: i love what other people might find annoying: the extreme simplicity, repetitiveness: it's a form of mesmerism. my favorite quote ever is from miles davis: "i always listen for what i can leave out." like davis, or billie holiday, pablo is always looking for the direct, the non-technical expression: always at the heart, always being true to the improvisation, even in its imperfections. 

there's something about the free-reed instruments, if you ask me: the harmonica, accordion, melodica. it's just my favorite timbre. pablo is the only melodica player who could possibly appear in any history of music, and like the harp, the melodica is half serious instrument, half toy.

of course, pablo produced these great tracks, many of which have fairly famous vocal versions by various artists, and he often returned again and again to the same underlying riddims. most of the dubs are by king tubby, and represent some of his very best work. tubby invented dub, which has utterly revolutionized world popular music: changed its ontology. (veal's book linked below is a mgnificent academic treatment of the form.) ultimately the music below is devotional, an instrumental gospel music of rastafarianism (though "bedroom mazurka" ain't exactly a hymn!)

[from east of the river nile]

(1) jah light

(2) chant to king selassie i

(3) nature dub

(4) natural way

(5) memories of the ghetto

(6) africa (1983)

(7) east of the river nile

(8) addis-a-babba

(9) east africa

(10) jah light version

(11) islington rock

 

[from skanking with pablo]

(12) java

(13) hot and cold (version 1)

(14) bedroom mazurka

(15) bedroom mazurka (version)

(16) pablo in red

(17) lama lava

(18) vibrate on

(19) vibrate on (version)

 

[from in fine style]

(20) far east

(21) phillip's showcase

(22) up warika hill

(23) mountain view dub (version)

(24) chuck full and dub

 

[from king david's melody]

(25) king david's medley

(26) zion high

(27) mr. bassie

(28) sufferers trod

 

[from king tubby meets rockers uptown]

(29) keep on dubbing

(30) 555 dub street

(31) brace's tower dub

(32) king tubby meets rockers uptown

(33) skanking dub

(34) satta dub

 

[from original rockers]

(35) up warika hill

(36) cassava piece

(37) tubby's dub song

 

[from blowing with the wind]

(38) ancient harmonies

(39) blowing with the wind

(40) zion ufo

(41) eastern code

 

[from valley of jehosaphat]

(42) kushites

(43) omega africa

(44) internal struggle

(45) sleeping chariots

(46) ethiopia binghi drums