cheese it, the cops!

speaking of art: it's amazing what's hapnin on general hospital these days. i mean it's very typical for sweeps month to get the whole cast at a party and start a gunfight, a fire, a blizzard, and a series of explosions; it might take weeks before you realize that only a minor character they introduced two months ago is actually dead, after the miracle surgeries etc. but now claudia - a paradigmatic super-bitch only much much worse only actually just terribly terribly misunderstood only multiply continuously homicidal and deeply crazy although really just sad and so lonely only sexually obsessed with her brother etc, played by the very-fine and notably buff sarah brown - is heading to the bold and the beautiful or something. so she's being written out in an elaborate way that embroils the whole cast in total disaster. it's a mafia/physician/pregnantwomen conflagration: gh apocalypse. every member of the ensemble has multiple motives to kill claudia, while she has multiple motives to kill everybody, that lovely psychotic bitch! can't get that shit at the met.

 

i've been watching gh since the late seventies. here's a piece on gh aesthetics from maybe a decade ago.

in the new york review of books dated november 19, peter brooks, a lit crit with a line in henry james, reviews some books about the louvre and the founding of the modern mega-museum, a development which i would say reflects and also drives an entirely new conception of art in the west that develops in the late eighteenth century. in the familiar narrative, napoleon loots europe and sticks the loot in a gigantic more-or-less abandoned palace. then the british follow suit and the americans etc and pretty soon you've got a mega-museum in every capital etc. now despite all the problems in the assembling of these collections, brooks gives a merry little tribute to the monster museum at the end of his piece. "a consensus has emerged that it is the fate of great art to end up in the museum - it's neither safe nor viewable elsewhere.... We might never have had the museum without cultural looting, but who would give it up today?"

well, i might. but right now i won't. i only want to point out that, for example, the metropolitan museum says that it possesses 5 million objects. now how many of these are on display? 20,000? so in what sense is the work "viewable"? it's like - correction: it is - a massive bunker of art, a miser with a stashed hoard of useless gold. the point isn't to display the art; it's to segregate it or insulate it, to assert its priceless uniqueness by, um, burying it forever etc.

but the good part about this is that by taking all the masterpieces and the whimsical astonishments of the avant-garde and sticking them all in big stone bunkers, these institutions demonstrate that the art they house is dead. these institutions are tombs. so that frees us from the endless weight of tens of millions of masterpieces and lets us breathe in a world of actual art that's alive: you know, good cooking, well-made clothing, our rose bushes, excellent pop music, your quilt, and stuff. in yanking the dead art with its infinite weight, its more-than-human status (which, admittedly, is a status that is manufactured by the institution and its accompanying practices in art history etc), out of our lives, the mega-museum frees us to live.

[one side note: the worst possible argument for the proposition p is "a consensus has emerged that p." if a consensus has emerged that p, p  is certainly false.]

even in death, michael jackson sucks. if i could, i'd revive him from his permanent anesthesis and kill him again: you know, drive a stake into his heart and bury him at a crossroads; soak him in kerosene and toss a match like a pepsi commercial; hang him high at a little boy's birthday party and use him as a quasi-human pinata; etc.

There he was arrested on September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters avoid heavily-armed cops -- an activity the State Department lauded when it happened in Iran. ...

But a closer look at the court documents leaves the unmistakable impression that Elliott Madison is yet another casualty of the government's nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents as threats to national security.

this piece from cnn is remarkable for not just going: "anarchist" rioters! anti-government insane people! etc. indeed, the very notion that we do not live in an entirely free society is for the most part unrepresentable in our media. so, um, good job.

john kerry  appeared as a witness as barbara boxer's climate-change hearings, declaring that the science is unequivocal (he started there and then went hyperbolic). now why call a senator to assess the science? because on this matter politicians are scientists and scientists politicians. this, i suggest, makes assessment of the evidence impossible.

offhand i would think that this gives you the worst of all possible worlds: you dick around and don't really make a decision. it's politically scary to withdraw from afghanistan. it's politically scary to commit the number of troops necessary to do the job. so you spend weeks pro and conning and really come out with no clear approach/strategy/idea of where you're going. i've got a feeling that by the time the bo admin is over that's going to be the kind of story we'll tell: soaring (albeit empty and repetitive) rhetoric and meek actual actions. eugene robinson, among others, has this right.

fcc regulation of radio, television, and cell phone frequencies has been wielded to allow an extremely narrow range of media corporations to corner public discourse. well, that kind of thing is what regulation is for. indeed the fcc "owns" the...atmosphere: they auction off spectrum and so on, which is only comprehensible within a claim of ownership. at any rate the last thing we should want is the fcc owning the internet and selling chunks of it to...you know, newscorp or whatever.

regulation of communications was certainly not a function of the state as the founders of the american republic conceived it - explicitly the reverse - and the fcc is a completely aconstitutional accretion in the first place. (of course, there is no power that federal govenment might claim that can't be justified under the history of interpretations of the interstate commerce clause.)  that's not an academic quibble: the actual effect has been to shape and deaden public discourse

last night on hardball, chris matthews interviewed stewart rhodes, the founder of a group called the oath keepers, a group of military people, police officers, firefighters etc. who are pledging themselves not to obey orders that directly violate the constitution: for example, to disarm the american people or to round people up into concentration camps. now i do not really know anything about who these folks are or how many people are taking these pledges, etc. some of the items seem more reasonable or right to me than others.

but matthews was at his absolute worst in this interview. he just berated the guy as a crazy person, and went on and on, pointedly not allowing rhodes to respond. then he ended with "i'll defend to the death your right to say whatever you want," while pointedly not allowing rhodes to speak or listening to what he was saying. he portrayed the oath keepers as a an armed militia or vigilante group, whereas that does not appear to be the idea at all: they are saying what they won't use their weapons for, not threatening anyone as an armed force.

to the extent that he was able to respond, rhodes's positions were things that matthews, for one, would entirely support, except that even the mainstream left is just flatly, happily totalitarian at this moment, because they have the power. matthews is like: 'what are you taking about? concentration camps? do you really think that that can happen here?' rhodes: 'well it has happened here: remember when the u.s. government interned japanese americans? was that a good idea? maybe people shouldn't have participated. it can happen anywhere. glance at history' etc. matthews was like: what is the government you people are always talking about? there's congress or the executive, dems and repubs: there is no the american government. rhodes: 'well, who passed the patriot act? it was completely bipartisan. was that an abuse of government power? think about all the abuses of executive power during the bush/cheney administration.'

matthews just kept saying "crazy right-wingers"; rhodes just kept saying things that any leftist who is not an inyourface totalitarian should certainly agree with - things, i want to say, that are plainly true - without making a dent. and it's the exactly-right approach: obedience to evil orders is the source of the greatest disasters human beings have ever inflicted on each other. matthews waved even that off, saying that "everyone knows this 'ilegal orders' stuff: it's already built in." yeah sorta. but are you out of your mind?

news from new freedom: meat bingo!

i wouldn't necessarily have selected climate change as the issue, but the yes men, whom i've been keeping up with here and there for many years, just kick ass. and they kick ass in an hilarious way.

here's an important piece on sudan, from the latimes: "state-sponsored pyromania." i remember susan rice, now the ambassador to the u.n., saying that the one thing she learned from serving in the clinton admin, with regard to rwanda, is that you can't dick around while the genocide goes forward. it's amazing how fast the political calculations set in when you actually have the power to do something. for that matter, obama really seemed to pledge to intervene during his campaign. there is nothing happening. ok i'm an anarchist blah blah blah, but i believe that if you actually do have to power to intervene in a genocide, you are morally obliged to do so. we do, and we are obligated. but we aren't doing a damn thing, i believe. the success of our diplomatic effeorts to isolate the regime and so on will coincide with the final emptying of the region of its living human beings.

the regime in iran is a very good example of squishy totalitarianism. here's a good model of essentially the way china or the u.s. or the eu etc are running their economies: by the merger of state and business:

The Revolutionary Guard has already worked its way into virtually all aspects of Iran's economy, from banks to manufacturing to the oil sector, and it is believed to have a hand in the country's black market. Isolation under sanctions could push even more of the economy into the corps' hands.

"A lot of companies that have invested in the economy are linked to the Revolutionary Guard," said Alireza Nader, an Iran expert with the RAND Corp. "You can make the argument that if you scare away foreign investors, you are strengthening the Guard."

as i've often indicated, i like david brooks. he's a more thoughtful person than the average columnist (more thoughtful than me, for example); he reads and thinks more than most columnists; he writes better than most columnists. sometimes, however, like today, you'd have to say that he's a bit out of his element. few columnists would go anywhere near the question of different conceptions of the human self, so points for that. but when he sets this up as philosophers vs psychologists, he just has no idea what he's talking about.

perhaps aristotle had some kind of unitary or atomic conception of the self (though that's a hard and interesting question). but no major philosopher who i can think of in the twentieth century who considered the matter at all didn't see that there was a problem, and whole movements of philosophy have shattered that sucker more thoroughly than any psychologist could.

for example, hume totally ripped up the cartesian self in the mid-eighteenth century. hegel socialized, historicalized, and smacked the self in 1810. multiple complex selves were flying all around the philosophy of nietzsche. you know, dewey, gilbert ryle, wittgenstein, foucault, derrida, deleuze etc etc: not a single single self to be found anywhere. 

"philosophy says x" is never a good idea. but here it's just completely uninformed.

if i were balloon boy's dad, i would be really pissed off that he fucked up my thing. families need to stick together, and children need to emulate and in turn pass on their parents' traditional american values: you know, that only notoriety matters, and the cash that follows. this time i'd really put that six-year-old bastard on a balloon and let him float away.

a few weeks ago, i set up a google alert for the term "anti-government." each day brings me (a) scary stories of anti-government extremists in the u.s.; people, even, that oppose multi-trillion dollar deficits because...they must be racists, and (b) admiring stories about dissidents in iran, china, yemen, and so on. with regard to domestic politics "anti-government" is self-evidently evil and incomprehensible. with regard to everywhere else it is the outbrak or democracy and freedom, a georgewashingtonesque excellence. people seem...confused.

"why wine matters" begs the question. wine doesn't matter. if wine did not contain alcohol, and if people were not obsessed with rationalizing the introduction of alcohol into their bodies, wine connoisseurship would not exist. the measure of that obsession at the extreme upper end of the social spectrum (and those who aspire to simulate that status) is the unbelievable preciousness and...extreme effeminacy of whingeing wine-whining. course i say this as someone who's...kinda pissed off at the substance alcohol.

In among such adventures, Nossiter makes a passionate case for the cultural importance of wine. Disdaining “winespeak,” he uses literary and historical metaphors. Bordeaux wine, for instance, is structured like “a hefty novel,” whereas a Burgundy has the “staccato lyricism” of a poem. (That sounds pretentious, but when I tried it out on my wine buddies they thought it hit the mark.)

this leaves it open whether these liquids taste more like a limerick or more like paradise lost, more like war and peace or harry potter and the goblet of fire. i'd suggest not trying to pay off on the metaphor, but there's no stopping a sommelier. does it taste more like a vermeer or picasso? the protestant reformation or the battle of stalingrad? the rockies or the andes? brahms or cage? robert johnson or natalie imbruglia? conceptualism or neo-expressionism? mars or saturn? anyway one kind of feels that substance abuse has been confounded with art: just go to the museum. then come home and cut to the everclear.

bono really always has a profound, comprehensive vision, as measured by the profundity and comprehensiveness of his astounding sunglasses. that's why i take him seriously, even while he's muttering cliches in unison with everyone else.

since i frequently slap at frank rich, i want to say that this is good. but i also want to say that it's caught up in the anachronistic state vs corporation, pre-squishy-t conceptuality. so, ok, let's say that we create a new bureaucracy, a financial consumer protection agency. who do you think would staff such an agency? well, who understands the arcane workings of investment banks, etc? it sounds good, but in effect it will be a gov/industry cooperative that will wield the gov's resources in such a way as to benefit both. "consumers" can't be represented, because they've got no idea what's going on. 

so my daughter emma is taking a class at nyu with the great/weird popomo theorist slavoj zizek.she directs me to the fact that he's writing abercrombie and fitch catalogue copy. it, um rocks. i'm envious all the way round.

it's amazing that when people discuss genocide, as in daniel goldhagen's new book (at least as it's represented in the review; i intend to read it), or in the alternative views mentioned in the review ('“Mobilizing the Will to Intervene,” a study by leading Canadian and American figures, identifies “poverty and inequality, population growth and the ‘youth bulge,’ ethnic nationalism and climate change” [climate change!] as the chief “drivers of deadly violence”'), they ignore the breathtakingly obvious. all of the events mentioned are the acts of states. states possess the resources (derived from coercive taxation and weaponry) to be effectively irresistible when they turn to mass slaughter. we are all potentially their victims throughout our lives.

really, this blindness to what is jumping up and down right in front of you waving its arms and screaming is a testimony to what our era really is: we cannot imagine life without the state; we cannot imagine our own lives except as nurtured, controlled, or subject to the extermination by the state. it has to be . . . what we want, who we most deeply are. it could extinguish the whole planet and the omega man would still be trying to blame the whole thing on...whatever: climate change, the youth bulge. the yout bulge? he'd be in despair because there was no one left to be subordinated by.

correction: actually, goldhagen evidently mentions 9.11/alqaeda. ok not a state. other "eliminationist" disasters mentioned in the review: the holocaust, rwanda, stalin. mao, colonial kenya and guatamala, sudan, srebrinica.

new eminem song. must be real new, as it had less than 500 hits when i got to it today 10:45. dude has got to stop rapping kardashian. i don't know. he's still amazing. but i feel lke the schtick's gettin a bit tired.

as states move to ban "distracted driving" - texting and talking on the phone - they might want to widen their conception a bit. few things are more distracting than a screaming toddler in the back seat, except perhaps two or three: you're constantly turning around and yelling etc. driving while toddled should certainly be illegal. eating, smoking, driving with your hand on her knee while she coos etc: surely all are felonies. cities tend to be extremely distracting, and signs, and complex interchanges. ban em. you might study the distracting power of hip hop vs country vs mahler, and the effects of singing along.

seat belts are distracting, and all those lights and buzzers telling you your doors are open, your tires flat, your belt unbuckled. windshield wipers are distracting, as is, for that matter, weather. now it might be difficuylt to enforce a law against weather, but americans have always dreamed big.

for that matter, we should focus on the other end and notice that some people are more easily distracted than others. anyone who's ever been diagnosed with add, for example, has no business behind the wheel for the rest of their lives.even the non-addled should be required to swallow ritalin, of course, to improve their focus.

in all seriousness, i've listened to the info on texting and driving (though as always in such cases, with some skepticism as to the quality of info), and i have reduced, though not stopped, my texting behind the wheel. i think that that kind of persuasion is the only legitimate way to proceed. no one really wants to crash, various novels notwithstanding. if you can show that it's not in people's interest to text and drive, they'll change their behavior. so take that approach.

forward my minions, etc. but it's amazing how obviously pejorative the coverage is of any given anarchist riot.

The wanton destruction, which lasted for about 90 minutes early Saturday evening, was a dramatic reminder that France and other European nations, below their surface of stability and wealth, harbor tiny bands of ultra-leftist activists who still want to combat the market economies and parliamentary democracies on which the continent's well-being is founded.

"We will destroy your morbid world," one of the Poitiers protesters sprayed-painted on a wall near the city's landmark Notre Dame Cathedral.

well i suppose that the continent's well-being is to some extent founded on market economies and parliamentay democracies. but i also suppose that, if you're going to attribute the ecstasy of europe to its alleged market economies and supposed liberal democracies, you must also hold those items responsible for the miseries of europe, if any.

They donned plastic masks, pulled up their hoods and started destroying everything in sight. In what police described as an organized attack, the band shattered store windows, damaged the facades of several banks and spray-painted anarchist slogans on government buildings.

you might ponder how the specific data about their actions supports the assertion that they were "destroying everything in sight." then they're described as performing "wanton destruction." but though these ultra-violent nihilists more or less leveled poitiers to the ground, there seem to have been no serious injuries, else you can be sure they'd be duly reported. and the only voices quoted are, of course, government spokesmen. 

i'm not asking edward cody of the washington post to endorse anarchist riots, but on the other hand it might be in better taste not simply to go all pravda on us. the piece just takes it as obvious that opposition to the current order in europe is entirely incomprehensible; putting it the other way, the piece blandly asserts that that order is about as sweet and good as it could possibly be. well, to sustain an argument like that (which has no place in a news story anyway), you'd better find out what the objections are. in other words, you've got to do more than just go to the news conferences conducted by officials or re-print their press releases. if immigrants or young people feel profoundly alienated from this system, you might try to figure out why. no point in assuming there can't be any reasons without trying to find out what the reasons might be.

in the most recent new york review of books, diane johnson (author of le divorce etc, masterpiece of the "i was a crack ho...in provence!" genre) praises margaret atwood's dystopian fiction for its astonishing prescience, adducing the following example:

The action in The Handmaid's Tale takes place in Harvard Yard, where men are executed and and their bodies draped on the walls; the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates might have given Atwood an I-told-you-so moment about the approach of the punitive forces.

mexican star infected by bad buttocks procedure

still collecting headlines. how bout this: middle school teacher faces death for killing lover's pregnant fiance.

i don't much like rush limbaugh, of course, though he can be pretty funny. but the whole race/nfl/mcnabb thing is a model case of what's wrong with a painfully p.c. culture. what he argued was that donovan mcnabb was kind of overrated, and that people hesitated to criticize him because he's black, rarer in nfl quarterbacks even five years ago than it is now. well, you know, perfectly plausible, i think. firing and banishing limbaugh for it only precisely illustrates his point.

there are many true or even obvious things that many people actually believe that simply cannot be uttered. is that any way to run a culture? and i well understand the impulse to find those things and say them: a necessary task, and one for which we cannot turn to al gore.

it is straight-up brutal out here in york county, pa.

so peter galbraith, who was helping oversee the un's role in the afghan presidential election, quit in protest and went public roughly with the charge that the un wanted to cover up the fraud in order to prop up the karzai regime (to put it gently, the u.s. gov is in the same position/dilemma: not knowing where to go excpt karzaii, still mouthing the platitudes of democracy). his ex-boss kai eide (the broken english to be excused on the grounds of norewegianness), responds:  

Yes, it has affected me. It's been attacking my integrity. I think it is - has not been dignified, it's not been fair, it's not been true. Of course, for the U.N. mission, we have suffered from that. And of course it has also had an impact on the election process because it has, in fact, considered to heightening the temperature of the discussion. Of course, these last few weeks has had a negative impact.

now i take this to be a form of the following paradigmatic human excuse, which i've...heard over dinner: i didn't do what you're saying i did, and here's why i was perfectly justified in doing it. the problem with galbraith's whistle-blowing is that it "has an impact on the election process" (?) by "heightening the temperature of the discussion." well, exactly. that's why we shouldn't talk about the fraud publicly, or go public with the details, peter. but plus i never tried to withold the details from the public, though i'm telling you, this is why i didn't go public with the details.

then he goes on to what, in my experience, is the amazing and essential third element of the ultimate rationalization/excuse: it never happened; here's why it was justified; and this is not an excuse: "I have decided to address you today; not to defend, not to attack, but to explain." this suggests a possible infinite elaboration. 'that was not an excuse. and here's why i was justified in offering an excuse.'

now the fact that you will, demonstrably, say absolutely anything to defend yourself, by definition without regard for the truth, as you're contradicting yourself in consecutive sentences, makes the total outrage that your integrity and honesty has been impugned (the fifth element of the perfect excuse) even more extremely impressive.

so when kip eide wonders "why don't they believe me?" he might consider, literally, how it would be possible to believe him, what you would believe if you did believe him. perhaps he is suggesting that we should shatter our rationality entirely and embrace the contradiction, believe the absurd and paradoxical, achieve a completely arbitrary and impossible leap of faith, transcend human reason or even thought, and just say 'yes.' yes! kip eide, yes!

i'm embedded in the world of television commercials for girls' toys (don't worry, i have a 9-year-old daughter). it's pretty amazing how the toys track (a year behind) the economy. so bratz, the gigantic-eyed extremely heavily made-up and accessorized dominant doll of 2005 has been replaced by moxie, a plucky dressed-down bratz with slightly smaller eyes and vague obama-like commitments. all the bratz wanted to do was shop, the better to pursue their life goal of embodying the fantasy life of roman polanski, complete with quaaludes. but moxies have to face adversity with courage and lower heels etc. meanwhile barbie has bought the song "barbie girl," the old aqua satire on barbie, and de-ironized it, thus adding on an impossibly intense layer of...irony. seriously, it's exponential.

janie is watching me blog and she points out, which is true, that she hates bratz and moxies.

moxies:

 

bratz: