cheese it, the cops!

rocksteady playlist

my next video slice will be on early jamaican pop and nyabhingi, so i've been throwing together some playlists. here is a one-cd (or close) rocksteady selection. rocksteady was essentially a half-speed ska. and after a few years of lurching, everybody in 1966 kingston was ready to chill out. essentially it is a reggae beat: that's ertainly how the average pop listener would hear it: as reggae.

some extremely key things happened in the rocksteady "era" (all of 18 months 66-68). there was unprecedented emphasis on the bass, which often provided the melody. at the sound systems which were the way music was experienced in jamaica, deejays started "toasting" or "chattering" over dub plates: pressings with the vocals removed and the treble damped. pretty soon the riddim is detached from the song, and many songs could be underpinned by the same track. pretty soon you've got dub. and hip hop. that moment, originary for world pop music, is represented here by u-roy and king stitt toasting over existing tracks.

Rocksteady

(1) The Jamaicans, "Bada Boom"
(2) The Paragons, "Riding High on a Windy Day"
(3) Desmond Dekker, "Fu Manchu"
(4) Bob Andy and Marcia Griffiths, "Young, Gifted, and Black"
(5) The Gaylads, "ABC Rocksteady"
(6) Toots and the Maytals, "Pressure Drop"
(7) Hopeton Lewis, "Boom Shaka Laka"
(8) Sound Dimension, "Mojo Rock Steady" (instrumental)
(9) Winston Wright, "Musical Date"
(10) U-Roy, "Wake the Town (Take 2)"
(11) Gaylads, "I Am Free"
(12) Max Romeo, "Wet Dream"
(13) Soul Agents,  "Get Ready, Rock Steady"
(14) Heptones, "Fatty Fatty"
(15) Roland Alphonso, "Take Me"
(16) Ken Boothe, "Ain't No Sunshine"
(17) Melodians, "Rivers of Babylon"
(18) Prince Francis, "Mojo Rock Steady"
(19) Tony Tribe, "Red, Red Wine"
(20) Alton Ellis, "Cry Tough (Take 5)"
(21) Roland Alphonso, "Rock and Sock"
(22) Gaylads, "Africa"
(23) Tommy and Roy, "Rocking Soul"
(24) Desmond Dekker, "Israelites"
(25) King Stitt, "Rockers Corner"
(26) Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay"

"do the reggay" is one candidate for the first reggae song, or at least the first song to use the word.

i feel depressed and lonely and don't know what to do.  wait! i know: i'll blow up my crotch!! that'll fuck y'all up good.

blacknat2: moorish science temple, nation of islam, nation of gods and earths.

i, like umar farouk abdulmutallab, have explosives hidden in my underwear,.

ok sorry about that video yesterday. replacement is coming. just learning the equipment. sorry to lose nice ratings, etc. but this is more acceptable, both the talk and its audio.

i am having a helluva time doing youtube videos. but i do have a couple hundred subscribers! anyway, i'm trying out a new like 40 buck polaroid video cam. it keeps freezing my imovie etc, so anyway i'm sorry about the annoying form of the titles, which believe it or not was the only thing i could make work.

christ. anyway, political aesthetics (2010, cornell university press) will feature four "case studies": national socialism, punk, black nationalist aesthetics, and american republican neo-classicism. i'm gonna do a sub-series on each. here is the first installment of the first installment: on garvey and rastafariansim, as well a little-bitty intro to "political aesthetics."

this bit should be good for my students in "politics and hip hop" next semester, among other things. playlists etc will get posted along with videos here.

never light the explosives in your lap. geez.

so when the house voted a health bill, it was a truly historic moment. it was historic when the senate voted for cloture the first time. and dramatically, quite literally, quite frankly historic when they voted for cloture the second time. then it'll be historic when the senate passes the bill. then they'll go into the history-making reconciliation process and a further series of quite literally earthshattering votes. then...i guess i'll snooze through any more literally mind-destroyingly historic events that may take place after that.

the philosopher john smith died a couple of days ago. i knew him slightly, from society for the advancement of american philosophy meetings, while i was still a grad student and he was an eminence. he was much beloved as a human being and as a thinker, whereas often it seems like you've got to choose one or the other. 

he's one of a few people that kept the peirce/james/royce/dewey/santayana trad alive in the american academy during a kind of dark age 9For this kind of philosophy) between the rise of analytic philosophy in the thirties and forties and the rorty-type neo-pragmatism of the eighties. (the great john mcdermott is another such figure.) one of the problems with analytic philosophy - and, actually, with several kinds of philosophy, though perhaps not with pragmatism - is that it tries to kill its enemies: the analytic folks were and sometimes are all about how what other kinds of philosophers say isn't philosophy, or is literally meaningless, etc. [if you want my assessment, both these traditions are necessary; neither is sufficient.]

rorty emerged out of the anlytic mode and tried to open things up. but the fact that he became world famous for his revival of pragmatism was, i rather hate to say it, a source of bitterness to the people who never left. not only that, but smith, mcdermott, and their like had a much, much better grasp on what this tradition actually was. so why were they still laboring at the margins while the whole world made pilgrimages to rorty? dunno, really. but the history of ideas, like the other kinds, can be profoundly unjust.

anyway, one thing i can testify to is that john smith's books are well worth reading.

here's an interesting piece by russ douthat on popular pantheism. very true. but one thing i would point out is that pantheism of the sort he's describing is a lot more like the standard religions than douthat or its acolytes would allow, because fundamentally nature is treated as an agent: it tries to achieve an equilibrium; it wants balance; and it wants your worship or connection. our distance from it is like - in fact is - the distance of a sinner from his god. i like the idea better than i like the idea of a transcendent spiritual intelligence, for one thing because that conception can't even be made out: it is nonsensical or contradictory. but on the other hand the modern pantheist hasn't achieved immanence in the object of her worship either, hasn't at all seen that nature is a morally arbitrary system by our standards, that it's not trying to get anywhere, etc. "it's nature's way of telling you something's wrong": it might as well be a scripture: nature as a text, and as the author of a text.

douthat's conclusion - that we are half-animals and half-not, that we are moral creatures and hence not merely natural - is the traditional monotheistic view. here it is used in a really compelling critique of pantheism: that is some of the best philosophical writing i've ever seen in an op-ed column. but i must say that the modern pantheist thinks exactly the same thing in slightly transposed terms: that we stand partly outside the order of nature - which we can harm or nurture - and have to engage in a process to reconnect with it. this sort of pantheism just is a monotheism, perhaps a competitor with judaism, islam, christianity, but also, like each of those in relation to the others, part of the same history.

in fact, you can see it emerging in the same history, together with the emergence of the reformation and modern science. spinoza is obviously a site, and he's trying to show that that treating nature as god is not heretical, is entailed by judaism and christianity. or you get emerson's development from unitarian minister to pantheist minister, which is a far less profound change than it might appear to be. i put thoreau in aslightly different category: his nature is more equivocal and less conscious. but he has been read as a pantheist pope.

now we do have examples of consciousness and goal-directed behavior emerging from material systems: namely in ourselves and each other. so it could be that the universe as a whole is like a giant brain from which consciousness could emerge. however do you really believe that? and why? you're anthropomorphizing the whole kit and caboodle: saying the universe is made in our image or vice versa. also i would point out that consciousness emerges in organisms in an environment, that consciousness is consciousnes of something outside ourselves, is a form of alertness or sensitivity to a world. but what would the world be consious of? itself i suppose: a kind of onanistic god.

at any rate, the structure, while not quite as unbelievable as the traditoonal monotheisms, is unbelievable, or is fundamentally a matter of sheer faith, and is also bent to whatever our purposes might be: it's as it were political rather than an attempt to ascertain the truth.

originally i started watching general hospital when i was 18 and living in a lovely group house in bethesda, md. residents: tweedy: the biggest coke dealer in the area. carl: the heavily-armed biker who, when too drunk to turn off his lights at night, shot them out instead. my stepbrother bob: charming sexual abuser and illiterate victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. gac the depressive ("gac" was, seriously, his last name), who weighed 350 pounds and emerged from his room only to go to the bathroom, literally, for years on end. we fed him through the door, but after a few years on end it was 150.

well other than gac, who putting it mildly didn't date, these guys favored strippers. they'd bring them home, make them scream all night - sometimes in a good way, sometimes not - and then leave them in the morning to head to work. (tweedy's cover was auto mechanic; his cash was buried in the woods somewhere.) so there would be strippers - often, you know, 14-year-old strippers, but also 22-year-old strippers  - draped around the living room watching soaps, after they woke up early in the afternoon.

i was a student and often home mid-day. so i hung out with strippers watching soaps, listening to their tales of woe, as created by my housemates. often they seemed to resent the fact that that they had been passed from carl to bob to tweedy or perhaps the other way round. and yet...there they were and after their shift that evening they'd be back, perhaps with a friend. well there was coke, booze, and extremely bad boys. still i didn't think they were really getting what they wanted or acting rationally. they kept telling me so, actually. i didn't have sex with them, which i did and did not think was a good thing. at any rate, i didn't press the point, but sadly neither did they. i was like their mascot.

tell me this wouldn't be a good stoner comedy, set in 1976.

speaking again of art, i heard that james franco hosted snl last night. past my bedtime. but he rocks on on general hospital. like ed ruscha, he's a twisted, vicious serial killer but on the plus side a gifted young artist (except that ed ruscha isn't a serial killer [probably], isn't gifted, isn't young, and isn't an artist). i wonder whether, when franco did maxie on the floor of his studio/torture facility, he understood that he was doing zenon, space girl, i.e. kirsten storms? yes!: that's a tiny raven-symone standing behind her. (i have raised daughters, now 21 and 9). well zenon: girl of the 21st century wasn't real good, but it was better than zenon: the zequel, which in turn was better than ed ruscha's "visual interpretation of winter."

 

 

almost twenty inches of snow and as the sun comes up the new world is gleaming. each little breeze brings a shower of powdered diamonds off the trees. every secretive animal around me in these woods and fields - maybe deer, fox, coyote, bobcat, squirrel, rabbit - has become apparent by its trail. all sound silenced, hand on a ringing bell.

dude. art sucks. i mean seriously. it is of no value whatever. its entire disappearance would make no difference in the way anybody thinks, talks, or experiences anything. it must be sad to be ed ruscha, and realize in your heart of hearts that you have nothing to give anyone, and that you're famous and successful, but have done nothing to deserve it.

and it must suck to be the new york times, where each person is thinking: wow, that fucking sucks. and simultaneously: we got ed ruscha the famous artist! so that you just look at the person next to you, who is thinking, wow, that fucking sucks, and say: how interesting! to which they nod along. your goal in life is not to appear to be an uncomprehending dolt. in the service of which you render yourself an uncomprehending dolt, celebrating the workless work of uncomprehending dolts.

"ed ruscha's visual interpretation of winter":

 

it's anti-capitalist! but the fact that it starts sucking early and keeps sucking all day actually makes you like capitalism, perhaps for the first time.

and that's how you write art criticism.

johann hari, huffpost:

They didn't seal the deal; they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives.

well, that's a relief. at least we can give up now and try to die with dignity.

anyway, a few bald assertions: (1) nature, the earth's atmosphere, etc do not seek balance or equilibrium. they seek nothing at all, and they are volatile. (2) human beings are animals - entirely, 100% natural creatures - and like, say, plants, they can have entirely transformative effects on the climate and that would still be a completely natural event. what else? a supernatural event? (3) running around in circles screaming, or pacing dourly up and down the street with "the end is nigh" sandwich boards and a strange gleam in your eye just isn't working out strategically.

something i'm confused about: is the president a thief, or perhaps the whole government of pakistan, which we are supporting with billions of dollars, a  kleptocracy? or not? i've read rumors or claims that asif ali zardari has a bilion dollars or more stashed in swiss banks. meanwhile, his wife benazir bhutto has been turned into a saint or martyr of democracy. so: is he or is he not stripping the country to enrich himself, as his people starve and die? i really haven't seen any reasonable or informed assessment.

now if he is, it is just hopeless to go on supporting him. the first factor is that the support just ends up in the accounts of zardari and his ministers. the second is that the extreme corruption is exactly why the taliban is attractive. i too could be tempted by rigid religious fanatics in a case where my country is being run into the ground by greed-soaked decadent hedonists. well, the same goes for karzai in afghanistan, and the corruption there was key in the taliban victory over the russkies.

it's good to oppose or try to destroy the suicide-bombing evil fanatics. but you'd better think about what alternative you're constructing, because if you don't you will drop a trillion dollars and not only contribute to the fleecing and oppression of the populations, but lose. and deserve to lose.

watcha listenin to, crisp? dub. the real shit.

alright so i just got through teaching michael veal's wonderful book dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae, and i've been addicted. dub illustrates about a thousand important points about the nature of art, technology, postmodernism, the concept of the song, intellectual property (not), etc. plus it is at its best an intensely excellent music and anywhere in the ballpark an extremely pleasant background to your various activities.

sound systems in jamaica in the mid/late sixties started demanding versions of hit songs with the vocals removed so that their deejays could chatter over them. considering that the songs were two-track or four-track, they accomplished these isolations at first largely by, for example, shutting down the treble, so that the bass came up, which changed the way people moved, the way they heard, who they were.

before long the great king tubby, in the back of his stereo shop, was engaged in secret manipulations of music, and sound systems and producers would bring him songs to be destroyed and reconfigured by insane analog manipulation: extended, reconfigured, echoplexed into whole worlds. then there could be multiple, or many, versions of the same material. by the late seventies, it was a style of music in its own right, with whole dub lps and engineers as stars, including tubby protoges scientist and prince jammy. eventually you could hardly trace the origins of these collages.

this sort of thinking has been fundamental to music ever since: the remix,the hip hop turntablist, sampling, etc etc: our music world is inconceivable without it.

ok the output is very uneven. tubby remixed thousands, tens of thousands of songs. it's easy to find the mediocre stuff; i like dub with an extremely vicious or evil bass line. so let me give you a few albums: king tubby, the fatman tapes; scientist vs the space invaders (the first dub album i bought, make it 1976); apeology by lee perry; keith hudson's pick a dub; and the astounding glen brown's rhythm master vol 1. the latter 2 are producers, not dub engineers, and the dubs are by the tubby combine. great dub versions are all over augustus pablo's records, by pablo and tubby, the classic being king tubby meets rockers uptown. here is the playlist for the disc i made for my non-western aesthetics course:

King Tubby, "King Tubby on the Throne"
King Tubby, "Dubbing My Way"
Augustus Pablo, "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown"
Scientist,  "De Materialize"
Scientist, "Red Shift"
Lee "Scratch" Perry, "Super Ape"
Lee Perry, "Noah Sugar Pan"
Lee Perry "Zion Blood"
Augustus Pablo, "Satta Dub"
Augustus Pablo, "Vibrate On (Version)"
Yabby You, "Chant Jah Victory"
Yabby You, "Jah Victory Dub"
Errol Thompson, "Extraordinary Version"
Phillip Smart, "Cool This Dub"
Prince Jammy, "Dub There"
Dub Syndicate (Adrian Sherwood at the controls), "African Landing"

everything adrian sherwood (a later english outgrowth) ever produced is great, especially the dub syndicate albums, especially murder tone.

you'll do better on itunes but here's amazon.



here's what you should read about reggae.

that the rough guide is out of print is absurd. an immense work of excellent excellence. bass culture is written rather badly, and with way too much irritating quasi-clever cuteness, every strained metaphor made more useless by the phrase "quite literally," and with no sourcing of any kind for the myriad facts it asserts. editing bradley must have been a form of martyrdom. but the info is amazing and the research indispensable.

let me also point you toward blood and fire, steve barrow's wonderful reggae reissue label in the uk.

from the la weekly (thanks, adam!)

 

as i've said many times, barack obama is martin luther king...with a world-annihilating nuclear arsenal, predator drones, the greatest miltary the world has ever known, a sprawling prison system, etc.

here's a really excellent piece on the state of play in the climate-change debate, by two scientists. i like it all, but particularly this graph.

That myth [of pure science] has allowed politicians to shirk their responsibility to be clear about the values, interests and beliefs that underpin their preferences and choices about science and policy. Better to recognize that decision-makers, depending on their political beliefs, will weigh the evidence and risks of climate change differently when evaluating policy options. Their choices will influence the distribution of benefits and costs, and will have varying and uncertain prospects for success. Voters should evaluate the decisions on that basis, rather than on the false notion that science is dictating the choices.

right. and the same goes for the scientists. the first thing i would do if i was editing a scientific journal on these questions, is to demand that in each scientific paper, the authors declare their position on the political questions. the idea that you have no position is absurd in a case like this, as the emails show in spades. state and try to allow for - but in any case reveal - sources of funding, political commitments/connections and so on. that is as close as you can come to enabling people to assess your results objectively. and it is an aid in actually becoming objective. this is why, as a teacher, i don't try to pretend i don't have any opinions. the audience has to know the angle to assess the terrain.

i'm trying to tell you what it would take to actually begin to convince me. because the approach y'all are taking so far just sets off my jive detector like a series of screeching sirens. if you're an actual scientist, you ought to want the suspicion of others on any reasonable grounds. and you ought to suspect yourself: that's the essence of the procedure of seeking truth.

 i want to say how refreshing the piece is in its reasonableness, its humility, its sincerity. it doesn't pretend like everyone else that the science is settled. it doesn't equate puzzlement about masses of difficult or obscure or equivocal data about massively complex systems to holocaust denial. it just pfrobes for the truth with some humility.

it's a paradox. it might seem obvious that only expressions of total certainty will convince people. in a case like this, the reverse is - or at least obviously ought to be - the case. give me something that sounds like you're open and thinking, and you might bring me along. give me exactly one side of the story in your tone of absolute authority and i not only don't believe you, i start to think maybe freedom requires me to emit maximum carbon.

anyway: let the dogma be discredited. that is the best thing that has ever happened to the global warming movement. i'm telling you that in a year, when these people are recovering from their felicitous humiliation, when they are carefully reconstructing the data in the face of objections they have been forced to take seriously, when their degree of certainty is commensurate with their evidence, when the assertions are truth-oriented rather than merely strategic or manipulative, then i will believe them. then i will be mobilizable.

oh yeah, and tell al gore to shut the fuck up.

"Vapors rise as

Fever settles on an acid sea

Neptune's bones dissolve."

indeed. but your lame ass endureth eternally.

i make this the 236th anniversary of the boston tea party. as you may recall the issue was taxes. in celebration i'm urging everyone to send money galore to michele bachman. wait. did i say michele bachman? i meant rand paul.

it might seem that when people whine about taxes, in the tradition of george washington, they are simply being selfish and refusing to help their nation and fellow citizens. but taxation is of the essence. the state is this sort of feedback loop: a little gang gets enough power (=weapons and weapon-wielders) to confiscate some of your stuff, by threatening you with pain or death. the resources thus generated enable them to gain enough power (=weapons and weapon-wielders) to take more of your stuff and move outward geographically: the origin is simply organized crime. now this has never stopped since the peace of westphalia or the late neolithic or whatever, so that now you have world-annihilating war machines which subordinate each of us utterly and to which, for that reason, we sincerely express our loyalty.

resistance is impossible and useless, and every day since 50 BC it has become more impossible and useless. why? taxation.

now i personally think that the state's provision of food, shelter, healthcare - in short our complete loss of autonomy or self-reliance in its ambit - is itself a form of subordination, that a totally dependent population is a totally oppressed population. but leave that aside. these war and genocide machines have slaughtered hundreds of millions. they have developed weapons capable of killing every single thing on earth that lives. you can't do that without taxation.

and if you think taxation is anything other than confiscation, then i suggest that the u.s. gov shift to soliciting voluntary contributions. then the actions of the state would actually be - as they purport to be - the cooperative actions of the people. taxation is where it is obvious that up, down, and all around, the state is nothing but coercion, is nothing but force, is nothing but violence, here as everywhere else. taxation is what democracies have in common with fascist dicatatorships, one-party giant gulags, monarchies, and theocracies: they are all, right at the nub or essence, exactly the same thing: some people taking other people's stuff and using it to subordinate, repress, and slaughter on a scale otherwise completely inconceivable.

now i say these facts are known to everyone and are entirely obvious, right there in your face alldayeveryday. i hold to them against all comers. i say that though john rawls or barack obama have notably high iqs they are in this matter idiots: they hallucinate the state; they live in a fairy world; they have entirely lost touch with reality. barack obama has no idea what he's actually doing, or how, or why.

i just want to point out that joining a war on the wrong side, if any, is not terrorism. if you want to fight us troops, that might be reprehensible, depending on what those troops are doing. it might be treason, if you are a american citizen. but terrorism involves targeting non-combatants.

npr is doing a series on security problems caused by climate change. the first thing i note is that "security"=state authority, so that "security problems"=destabilization of state power. and i will just register this: you don't have to be anarchist to see that sometimes destabilization of the state is a good thing, namely when the state is profoundly repressive.

anyway the first piece, linked above, was a completely incoherent thing about a village in colombia that was destroyed in a flood. this was connected with ascendant drug gangs in the area, and both were connected to global warming and the melting of glaciers. each piece might be a story, but the reporter was completely unable to draw any causal connections. the supposed origin of the flood, much less the drug trade, in global warming - the premise of the piece - was a complete blank, filled in by mere politically-driven speculation or wishful thinking. in his defense, and remarkably, he actually said that he couldn't nail down the connections on which the piece was based. i think that two years ago, when npr was doing a more-or-less indistinguishable series of reports, they didn't mention or even conceive that they were merely asserting, without doing anything to show, that all the bad things happening were due to global warming. that is, there is a sudden chastening of the "movement." if that's due to climategate, then climategate is great: it's forcing people to try to produce evidence and to understand slightly that they have been grasping at mere dogma.

now notice that when i say things like this, i am not laughably opposing all the science. i am demanding empirical evidence, an explanation of chains of causation, whereas the basis of the report was: here are three things that are happening in the same place. they must all be causally connected, and the root cause must be global warming: a pathetic excuse for an account or even a story.

"climategate," in other words, will improve the science. as long as the unanimity was enforced, by mechanisms described in the emails, the science was mere dogma. where there are no doubts, there is no knowledge. i think this shows something about the role of consensus and dissent in human knowledge, about the dangers of epistemic backslapping etc. now that the thing is flowing the other way, there is the danger that we will fail to mobilize and save ourselves from the alleged scourge. right. but on the other hand, now it becomes possible actually to show that there is a scourge, so that if we were to mobilize, we might be able to do it on the basis of information instead of mere yearning after solidarity or collective wishing.

seborga is about the right size for a nation. 

because every aspect of our lives has been in crisis for decades, we now have to move to other ways to express the non-stop ubiquitous disaster. thus the coinage extreme crisis. this would appear to be redundant, but is not. the healthcare crisis is acute and must be addressed immediately. however, we have been muddling along with more or less the same system since 1813. there has never been a moment in my 52 years in which education has not been in crisis. all of these gigantic mini-crises of course take place within the greatest crisis our species has ever faced: global warming, which is our biggest national security crisis.

so it's well past time we started tacking intensifiers on 'crisis,' which now refers to the normal or run-of-the-mill state of affairs in any given sphere. 'crisis,' in other words, has become synonymous with 'reality,' and just as something could be really real, a crisis could be critical. 'crisis' has lost its ability to mobilize, which was all it was ever actually used for anyway. well, i think now you're gonna need actual clubs and body armor to motivate anyone to do anything. during the next presidential campaign, for example, i think we should refer to american education as a "world-annihilating conflagration" or an "apocalypse."

however, i am already kind of bored by world-annihilating conflagrations and apocalypses, which are now available wholesale at six cents per thousand. the concept of the crisis is in crisis, in other words. so, if elected, i will try to remediate the extreme crisis crisis through understatement or perhaps a couple of centuries of absolute silence.

great moments in advertising (cbs): "tonight. for the first time in history. the songs of bob seger. on cold case."

well that "distant relatives" reggae/hip hop thing was desperately bad. sorry bout that! it was completely unfocused, and came off more like nas half-heartedly promoting his next album on mtv or bet than any kind of historical investogation. truly the choice of sway to mc was ridiculous: nat geo needed someone with some vague scholarly chops or some notion of something beyond self-promotion. jeff chang, sitting right there, has done great work on these themes and should have run the show..

it was an amazing line-up of foundational figures, but they didn't do anything coherent with it.

tonight at 7ET national geographic (!) is hosting a panel discussion on the relation of reggae to hip hop, featuring quite the unbelievable cast: nas and damian marley, kool herc (the first hip hop dj), u-roy (pioneering reggae dj ['dj' is used differently in the two traditions*]), jeff chang (author of the great history of hip hop can't stop won't stop), rakim (wu-tang clan), king jammy (dub pioneer) etc. astonishing and they'll stream it live. meanwhile you can see what i make of this connection in a rough draft of a chapter of my next book (political aesthetics), or in the paper version at contemporary aesthetics.

*it's a long story, but roughly a dj in reggae is a rapper; a dj in hip hop is a turntablist, or the guy that stands at the back of the stage constructing the tracks.

if i'm trying to figure out whether the planet is getting hotter, and if so why and with what effects, the last people i'm gonna ask are al gore and sarah palin. first of all, despite all evidence to the contrary, neither is in a reasonable position to read, much less assess the data. second, their views are dictated not by reality but what they want reality to be: their positions are, of course, political positions. their voices are irrrlevant and incompetent, and they should shut the fuck up.

much as one (or i) might have reservations about obama, it's refreshing, though, to have someone in the office capable of actual thought. so in the nobel speech, he goes right after peirce/james/dewey fallibilism and convergence toward consensus as truth, connecting his own politics to classical american philosophy. without hitting you over the head with abstractions.

We are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us. But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place.