cheese it, the cops!

wish carefully

if i were a liberal, i wouldn't necessarily be rooting for santorum, and i wouldn't cross over to vote for him in michigan. true, he looks like an easier opponent. but say he gets the nomination. there's always some chance that something goes wrong: a terribly mishandled international incident; a scandal; an economic crisis. then you end up living your liberal life in a santorum admin. now i wouldn't expect a santorum admin to be as much of a crazed disaster as it seems it could be; no one's going to be banning contraception. on the other hand, i think that, except rhetorically, you wouldn't practically be able to distinguish an obama from a romney admin at all, except perhaps in terms of military spending.

kim jong il on the red carpet

sacha baron cohen rocks. great moments in this particular dimension:

Speaking with E!’s Ryan Seacrest, Baron Cohen said he was wearing John Galliano “but the socks are from K-Mart.”

Baron Cohen, in character [as Adm. General Aladeen, dictator of the Republic of Wadiya] appeared on the “Today” show to threaten “unimaginable consequences” if his tickets weren’t given back.

eat me

mark bittman: The government regulates tobacco and alcohol. Why not diet? and while we're at it, there are a lot of harmful books out there. why not? at any rate, the idea of prohibiting people from buying x, y, and z with food stamps (of course that's already in place in some respects) shows very precisely that dependency and liberty are inversely related, that a dependent population is an abject population, that a welfare state is an authoritarian state. a government that provides your food owns your body.

going nuclear

and speaking of my hawkish streak: i'm surprised by the naivete of the left on iran. don't be blinded by the iraq debacle; it's not the same thing. i thought the evidence the bush admin produced on wmd in iraq was pitiful, and i said so over and over again. on the other hand, don't sit there and tell me that iran isn't working on nuclear weapons. it's obvious. they're saying that even as they're denying it. and have you actually listened to ahmadinejad? it's both wacky and chilling. what to do about it is a different question, but pretending it isn't happening and isn't a big old problem is something else. i know y'all dearly love a theocracy as long as santorum isn't running it, but please.

atomization

sorry for no blogging. life has been overfull lately: moving, among other things, while, um, totaling my car etc. however, my life is less overfull than that of the citizens of homs, and i'd take the approach not of 'arming the rebels,' but of bombing the regime's emplacements outside the city, exploding their incoming tanks, etc. yes it's true then you're in a libya situation and there's no real reason you shouldn't be trying to locate the regime's leaders with the purpose of resolving them into their constituent particles.

ethnic pussies

here's a relatively typical case in which the exquisitely delicate ethnic sensitivities of the press preclude them from actually reporting the story: espn fired a staffer for an 'offensive' headline: we report the story at length, but can't actually say what the headline said. that's frigging ridiculous. we'd do our basic jobs, only we're pussies. the headline itself was only up for a half hour, and for example reading this account would make it impossible to reach an informed opinion on whether the firing was reasonable. you don't want to offend your readers, who are not at all offended for example when you report the actual facts of a murder in excruciating detail. well, lord knows this - whatever it was - was worse than murder.

rain of fire

New York Isn't Like Sodom and Gomorrah, Archbishop Says

really? not at all?

baptize this

this mormon baptism thing is deeply weird. now let's stipulate that being baptized in absentia in the church of jesus christ of latter day saints has no effect on dead people. it can neither redeem nor damn the soul of the deceased, nor indeed create a soul where there was none before. (do jews believe in the soul? or do they believe it in anything like the way mitt presumably does?) at any rate, i say: knock yourselves out. baptize the piss out of me, somewhere deep in utah. just now, in fact, i performed an elaborate ceremony, full of solemn, highly efficacious mumbo-jumbo, to proclaim brigham young and joseph smith posthumously to be atheists, to declare that brigham young and joseph smith were material objects, members of a species of mammals who existed only in the actual world. welcome back to reality, y'all!

i'm for love

on the other hand, i would try again. and even though the j.geils band was my fave in the 70s (partly because they featured the harp of magic dick), i offer the following reply to crusader. dude, don't turn against valentine's!

 

Love is a bar band in Boston or Austin

Ok. Crusader AXE here. I guess the incredible, inscrutable, incomparable one either wanted me to occasionally put something here for the erudite masses, or he just forgot he gave me permission many years ago. Regardless, I'm glad he did. He gets a better class of reader here than we do at the Defeatists, most of whom appear to be robots. 

 

Today's topic is love and Valentine's Day. I speak as a bloodied veteran here on several fronts.

So, in the proper spirit of the thing.  Ok. Yesterday was our 36th anniversary. We are very fond of each other and have a reasonably complex financial life that would make disengaging difficult. We don't want to cause the other pain or even inconvenience. I rate this as a successful marriage. We don't hate each other, wish the other grevious harm, and try not to act contrary to our mutual best interests. 

That said, we got married on Friday the 13th. My thought, being a strategic thinker, was that this way I would not forget both Valentine's day or the Anniversary and hopefully, one would key my brain as to the other. Generally has worked...I see the Valentine's bullshit in the stores, and it triggers the response that I need to do something to commemorate the day so as not to violate the "first, do no harm or cause unnecessary pain" part of my ethic. It does not make me happy. This makes me happy... 

I hate Valentine's Day. It is part of the conspiracy of the consumer society that begins in pre-school to make us all ready for a life of disappointment and conspicuous consumption. 

killed by death

nothing kills a pop star like death. whitney isn't quite on the michael level, but any rational person has already had enough of the stirring tributes and endless re-hashing of the addiction. ok her version of dolly's 'i will always love you' is astonishing. first time i heard it was at the gym at vanderbilt; i just stopped dead, couldn't believe what i was hearing, especially because it was already one of my favorite songs. she had good poppy moments, such as 'how will i know.' on the other hand 'the greatest love' is just dreck. her mother was a great gospel singer; 'the greatest love' just replaces god with...oneself, about the worst and most implausible and most pitiful idea we ever had as a species. don't believe me? ask whitney's 12-step sponsor. the song was a high point in the wave of contentless self-esteem-enhancement and unearned self-worship that in particular women have been surfing for decades. but, like a good spa treatment, all the plastic surgery you can absorb, and all the chardonnay in the world, you deserve it. anyway, i'd say i was at best indifferent to most of her records. great singer, basically meaningless, extremely middle-of-the-road material.

i'll never forget a review i read of the bodyguard (wish i could recall the name of the reviewer). he said that when whitney houston and kevin costner kissed, 'it was like two boards clacking together.'

 

prevent affordable care

obviously i've got no problem with contraception, and i'm pro-choice. but does anyone besides me find it disturbing that the admin, including obama, who's speaking right now, defines contraception as 'preventive care'? i don't think pregnancy is an illness, or that a fetus is analagous to a tumor, etc.

android moses

i'd be sad to see romney go down, though. as barack is our first black president, romney would have been our first android president, a triumph of artificial 'intelligence.' al gore was the moses, and he did not get to the promised land, but romney could have been the android joshua.

tys

i hate 'told-you-so.' but i have been trying to say for months that the frigging experts should stop calling the republican nominating process every week according to who won yesterday or yesterday's polls. it's all sewed up! it's a two-man race! but week to week they don't seem to learn. santorum is perhaps roaring back tonight and most republicans, really, would be a lot more comfortable with him as the nominee. after tonight the common wisdom will be that gingrich is cooked (again). i don't know, don't bet the baby on it. (actually, just to violate my own advice, i do think it's likelly that newt has flamed out.) and of course paul's on his slow burn, and he gets better as a candidate all the time if you actually watch his speeches etc. tomorrow's narrative might be right back to 'two-man race!' with santorum replacing gingrich. it's the kind of thing that the media thinks it must do: provide a 'frame' or a 'narrative' of, putting it mildly, excessive simplicity. but who knows, really?

drop the hammer

i want to say about the post below that i tend to express critical judgments with a sledge-hammer. it took me awhile to reach the point of not deferring to what various other people think and reaching my own judgments cleanly. then it was another step to hammering them home like that. i realize it can seem kind of over-aggressive and arrogant. true true! but one little idea i have is that something like that is action without consequence (like, say, academic philosophy). i love action without consequence; it is extremely liberating. now, i could be wrong about burroughs. it's even probable. one thing my hostile response entails is not reading all the books (a couple, though, way back). the last thing i propose to do is read the complete works of ginsberg so as to spend the next ten years criticizing him in detail. but - who knows? - if i did i might slowly ameliorate the harshness. but anyway say i am wrong. so what? burroughs' reputation is in many hands and has been built up over decades by many authoritative voices. it's not going to harm him, or even those that love him, to say wait that sucks, though it might irritate them a bit. if i say the italian renaissance basically leaves me cold and has been wildly overrated since 1550, that would be a bold, counter-consensus, possibly ridiculous position. but it wouldn't - doesn't - damage anything or anyone, though it might puzzle or offend someone. it has no ethical upshot or implication. so, hammer back! like ziffel, e.g. it's like playing a video game: you can shoot stuff without killing anything! it's complete moral liberation! free yourselves through brutal criticism, my friends, from the cycle of samsara. 

it's important in evaluating me the critic that i don't hate everything, and i'm just as intemperate in my loves as in my hatreds. and then it really matters whether or not i'm expressing these opinions in a clever or funny or sharp way, which i'll leave others to judge (brutally, no doubt).

ok briefly on the italian high renaissance, particularly michelangelo and raphael: it has the opposite problem from the beats: the perfection, embodied in perfectly poised compositional structures, has an inhuman or blank quality. (it's not like i'm the first person to notice that: people started reacting immediately, or cf. caravaggio.) it is pervaded by platonism: the aspiration to transcend this world into an ideal realm. but i don't think that's possible, and i don't think it's admirable. further in, not out, is the course i'd recommend: durer. van eyck. also it is very stuck between paganism and christianity, and between sexual obsession and asceticism, between the actual concrete reality of the human body and human body as a sign of something that can have no body: between self-adoration and self-loathing. the tension is productive, but that's not to say it's resolved. naked bodies everywhere, but weirdly purged of particularity: signs, not things. does michelangelo celebrate or transcend embodiment? does he seek a sexual release or a release from the material world altogether? the sexuality is omnipresent, obsessional, but is, almost ridiculously, also repressed: all these naked bodies have...nothing to do with sexuality. that's...dishonest. the sublimation of sexuality into spirituality is at least as old as the symposium and has a certain profundity and a certain quixotic nobility. also a certain ridiculousness. like: just admit you want to fuck. and what the hell, i think the cult of greeks, as liberating as it felt to roman catholics in the 15th and 16th centuries, or to germans in the 19th, was overwrought. and the patronage structures in which these folks were embroiled were excruciatingly problematic. wait maybe that wasn't so brief!

bury burroughs again

obviously luc sante is a fan of william s. burroughs. but this review of a collection of his letters just makes burroughs more obviously grotesque, ridiculous, and idiotic than he was already. really: orgone boxes, e-meters, random cut-and-paste or 'stroboscope' as literary techniques, drugs drugs drugs: surely these and myriad other details bespeak a miserable, insufferable human being and an obvious literary charlatan. there is not a moment in this review that would give you any reason to do anything but ignore burroughs for the rest of time. do. his status as legend etc is just a sign of critical credulousness. like a lot of the clowns and monsters that emerged in the golden age when shooting heroin and then your wife was an irrefutable indication of transcendent genius, burroughs shows what happens when you actually take modernism seriously as a road to artistic liberation. well, i ain't too impressed by ginsberg, kerouac, de kooning, dylan, etc either. thank god that shit is over, but now we've got to kill the nostalgia too.

it's true that 'literary quality' or even craft can be oppressive, that immediacy, spontaneity, and unfinishedness have their place in the aesthetic repertoire. mere conventionality or following the rules doesn't get you anywhere in the artistic realm. ok! it doesn't follow, as all these folks and their fans believe with such deep conviction, that the worse something sucks, the better it is, that one's intelligence corresponds to the amount of ridiculous crap one accepts, that the nastier and grosser a person is the freer, etc. etc. y'all seem kind of confused.

unresolution

the un in its great courage may be nearing a resolution calling on assad to resign. if i were drafting, the 'international community' would be resolving to sandusky assad with a stick of dynamite, detonate him, then meticulously reassemble him and blow him up again.

longing

 

07 When The Golden Leaves Begin To Fall

 

that's my current candidate for the world's most beautiful song. it's an old bill monroe thing, sung here by the bluegrass supergroup longview, dudley connell (johnson mountain boys) on lead vocal.

romney and trump

trump endorses romney: whatever. in accepting the endorsement, however, romney described the trump hotel in lv as 'magnificent' (start this at about 2 minutes).

surely we can't elect a president who associates himself with the trump aesthetic, any more than you'd vote for a candidate who likes andrew lloyd webber. i mean, there are limits. character matters. there has never been a more repulsive style than trump's, a more crass, banal, and tasteless display of conspicuous consumption. the thing in nyc is grotesque enough. i hope when these things are in ruins, they will be remembered as emblems of the era in which we celebrated by a degraded aesthetic our own economic degradation. the only signifier is gold.

where is william jennings bryan when you need him? yo mitt, you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.

absurd

if mitt romney gets elected president this year, i propose that that is a reductio ad absurdum of our political culture and procedures. he will be elected as a servant of the wealthy, and he will be elected by means of their wealth, at a moment when the hierarchy of wealth has grown excruciating. he is a person of no visible convictions whose whole procedure is to purchase the presidency by means of an infinite barrage of mindless attack ads. the idea at that point would be to move from occupy to destroy. but let me say again: a television commercial does not actually constrain anyone to do anything, and we'd need not only resistance, but some kind of universal self-examination. an american people who can be manipulated this thoroughly by money needs some kind of intellectual or spiritual awakening; folks with so little epistemic autonomy need to change their minds. an endless repetition of the same message ought to have the effect of making people loathe and reject it, not agree or vote for it. the last thing you want to do is prove professors of communication right.

in the age of mechanical reproduction

in case you're wondering, i agree with all these conservative types that catholic medical institutions must be exempted from rules requiring provision of contraception. this, it seems to me, is perfectly clear on constitutional grounds, but also on basic moral grounds according to which one ought not to require people to violate their own ethical and religious principles. as i always say, ask yourself which has been the source of more evil: permitting people to act according to their own moral convictions, or coercing them to act in violation of those convictions. however, on the same grounds, doctors must be permitted to opt out of these state laws requiring that women wanting abortions must be shown ultrasounds or hear their fetuses described in any particular way. here's what i'd actually suggest: such decisions must be left to each individual doctor, working with her patient. this seems entirely obvious to me. stop trying to institute conformity to your own little beliefs, convictions, prejudices, and allow each person to act according to her own.

workin for cheese

from world wide words:

The exclamation cheese!, often written jeez!, is definitely a euphemism for Jesus! But the word in the sense you give isn’t from that source.

Cheese it! means either to be silent (“Will you cheese it! I don’t want to hear!”) or to stop what you are doing, presumably something illegal or inappropriate, or to leave or run away. The expression is now virtually defunct, but it turns up often enough in older writing, as you say, that it’s not entirely unknown even now.

It was originally British slang of the early nineteenth century, but was later taken to the US — it turns up, for example, in a story in O Henry’s The Voice of the City, published in 1908: “The defence of Mr Conover was so prompt and admirable that the conflict was protracted until the onlookers unselfishly gave the warning cry of ‘Cheese it — the cop!’” It’s also in The Inimitable Jeeves by P G Wodehouse, published in 1923: “He had been clearing away the breakfast things, but at the sound of the young master’s voice cheesed it courteously.” The first example occurs in James Hardy Vaux’s A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language of 1812. Flash at the time referred to men associated with disreputable sports such as boxing and generally to thieves, tramps, and prostitutes, so flash language was the cant or slang of criminals.

Vaux said that cheese it meant to keep quiet or to stop, desist or leave off doing something. What he actually wrote was that it meant the same as stow it, which Vaux explained as “an intimation from a thief to his pall, to desist from what he is about, on the occasion of some alarm.” This is a much older expression that comes from the idea of putting cargo in ship’s storage and shutting the hatches.

Unfortunately, we don’t have such a simple explanation for cheese it. It might have been a version of cease. Jonathon Green, in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, also points to an old proverb, after cheese comes nothing, which refers to cheese being the last item in a meal. This sounds more than a little literary and stretched, but perhaps the proverb was well enough known then that it made sense just to say “cheese!”

i'm not working for bread. i'm working for cheese.

this blog will be makin models out of strippers, makin water out of liquor.

blog design

update: i'm sort of in crisis mode as both my daughter's mom marion and my own mom joyce have been in thehospital the last few days. but i am listening!

obviously i am playing with the design, etc. just needing something new, in every possible aspect of life. tell me what you think, though it's still in process.

romney for dictator

if you allow yourself to be manipulated by this poison into voting for the person with whom it originates, you richly deserve the fatal dose. stop blaming super-pacs and start blaming yourself. indeed, i would say that people whose vote can be affected by vicious, unbelievably obvious and painfully simplistic propaganda are demonstrating that they don't deserve even the vestiges of democracy.