cheese it, the cops!

great scott

i've been reading the works of the yale political scientist/anthropologist james c. scott, for example the art of not being governed; an anarchist history of upland southeast asia and seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. it's work that flips your head over. the experience of reading it reminds me of the first time i read foucault's discipline and punish: you suddenly see what we and our histories lok like from a completely different angle: the truths that you can only see from the outside. also like foucault, scott does theory by producing detailed empirical observations; there is very much hard work i can't help comparing my own work; i am more likely to wield the big theoretical construction; i wish i had more of scott's consciousness, though maybe you need both. 

i'm not sure how i missed this stuff; it's easy to not register 'james scott,' and i kind of thought he was writing about some ragtag bands of anarchist rebels in burma or something. not at all. scott's data ranges around the world, but is also insistently particular and local, which is precisely what the intellectual structure he's constructing demands. so, he's roughly to be ranged in the movement of 'anarchist anthropology' that would include michael taussig and peter clastres and then younger figures such as david graeber. this sounds obnoxious, i admit; why combine the name of a political position with the name of a discipline? what if i said i'm doing capitalist anthropology or something? 

but really here is the idea: such disciplines as environmental studies, anthropology, and political science are infested with statist assumptions that need to be questioned to get at the truth. here's how scott states one of the basic ideas of this trend:

Shatter zones are found wherever the expansion of states, empires, slave-trading, and wars, as well as natural disasters, have driven large numbers of people to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places: in Amazonia. . . in that corridor of highland Africa safe from slave-raiding, in the Balkand and the Caucasus. The diagnostic characteristic of shatter zones are their relative inaccessibility and enormous diversity of tongues and cultures.

Note that this account of the periphery is sharply at odds with the official story most civilizations tell about themselves. According to that tale, the backward, naive, and perhaps barbaric people are gradually incorporated into an advanced, superior, and more prosperous society and culture. If, instead, as a political choice, to take their distance from the state, a new element of political agency enters the picture. Many, perhaps most, of the inhabitants of the ungoverned margins are not remnants of an earlier social formation, left behind, or, as some lowland folk accounts in Southeast Asia have it, 'our living ancestors.' ...Their subsistence routines, their social organization, their physical dispersal, and many elements of their culture, far from being the archaic traits of a people left behind, are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby states and to minimize the likelihood that statelike concentrations of power will arise among them. art of not being governed 8

scott ends up producing incredibly rich evidence for such assertions. the narrative of history or of hunter-gatherer indigenous tribes that reveal our stone-age past and so on, the teleological conception of history, is inherently a state dogma. my favorite little example, which is mentioned by scott, are the seminoles: they are themselves some kind of extruded portion of the cherokee nation intermixed with whatever was in florida. and then they welcomed and interbred with escaped slaves; they were so quaintly primitive; they were so hybrid and schooled in the arts of resistance. that might be quite typical. it's not like different people literally inhabit different temporalities, and i doubt that any human band is evr truly isolated for very long. scott does point out the disadvantages of living in the lowland valley states: corvee labor, conscription, taxation. obviously, some people might rationally opt into the woods. scott is fascinated too by everything that takes place within state formations that delays, irritates, evades, or undermines it.

 

the melody of death

one thing i notice about all the year-end death round-ups is that a very high percentage of the people who are mentioned were in the music biz. i think that's an index of the degree wo which music is something that is central to our national identity.

nothing succeeds like excision

you know, people have made fun of contemporary secessionists. but secession in itself is never the wrong idea. now, i think that if you live in blue america, with your delicate sensibilities, latte, and metrosexuality, you might seriously entertain seceding from the reds. remember, radical abolitionists were as much in favor of separating the country as were the slavers. each nation can continue to divide from there until we're down to the secession of each consciousness from itself. that's my prediction for 2013!

nude pics of abe lincoln!

watching spielberg and kerns-goodwin again on morning joe on lincoln. they're helping me to a formulation of my political orientation: with regard to anyone who might think or say, like the god of israel, 'i am clothed in immense power': i will strip your ass naked and show it to the world. power is an outfit, a uniform, a disguise, a shroud, a photoshopped self-portrait. what kerns-goodwin and spielberg are expressing - and really they just almost say this straight out - is the continuing cult of political power = our continuing need to be subordinated. it is literally idolatry: the god on his throne in his temple in our capital. lincoln the film is just that. on the other hand, it's hard to deny that lincoln had at his disposal a very large army, capable of burning your city in a pinch. so i suppose he was clothed in immense power. of course, there's the part where spielberg or k-g or kushner point out rather perfunctorily that lincoln was a flawed human being, not a god or a myth. well, they're right there, only they are being entirely disingenuous. isn't there a moment in the film where someone says to lincoln, speaking for all the auteurs involved: you've reached semi-divine status. maybe they have a half-conscious idea of connecting mythologies: the cult of political power and christianity: god is...human. but infinitely more. lincoln of course gets the christ treament routinely. and on kerns-goodwin's own account, this material, also central to obama's understanding of himself and his role, is a defense of politics as a transformative enterprise. well, the message of the book/film is 'compromise,' or as sesame street would put it: share. ok. but in her centralization of that quote, k-g shows what she really means: a super-powerful person can transform us: find someone and do what he says. then we will be as one.

thinking like a monster

so i said i didn't want to understand or humanize adam lanza. and of course i don't know; maybe he was a completely delusional schizophrenic, the kind of person where it really does no good to search for comprehensible motivations. but let me try this. he had trouble making any sort of social connections or even holding a conversation, we're told. perhaps the spectrum he was farthest on was the shyness spectrum; he could barely speak to anyone but his parents. i've known four-year-olds like that. but even if the extreme shyness came from him, he also believed (insert a 'perhaps' in every clause for me, if you would) that the fact that he couldn't connect with people was partly their fault: they should have reached in, seen who he really was, fallen in love with him, and so on. people weren't much but a source of mortification, abandonment, and pain. everyone who ever smiled at him and then didn't know what to do because he was so strange, and so sidled off uncomfortably, betrayed him. then perhaps he worked this up into a kind of moral fury in which you're judging everyone all the time, hyper-emphasizing the negative.

let that infest your thinking and then spend a few years reading the news; it is possible to see the monstrousness of human beings every day, from the regional murders to the overseas wars: syria, say. watch politicians in action; mitt romney ran for president this year, talking about his fundamental convictions, har har. think about what we do for entertainment from the point of view of my hypothetical adam lanza, furious moralist. or what we do to the environment. and yet everyone is talking love, hope, democracy, leadership, etc.

then maybe his only relationships were with his parents, and what we would think of as the normal wrenching crap around their divorce and then also his mother's threat to commit him showed him that he had absolutely no one. then the thought perhaps occurred: homo sapiens is a species of frauds, hypocrites, and killers: we are liars; we are lies. then, with ever-growing conviction: the world would be better off without us.

now perhaps adam lanza was happiest when he was little, in 1st grade, say, or at least he remembered that as the best period of his life. in his head, i am speculating on god knows what grounds, he was saving these children by killing them: saving them from being victimized, and from becoming hateful lying monstrous teenagers or adults. he couldn't save all the children; but whatever shred of decency he had left demanded that he save as many as possible. so he went to where there were a lot of children together and opened fire. he was armoured up to keep going as long as possible. he might have wanted to kill hundreds of children. he would release them, and punish their parents and his own. and he would show the whole world, in a way that could not be ignored or ameliorated or explained away, the real essence of destruction that lurks within us. for of course he was a people himself: he was himself what he hated most. he too deserved to die. well, hard to quibble with that part by the time he'd finished up. it was always part of the plan.

what does it mean that perhaps i can see this or envision a project of trying to see something like this? well now that disturbs even me. if something along these lines was his train of thought, he was, i believe, not entirely wrong, sadly. but he was not entirely right, thank god. i pondered writing this entry in the first person, as adam lanza. but even though that is what is called for aesthetically - a first-person novel or whatever - i would not want to own that series of thoughts even with a fictional displacement of the 'i.' and yet it was me who assembled this series of thoughts from whatever shreds we've gotten, so i can't disown them exactly either. 

plan b and progress

that plan b thing last night was bizarre. i still haven't heard a plausible explanation of what boehner was trying to do, and it seemed almost precisely formulated to alienate his own tax obsessives. i would expect he cannot persist as speaker. perhaps it was actually a test to see whether he could command his own caucus? now, on the other hand, if i were a democrat, i would be concerned by the triumphalism, which becomes ever-more extreme. see, progressives have always believed they own the future. they believe more or less that their kind of progress is inevitable and also something they willl push like mad. they view themselves as spokespersons for the future. this tempts them to believe that they have found the millennium at the election; listen to the victory raps in ads by msnbc hosts, for example. there is so much gloating and so much bludgeoning of the 'right-wing crazies' (cf krugman again today). if you think american conservatism is over, i think you will very soon be absorbing another refutation of your theory of history.

what's up with hillary?

i would be a bit concerned about the health of hillary clinton. supposedly she's not going to be at the kerry anouncement today. maybe the stomach flu/concussion thing is all there is to it, though she certainly seems to be down for quite awhile; i don't know that we have the true story, any more than i am confident that daniel inouye's last utterance really was 'aloha.'

hata base

one of wayne lapierre's sugestions at that nra news conference (interrupted repeatedly by protests) is that there should be a national database of the mentally ill. i think facial tattoos might be a good idea too.

wake up to a completely transformed world

well, the apocalypse has occurred, and our lives and world have been completely transformed in every aspect. a new world has replaced the old world. but amazingly enough, the new world is indistinguishable from the old world. we escaped into the same. everything, even you, has been replaced by itself. i think the idea was to teach us that we better learn to like where we are. only then will god show us something else.

run

you'd have to assume that there's a run on sales of semi-automatic rifles right now.

it's amazing to watch all the people saying that the most important thing is to make it easier to involuntarily commit adults. also one theory seems to be that adam lanza killed his mother and went on his spree after she threatened to commit him. it's sort of a classic response: our solution is to stigmatize or dehumanize a certain bunch of people who share some vague set of qualities with the disasterer. really what's being said is we need more incarceration, preventive incarceration based on a shared profile; or, people like that should interned until the conflict is over. and if you think that the psychologists have a good taxonomy of the relevant illnesses or account of their etiology or effective treatments etc - or, for example, if you think that psych profs are the sort of people who are likely to be developing such things in the future - you have not been watching; trusting them to convict or exculpate possible future criminals is an extraordinarily bad idea. we tried that kind of stuff before. 

Clarity, madness, venality and heroism...

In which Crusader AXE uses a picture of Gina the PTSD suffering IED dog to illustrate how sadness in the face of pain and madness infects us all, confusing the better natures and sparking occasional moments of communication outside the noise media...and then fades away .

they will never re-open that school.

supposedly fox news has 'banned' discussion of gun contol. well, they're talking about it right now.

threatened by loners

it's rough being a loner these days, and every psychologist starts with that in the profile of the killer. i have heard social authorities actually telling people to be on the lookout for loners. the loner is the contemporary version of what previous cultures referred to as the 'barbarian' or 'savage': people not quite completely subject to our relentless socialization and picture of what it means to be human (=like us). direction of causation as well as extreme vagueness are problems with this analysis. are we loners weird wacky killer-people because we don't belong to the kiwanis, or do we avoid the kiwanis and they us because we're weird wacky killer people? anyway, i just want to alert you to the fact that even more elaborate efforts to socialize us loners or require us to party with you chumps is likely to have a reverse effect; you're becoming ever-more relentlessly though only semi-seriously caring, obnoxious, and indistinguishable from each other, and we tend to react badly.

in terms of beefed-up background checks, you might want to give a questionnaire: when was the last time you ate out? you don't sit in a study alone writing books (manifestoes, epic suicide notes, etc), do you? anyway, i just hope that the next mass killer is like a preppy frat boy with a thousand beer-soaked friends or a junior leaguer from dallas or a gay trelevision chef.

review for the mid-term

squishy totalitarianism: the political/economic/aesthetic/psychological system or syndrome shared in common, for instance, by contemporary china, the european union, and the united states. it is characterized by a complex so-called 'technocratic' merger of state and capital; large-scale mechanisms of subject-formation such as compulsory state education and regulation/monopoly ownership of the media; a relative tolerance for some forms of diffuse dissent and scope for individual choice, particularly in consumption, combined with pervasive state and corporate surveillance; overwhelming police and military force and sprawling systems of incarceration; entrenched extreme hierarchies of wealth and expertise (plausibly declared by such authorities as spode to be the purpose of squishy totalitarianism); regulation of the economy by monetary policy in cooperation with banking concerns; an international regime of national sovereignty combined with international state/corporate mechanisms for the circulation of wealth.  

hopeful note: st is no more difficult to resist than any other 'system'; every expansion opens up new interstices. 

mistakes you don't have to make

it really is amazing how wrong everybody got the story, in virtually every respect. they misidentified the shooter as his brother. for like 24 hours everyone was asserting with complete assurance that his mother was a kindergarten teacher at sandy hook. then they said he went there as a student. all that is wrong. they said he left the assault rifle in his car and fired all the shots with handguns; now all the shots came from the bushmaster, and so on. now, in any particular case, maybe it's the police who are giving the wrong info or maybe it's the media developing it independently. and of course, reporters are human and will make mistakes. but i say that they can and should do better than that. i'm impatient too, but you really do need to take deep breath and think about sourcing, confirmation, etc.

the familiar problem gathers: everyone wants to know what's going on, wants to participate in some wise in the mourning. so all media gather and engage in saturation coverage. the town becomes a kind of truman show or something. after the fortieth time they put on a psychiatrist to tell you how to talk to your kids or pay tribute to the victims, you begin to lose the emotional thread and participate in a media spectacle. the more attention they bring and the more they insist on telling the story, the further it starts to recede into a kind of fiction, with a kind of pre-determined narrative shape: the heroes, the community pulling together, etc. not that any of that is exactly false, but one begins to experience it as though it were a fictional narrative: they want to construct it that way for us and it attenuates the immediacy in a way that both helps everyone turn a corner, and puts the thing away somewhere where we have it contained. the narrative form requires some sort of resolution, and that requires at a minimum a process of systematic simplification. again you lose the excess, where the reality of an event like that enters into our experience: the moment where you can't face up that is the real response.

after awhile you start to worry that you want to watch people in pain as a kind of entertainment. you're getting it right where you get your sports and romcoms. you start to doubt the sincerity of the anchors' and politicians' formulaic emoting. you start to doubt your own.

lisa and brian lamb

lisa's having trouble commenting, and i do note that comments have been very few lately, even when views spike. other people having problems? maybe i will make adjustments; the spam filtering might be too much. here's lisa:

 

Good discussion (video), Crispin.

I confess I can't fathom the kind of rage you were talking about. I can only understand it in the most abstract, intellectualized sense.

I can understand it with people who've been brutalized -- who've been to war, or who've been tortured or beaten -- or watched someone else be brutalized. That I get. But an ordinary middle-class kid? I'm glad to know about it, I think it's important to have these discussions, but I can't say I understand it.

The autonomy thing, yes, that I totally get. If anything, girls understand this even more deeply than boys. We're shoved along a rigid path, with ridiculous societal expectations, from the get-go. If I had lived 100 years ago, I probably would've been full of rage. And, like so many women then, driven mad, or just stuffed into some hell-hole asylum for being insufficiently obedient an "unwomanly."

Anyway, as I said, it's important to have these discussions.

(I still say a monthly shot of estrogen for all men would calm the world down considerably!)

http://eyeofthestorm.blogs.com/eye_of_the_storm/2012/12/you-have-to-not-figure-this-out.html#tpe-action-resize-633

it's funny but that was me like 13 years ago. i don't think i did much of anything in that interview by way of explanation; he asked me like 'why are these kids so angry?' and i said 'it's about some kind of rage.' not exactly my most brilliant insight. what i did want to do and think i sort of did in that interview was to make the thing a little more human, or to say i could somehow connect to harris and klebold, little as i wanted to. and my view then was that we tried to find an explanation that would distinguish them from us, but that them was us, just bent a bit further. now i'm 54, even less attuned to my own adolescent experiences. and also i will say this: newtown is deranged in a way i just do not understand at all. and i really in a way also do not want to understand it. i want to not understand it, as i said before. so maybe now i'm the one insulating myself or disavowing them. 

 

Tell me, Crispy, of what philosophical school is Krampus an alumni?

In which Crusader AXE explores Musicology, Existentialism, Mysticism, and several beautiful girls with marvelous voices, a couple of Texans, a Geezer or two and recommends some Bing Crosby as angst producing and reflective poetry. 

making an example of you

i think it is a betrayal of the dead to turn them instantly into an example of something, immediately to put them to use in your endless prosecution of your case. 'it's all about guns': no it is a real human situation: it's about emilie parker, 6, and her people. maybe her death can lead to change etc; well, maybe, and that might be good; but this moment just can't be primarily about how to put her death to use. i saw a woman on tv saying 'it all is because of one thing: we need laws to make it easier to commit people involuntarily. but emilie has to have somewhere the status of a particular person and not a case, an example, a projectile to hurl at your opponents. i think in a way the immediate resolution to put her to use as a debating point is narcissistic; it makes emilie an apparition or a symbol or an illustration, something that exists primarily inside your consciousness instead of out there in the world where she did live and die.. 

under the gun

let me try to do something on guns. the entries below, contrary to how people have responded online and off, do not defend gun rights. they only insist that you not run to the most automatic and partisan interpretation, because this interpretation abandons the event itself and enters into a realm of abstractions. the political polzarization in this country is just absurd, and there is nothing, nothing, that everyone won't just feed into a pre-existing interpretation machine that they themselves had nothing to do with designing: everyone just reciting the same lines, like barbiies with a pull cord. it gives you the illusion you understand something or could do something about it. some people are almost explicit about this. gail collins, for example, says 'this is all about guns,' which is silly; it's about all sorts of things including guns. then she says, just as explicitly as possible, "We have to make ourselves better. Otherwise, the story from Connecticut is too unspeakable to bear." first of all, banning guns doesn't make anyone any better. and second, the event is - it is - too unspeakable to bear. it is too unspeakable to bear. that is why gail collins takes less than a second to figure out what it's all about and prescribe a quick symptomatic cure. you have to rush through that process as superficially as possible, to deal with your own emotional response. collins just almost says that straight up.

every time something like this happens - particularly after virginia tech and this one - i think to myself that i am wrong to oppose gun control. my problem is that i can't support it compatibly with the rest of my political philosophy. i understand that this is actually a problem for my political philosophy. i will just note, however, that the other position is that only state agents should be armed, and i think if you look historically you might reach the conclusion that that would not necessarily be a formula for reducing violent death. but when someone can grab his mom's assault weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammo and walk into a school, you just have to think that this is absurd. you can say that the weapon is not the thing: e.g. that guy in china stabbed 22 children a couple of days before newtown. but note: none of those children died. all the children died at newtown, each riddled with multiple gunshot wounds. at any rate, at least at moments like this, i do not know what to say about gun control, and i do not intend to avail myself of the usual knee-jerk arguments against it.

i myself have never owned a firearm and i don't intend to. and i'll tell you what: i can't really in good conscience or consistency advocate, for example, a ban on assault rifles, but if y'all manage to move in that direction, i won't even blog against you.

you have to not figure this out

you do not have a good explanation of this event. it's loners; it's masculinity; it's guns; it's relativism; it's video games; its militarism; it's mental health. perhaps it's all these things and a lot lot more. how fast you got to an explanation is a measure of how hard something like this for you to face. well, it is hard to face. but even as we figure out what happened etc, this event needs to retain a penumbra of incomprehensibility that hints that we are unknowable to ourselves; you must not deprive an event like this of its excess; you have to try to hold on to a feeling of being overwhelmed or disassembled in the face of this. the disorientation you felt before you remembered 'guns!' is the right response. you have to not figure it out, quite, and you have to keep trying, or else you have betrayed it and yourself. 

i blame god

fox is blaming relativism, video games, and the end of school prayer. in other words, democrats blame republicans, republicans democrats. obviously, if we just had fully-funded mental health services... it gets to the point of 'blood on your hands,' etc. that'll make it pretty tough to compromise on tax policy, i feel. also it is ridiculous. also it entails an immediate loss of the actual specific event and people; it's rendered over immediately into an abstraction. it's just a particular way of not facing up. think about it as a particular human event, not an emblem of something, in particular not an emblem of your prepossessions. think instead about a teacher reading to students in a closet as the carnage is unleashed, or the teacher who told her kids she loved them because that should be the last thing they heard. in that, and not in compulsory prayer or a new bureaucracy or a house-by-house confiscation, is where there is a flash of hope.

try to feel

in my opinion, y'all immediately go 'gun control' in order (1) not to face the thing emotionally, (2) to offer yourself some sort of explanation, (3) to use these deaths as a political club. i'd suggest trying something else for ten minutes first.

what big weapons you have, grandma

to pull back from the abyss for a moment: the guns were all owned by the mother. a kindergarten teacher who owns an assault rifle and two 9s? that seems odd.

the way they're securing these schools (and all these strategies will now certainly be redoubled) also converts them into traps. they were leading kids out the front door past the (dead) killer and the horror. a fortress makes you feel secure until you can't get out. 

the apocalypse of 2012 comes from within

it's hard not to read these mass killings, especially of children, as a sign of the apocalypse, an apocalypse welling up from within us. what kind of beings are we, that contain this reservoir of death? at a moment like this, you just have to think: how sick, how evil, how bent are we? what has gone wrong? what is the process by which a human being makes that possible for himself? the same thing just happened (again) in china. is this the kind of thing human beings have always done? or you just wave vaguely at something sick in the culture, or some chemical in the water, or really anything; it just fills you with a feeling of your own wrongness too and the wrongness of the whole, a sense of our species or our culture or our world as profoundly depraved, something that deserves annihilation. then the next day it's back to the commute. we forget again that we are ourselves the end.

ain't no cheatin on standardized tests

here's one problem with our authoritarian approach to education (and look, you can't make something compulsory and then enforce that compulsion and not be taking an authoritarian approach; but this is only one detail of the gulag; the whole machine of public education is dedicated to behavioral control): it is actually not wrong to defy, sabotage, or cheat a coercive social order, or one that you're embedded in but not by your own voluntary choice. it cannot be a violation of your personal responsibility to violate the percepts of such an institution: your consent isn't even sincerely solicited; you can have no obligation to hold yourself to arbitrarily imposed external standards. so, for example, it is not wrong for a slave to shirk, correct? it is exactly what you'd expect, because you're not worried in the whole system about the slave's internal motivations. if a slave escapes, that is right, not wrong, see? even if the master is relatively benevolent. this is why these institutions get into a spiral of sabotage/vandalism/slacking and crackdown. everyone understands that the most you can reasonably expect from a slave is a simulation of cooperation. the institution, precisely because it is authoritarian, or to the extent it is coercive, can impose no true responsibilties on the people embedded in it. this is a generalizable argument. but think also of what this means in terms of each person's relation to their own education, which becomes something external to themselves as opposed to a self-development. ignorance itself is a morally defensible response to pervasively authoritarian educational institutions.

nuke yourself

she might not have been a particularly effective dean, embezzler, murderess, and so on, but she was an extremely impressive suicide. 

She started a fire in a bedroom fireplace and closed the flue. When death did not come quickly enough, she went downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the gas. For extra measure, she slit her wrists.

Stereo speaker wire was her final weapon of choice. She took a length of it back upstairs, lowered an attic ladder and hanged herself from it.

most people kind of kill themselves with a whimper of sadness; she assaulted herself repeatedly in a total rage.

copyright them treasures

speaking of indiana jones and the turkey of doom and the era of copyright protection, the government of belize is apparently suing lucasfilm for using the 'likeness' of their national treasure, the crystal skull. or i'm not sure from that piece who is suing whom for what, precisely. but i do like the idea that governments own the likenesses of the 'national' treasures in the territory they claim to administer. oh you know you can't freely reproduce those pictures of the rockies or the new york city skyline or the great lakes or the declaration of independence. or my ass. just speculating now but any crystal skulls there may be are of non-ancient origin. but that is as nothing compared to this whole new world of intellectual property. well, you never should have started down this road of people owning the likenesses of themselves or others or works of art and so on because, just a bit further on than that, all representations - all images and pictures, for example, of any sort, also reflections, shadows, and footprints; in short, all likenesses - are potentially litigable. now on the other hand say you are, per impossibile, a proponent of intellectual property. why exactly can't persons or governments or corporations own things like that? is there any plane of reality that can't be colonized by imperialistic regimes or sold off in tracts? now this particular battle could be complicated, because no doubt lucasfilm has trademarked the adjective-noun pair 'crystal skull.' so if i were their squad of attorneys, i'd be preparing to counter-sue on the grounds that the government of belize and its representatives say, without permission, that the crystal skull is their national treasure.

ohhh...absolutely

geithner's been doing television interviews, where everyone asks him 'are you willing to go over the fiscal cliff' if the republicans won't go from 35 to 39.6% in the tax rate? his answer is 'ohhh...absolutely.' it is a very unconvincing ultimatum, and if i were the republicans i might well decide to see whether these people have actually grown a spine. i do not believe they have.

lucinda

lately i have been listening to everything lucinda williams ever recorded, from the girlish first forays around 1979 to the latest shattering expressions of age and regret, as in the masterpiece "kiss like your kiss." i sort of hate to love lucinda, because she is relatively popular in my demographic. nevertheless i love her music inordinately and also i have a crush, though obviously she is a handful. i see that some people find that hoarse thing and also the wandering pitch to be unlistenable: kind of the way i feel about neil young. but i love every frigging burr on that voice; every time she wanders off-key it sounds right to me. sometimes someone just brings you along; i regard even her clumsy lyric moments (with some exceptions) as a kind of charming directness or a signifier of sincerity.

i think one thing is the variety and the coherence: everything she has ever recorded takes place in relation to american roots traditions, but looking at the oeuvre, she works with and from very many forms: cajun, country, folk, tex-mex, blues, gospel. she ranges vocally from an almost dolly-like pure soprano to a marianne faithfull croak. she loves to rock out, but no one can write a more unbelievably gorgeous extremely slow song and just frame it in crystal, as in 'i envy the wind' or 'blue.' and no one could possibly sing those songs as well as she does. she has essentially one theme: the dusky fatal romanticism of loving junkie poets who play the guitar in filthy bars. but never has desperate fucked-up love been explored in so many registers, from ecstatic to enraged to melancholic. wait two themes: she romanticizes the american south in every aspect, its every cricket and puddle, particularly east texas and lousiana: she's practically written a map of the towns in that region. i love this about her and it connects her writing fundamentally to both the blues and country traditions.

my honey judith bradford introduced me to her stuff in the early 90s; no doubt she 'knew' the bass player. anyway, that was the era of lucinda williams (1988) and sweet old world (1992). these albums feature some of the best country and rock writing of that era; of course 'sweet old world' is the most beautiful thing ever written; the playing and production by gurf morlix is exemplary; poppy in a way but not fully nashville commercial. surely one purpose of these discs was to demo the songs in nashville, and she scored for mary-chapin carpenter ('passionate kisses') and patty loveless (a wonderful performance of 'the night's too long'). still these albums have many eccentric moments or suddenly break into acoustic blues straight from the howling heart of the delta. maybe someone thought she could be a country star, but obviously not. but she is a great great country singer and writer. to me her four strongest albums are those two, car wheels on a gravel road (1998), and essence (2001). lucinda williams is hard to get ahold of; it must be in some stupid copyright limbo.

judith also adored those first forays, happy woman blues (1980) and ramblin (1979). these give a lovely rough acoustic frame to a series of covers/bent versions of classic country, gospel, and blues songs, with some originals. she almost sounds like mac wiseman with an extreme showy old-time vibrato at times, but listen to her kill something like "great speckled bird," one of the great curiosities in american song. obviously she is not trying to sing on-key, but i wouldn't say the roughness is affected: lucinda always sounds authentic to me, even if her dad was a prof. it wells from the heart and from a complete internalization of american roots music.

i hate to agree with all the critics, but car wheels on a gravel road is a masterpiece, and i say the same about its successor essence. they add a fierce rock element at times, and she has continued occasionally in that vein on subsequent albums, as in 'seeing black' or 'come on.' but really her normal mode is slow and simple or beautiful or at its worst, dirge-like. world without tears (2003) is weak and depressive, i think, and it's not insane to skip west (2007) and little honey (2008), though there are great moments. but blessed  (2011) has some extremely strong writing, and she recapitulates the album to a recorder in her kitchen all alone; some of these performances are really shattering, as in, again, 'kiss like your kiss.' at this point her work constitutes an autobiography, and i don't think any recording artist or songwriter has ever faced up more squarely to ageing; she's about 60 now; she can't write about boys the way she did when she was 40. but this material is so honest, even with very clumsy or too-explicit moments, that it is a worthy inheritor of the earlier phases.

i believe i'd do her up with a bit more dignity: less makeup and desperate-sexy clothes; she can't be a sexy girl singer anymore, if she ever really could; she should be a treasure of american song, like say johnny cash in the 90s. vintage dresses maybe (but i run afoul of taylor swift's dictum that no amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity). however, quibbling with the way someone looks in the face of a song and a performance like that is trivial.
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ok here's a 40-song best of, very carefully considered. this is surely, for one thing, one of the great bodies of songwriting in this era.

 

Metal Firecracker

Essence 

Those Three Days

I Envy The Wind

Am I Too Blue

Sweet Old World

Sharp Cutting Wings (Song to a Poet)

Right In Time

Kiss Like Your Kiss

Great Speckled Bird

Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

Learning How to Live

Six Blocks Away

Passionate Kisses

Seeing Black

Blue

One Night Stand

Abandonded

Buttercup

I Just Wanted To See You So Bad

Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor

Come On

Prove My Love

Sweet Old World

The Night's Too Long

Satisfied Mind

Circles and X's

Side Of The Road [Live]

Kiss Like Your Kiss (The Kitchen Tapes)

I Lost It

I Asked For Water He Gave Me Gasoline

Greenville (with Emmylou Harris)

Still I Long For Your Kiss

I Don't Know How You're Livin'

Buttercup (The Kitchen Tapes)

Rolling Along

Howlin' at Midnight

Big Red Sun Blues

Jackson

Gurf Morlix, "Center Of The Universe" (in my head anyway this is about lucinda)

Mary-Chapin Carpenter, "Passionate Kisses"

Patty Loveless, "The Night's Too Long"

Emmylou Harris, "Sweet Old World"