there will no doubt be more on george later. for now i just want to say he was the greatest male country singer, by a way. so people who i'd point to as great or paradigm country singers, such as keith whitley and vern gosdin, owed him plenty. he was better than his great contemporaries johnny cash or willie nelson or merle haggard or buck owens, as a singer, in a variety of ways. he had more emotional range and intensity (he was incomparable in that, as everyone who knows anything about this will acknowledge). and also his singing is more central or basic or exemplary of country music than is that of any of the others. the whole idea of what a man does in a country ballad, owes everything to him. it's remarkable that he was teamed with tammy, who of course i think was the greatest female country singer. well conway and loretta were close, but dolly and porter was asymmetrical. he made some great records late, as below. he made some horrendous records like in the 80s, i'm assuming under the influence of coke.
h.l. remarks that if you can't make a living in the usa (in 1922), you're not trying, or you're trying to sell americans something they could not understand what it would mean to want. "Whenever I hear a professor of philosophy complain that his wife has eloped with some moving picture actor or bootlegger who can at least feed and clothe her, my natural sympathy for the man is greatly corrupted by contempt for his lack of sense. Would it be regarded as sane and laudable for a man to travel to the Soudan trying to sell fountain-pens, or Greenland offering to teach double-entry book-keeping or counterpoint?. . . Let him bear in mind that, whatever its neglect of the humanities and their monks, the Republic has never got half enough bond salesmen, quack doctors, ward leaders, phrenologists, Methodist evangelists, circus clowns, magicians, soldiers, farmers, popular song writers, moonshine distillers, forgers of gin labels, mine guards, detectives, spies, snoopers, and agents provocateurs." (from prejudices: third series).
what's encouraging about this wave of terrorism is the whole slapstick quality, both of the perpetrators and the heroic first responders, the relentless all-too-human flamboyant mediocrity of it all, hedged about by a relentless hyperbolic rhetoric of earnesteness and non sequitur super-americanism. boston strong, son. next time be ready with a better writer for your sticker. that's basic preparedness.
anyway, the tsarnaev brothers, in their carjacked vehicle, improvise in collaboration with the car's owner a plan to bomb times square. later, they're chucking large exploding items of cookware out the window of the car at the cops and sort of getting away. finally, all the police in the world are searching watertown mass, overlooking for many hours the poor little wounded chump shivering in the boat two blocks away as they chase various vehicles hither and thither throughout the metro area. they pull him out of the boat in a fallujah-style fully armoured and mechanized mega-assault, disabling him with robots and percussion devices before unleashing a hail of automatic-weapons fire, somehow leaving him alive. dzokhar tsarnaev, like so many of us, no doubt owes his life to the incompetence of others, whose courage has made them heroes.
meanwhile, the ricin lame-attempt-to-assassinate-everybody case has broken down into an academic super bowl, a world chess championship of sheer white trash douchebaggery, pitting the elvis impersonator against the child molester. first they charged the elvis impersonator, which i could have told them was futile, as he was obviously framed by the envious child molester, who's also a martial arts entrepreneur and politician. the latter gentleman now appears to have absconded (?), which would be outstanding and remarkable. where is h.l. mencken in this golden age?
it's no surprise that chechnya might produce dark and extreme people. rarely has any people been more extremely victimized with less outrage. what i'd like to know more about here is the connection between the fbi and the russian secret police. one thing to notice is that if you mess with putin on chechnya, he will keel you.
April 19, 2013
turned out to be sacha baron cohen after all. this time i think the reality film-making has gone too far.
now it seems like the main thing about apocalyptic disaster is that it is an opportunity for american heroism. these things always show us at our best, er. we should want much much more.
sometimes nothing hardle seems to happen for years on end and suddenly all hell breaks loose. reminds me of 9.11 followed by anthrax followed by dc sniper. so, boston followed by ricin followed by ?
so i've been rummaging around for new female country singers. i don't know how i left out kimberly perry of the band perry, who's as good and interesting as any of these artists. unlike some of the people in that previous entry, the band perry is not a nostalgia act or a tribute to traditional country music; like taylor, they're recognizably country, but they also have a very contemporary pop sound. a good example might be the first single from their fine second album, pioneer.
that song has the little bit of morbidity that people have come to associate with the band perry since their breakthrough single 'if i die young.' and it also has characteristic shifts of mood from gentle to intense, both musically and emotionally. it reminds me perhaps of bobbie gentry's "ballad of billie joe" from back in the day; it's very theatrical.
my 12-year-old daughter jane loves this stuff, and i think the morbid/country-goth streak is part of the attraction, kind of like pretty little liars. but death is by no means the theme of all of tbp's songs, which run the gamut. check, for example, the title track of the new album. it has an unusual and timely theme for a country song, but also makes contact with the tradition at all points.
it's hard to tell from recordings anymore whether someone can really sing. but were i guessing, i'd say kimberley can sing like hell. here's one of their strongest lyrics (and their lyrics are often a bit better than they need to be).
and really kimberly can go into many different modes, from rowdy to sultry to heartbroken. here's the rowdy mode, which is dominant among nashville women right now.
if you can't sell a hundred thousand copies of that to country fans, you can't sell anything to anyone. one thing that i do like about taylor and kimberly is that they're connected to the tradition without constantly emphasizing that fact by mentioning hank williams or loretta lynn. they show country as a living tradition in a compelling way.
also even though tbp and taylor swift are recognizably of the same genre, kimberly is definitely not in any way a taylor imitator; i think she has a very fine country voice: strong with a soaring upper register.
8:15 bolo on a dark-skinned individual in a black hoodie. if anyone sees anything like that, shoot to kill. dude. it's trayvon martin. while you're at it, intern all white male loners.
7:25 sources tell me that the winklevoss twins are under suspicion. those fuckers hate america.
6:12 or wait. of course. it's a coup by ben bernanke.
6:00 PM obviously, the obama administration staged the explosions in boston so they could declare martial law and fully implement nationalized healthcare. no doubt they justify this to themselves with the fact that they'll be able to offer treatment to the victims of their own dastardly crimes!!
be sure to listen for anagrams and codes in the president's statement.
my other prediction is about afghanistan: this will be recalled as a failure a la vietnam, but smaller. there'll be 'entrepreneurs' and corrupt officials clinging to the underside of the last american cargo planes as we evacuate, giving way to civil war. see here's the slight problem: we imposed on them by force more or less the most corrupt government in the world. this never endears the populace. one of the last chances we had to jump off was the election of 2009; barack and hillary completely screwed that up; they needed to back another horse or demand another election and enforce fairness.
i know you've been waiting for me to declare my position on this. no, brittney griner will never play in the nba, though she's the most dominant player in the history of women's college basketball. she's a skinny 6'8" center, and slow to boot relative to the nba. the best bet to try this, again (a few have tried before) is someone who can play point guard, like maybe the cal player layshia clarendon. meanwhile that shoni schimmel, whose louisville team just beat clarendon's, is an amazing athlete.
that's the greatest play i've ever seen in women's b-ball, which i do watch.
if you're around carbondale ill a week from today, you should check me out on my 'insufferable diva' tour, soon also to play slippery rock.
"Abolitionist Saints and Anarchist Freaks: American Radical Reform, 1820-1850" SIUC Department of Philosophy, Faculty Colloquium 3:30pm - 5:00pm; Faner 3059
"Crispin Sartwell: American Philosopher" Free Public Lecture with Dr. Sartwell after a brief screening of the film "Crispin Sartwell: American Philosopher" Film screening: 7:00 - 7:30pm; Free Public Lecture: 7:30 - 8:00pm; Q & A: 8:00 - 8:30pm Morris Library Guyon Auditorium
watcha listenin to, little crispy? you'll probably be relieved to hear that i'm taking a hip hop break from country. (i'm proud to speculate that i'm the only person in america equally devoted to biggie and tammy; i recommend miscegenaton of taste.) so, turned on by this piece from the guardian, i've been checking out the wave of hip hop from mississippi; i love that whole idea, actually. i like at least some of big k.r.i.t.'s songs, but i'm completely grooved on pyinfamous (jason thompson), who's originally from clarksdale, ground zero of delta blues. the stuff is mellow and positive but real; i maybe have gotten too old for hos and blow. (all that's left is bitches and blunts, harhar.) the beats by sam.i.am are crunchy organic, baby. in fact, i'm teaching a sixth-grade writing class next week at roland park middle school in baltimore, and i'm going to have them write about this song:
this sun dula person is fascinating. is the stuff blues, jazz, soul, gospel, hip hop? kind of makes you realize that that's not necessarily the best question.
this is a recurring nightmare. tom frigging friedman is still insisting that you compare your toddler to finnish and chinese toddlers, as though that means anything. and now you can! in the technocratic dystopia manufactured by, say, al gore, or friedman, or arne duncan, children are the merest commodities, manufactured by and for global capitalism. the only question is: how can they - and here this means every single child anywhere in the world - be manufactured as uniform product, and rendered maximally profitable to people with economic and political power? i've certainly whined about this many times, but let me point out a couple of things: if you are a parent, and you think it's relevant to your relationship with your child, or relevant to your child's life, that her school compares poorly on standardized tests with some school in helsinki or sichuan, i think your child should be removed from your custody and given to a human parent. these ass-monkeys seem to be internationalists, but they are screeching economic nationalists: all that matters in the argument is the american economy in comparison with that of other nations, which we have to out-compete. and their vision of anyone's economy is a nightmare. they seriously, literally are intent on enslaving children to the vision of multi-national corporations and nation-states. the collision of extreme nationalism and internationalism is just one of many dimensions in which the position is riddled with demented contradictions. the bland reasonableness is a millimeter-thick surface over the real roiling evil. their vision of the world, and their vision of childhood, is a horror, and to some extent they have succeeded in implementing it. their envisioned totalitarian future of capitalist automatism is worse than no future at all, worse than species annihilation.
before i do this, let me remark that i am an opponent of murder. ok: whomever is killing prosecutors in texas and possibly prison chiefs in colorado, is - despite some conspicuous moral flaws - an unprecedented badass. after you kill your first prosecutor in texas, you'll have an extreme manhunt on your ass. then if you kill the prosecutor that called you scum and promised to hunt you down - and who of course is aware, like the rest of the law enforcement community, that you might try to kill him - you're in a situation in which there are thousands of heavily armed men with unlimited resources trying to keeel you. maybe this person will be caught tomorrow. but she (i'm speculating that it's a woman, possibly a lingerie model) hasn't been caught yet. in my opinion, this might teach even texas lawmen something about extreme bluster: do it, then brag about it, not the other way round.
so it turns out that 11% of american children have been diagnosed with adhd, and the figure is twice that for high-school age boys. there are many theories, evidently, including something in the water, overdiagnosis, and so on. but i am going to explain this to you clearly and, i believe, decisively. even though psychologists want to go with 'chemical imbalance in the brain' and so on, with the usual completely vague scientific-sounding hooha designed to flummox and reassure us and establish their epistemic authority, adhd is not a condition of the brain. it is a condition of a person in a context. what has changed, i propose, is not anyone's brain, but the institutional context in which those brains are embedded. the american educational system has become ever-more authoritarian, rigid, mindless, and unconnected from anyone's actual body. the dedication to standardized tests means that sitting still and doing the prescribed task in exactly the same way everyone else does it at the same time are more or less all that's left. my daughter, who's in seventh grade, does not have recess. etc etc. 'adhd' the supposed dysfunction or illness or imbalance, would be perfectly normal or useful in a less structured or authoritarian context, or in a context that deployed any basic understanding of or connection with children as human beings. these institutions are really merely diagnosing themselves.
let me just remark that by a state of perfect chemical balance or health, these people just mean capitulation and extreme passivity. psychologists, far from being scientists of any sort, merely reflect the authoritarian institutions from which they emerged and the effortless self-subordination to authority which they literally define as health. say you're an inquisitor. the harder you crack down, the more sinful everyone appears, the more heretics you detect. you are manufacturing heretics by your definitions and the way you conduct your church, but then you think, as you define your arbitrary dogmata ever-more narrowly, that society is degenerating because there are more and more heretics. that's exactly as scientific, as reasonable, and as reflective as this.
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