cheese it, the cops!

she does me like . . . wait, what?

obviously i am in reactionary mode right now. hard to tell why. maybe it's because i've been hanging out with my mom and reading richard rorty. while i'm at it, i've been listening to eric church. now, he's one of many male country singers who are basically working in a modified traditonalist vein and basically singing about the joys of getting drunk (well, hip hop, pop, my ex-wife, etc seem to be in an extremely drunken mode these days. party unto death, y'all.) the model is kenny chesney, which is quite unfortunate, though the boy can sing a country song and had good moments early on. also the thing with new male country stars is that they are emerging in this 'man-candy' era. so, you know, luke bryan takes longer getting into his jeans or having them painted on than beyonce. florida-georgia line is another example of the approach.

but i feel that eric church is a cut above: a bit better songs, a bit better singing. also, there is a twist of weirdness. what is up with his religion is interesting, and he throws jesuses around very cavalierly, saying that we need a country music jesus, or even more astonishingly that his woman loves him like jesus does. now, that really makes you wonder how jesus does love people, and also how people love jesus. on the other hand, i've also concluded that 'like jesus does' is an amazing song: both beautiful and interestingly bent. he has a lot of good songs, actually, and if i were predicting, i'd say that he's sort of an emerging george strait or alan jackson.

on man-candy: i guess we rather enjoyed our scopophilia before we got a bad conscience, so y'all knock yourselves out. i feel old and ugly, though. ah well, we deserve that too!

 

i don't know what you think about country music, but it's certainly the only genre where any major artist could sit down in front of a mic with a guitar at any time and blow you away. 'She knows the man I ain't/She forgives me when I can't." that is good.

 

that is classic country, and at least registers the other side of all the happy drunk songs.

 

 

yeah i wish i didn't have a heart.

education and equality

the other day i was being confronted yet again for the craziness of my anti-statism, and someone asked me: do you think people have a right to an education? well, i don't know. sure. problem is that no one has the right to educate them under compulsion. to read their right to be educated as your right to form their consciousness by force just shows everything dishonest and evil about your political philosophy, which is basically a bunch of la-di-da euphemisms for coercion to create a hierarchy with people like you at the top. your claim to know what they should know and how they should think is an attitude of incredible arrogance and elitism. the political philosophy of american liberalism is as hierarchical or more hierarchical even than, say, laissez-faire capitalism or hereditary aristocracy. but here is one difference; on the leftish side, the extreme enthusiasm for hierarchy is justified by egalitarianism. that is an amazing cognitive accomplishment.

the tea party is back

if the tea party continues to protest the common core curriculum, they can expect me to join right up. one thing about the tea party: somehow it literally makes liberals insane. they start arguing that dissent is never legitimate in a democracy, and then they just go crazed ad hominem: just throwing insults and shit like that's a reason. they can do this because they're only talking to their own demographic, where everyone nods along. right, these are ignorant white people. you fucking trailer trash! oh no actually they are the middle-class servants of capitalism. well, on this matter they are opposing bill gates, exxon-mobil, and so on. probably you who condemn them think you are yourself opposed to capitalism, which would indicate that you literally have no idea what you're doing or why. actually, we don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a squishy totalitarian state/corporate merger. but it is capitalists who are driving this thing: they want to churn out american children as a uniform product; it's quality control. i picture the next generation as an army of sexually and racially diverse yet intellectually cloned bureaucrats who make rurality a crime and who literally are incapable of understanding how or why anyone could possibly disagree with them. no particular person among them will have to think at all, because they'll all be thinking together!

Looking into the abyss, inviting gawkers...

In which Crusader AXE links Charlies Estevez, Mel Gibson, Michelle Bachmann and Bob Dole to reflect Daniel Webster's theory that "God takes care of fools, drunks and the United States..." only not so well. 

 

where the modern era never ended

 in the june 20 new york review of books, there is a devastating portrayal of the activities of the andy warhol foundation and the 'andy warhol art authentication board'. the basic accusation is that members of these interlocked organizations were in a position to profit from authenticating and discrediting works, and that this has very much affected their various decisions. [the piece isn't up yet on their site and will likely be behind a paywall when it is.] 

whether it's corrupt or not, this whole situation is a remarkable emblem of a central fact about art in this period. postmodern artists, of whom warhol is perhaps the best and central example, attacked many of the basic teachings (or, dogmas) of modernism: the great individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. warhol's entire set of techniques and the nature of his images were completely incompatible with modernism: he was the opposite of a picasso or a pollock. but half a century into post-modernism, the art market and the museum system have hardly changed at all, and indeed most ordinary viewers of art still believe all the teachings of modernism.

with regard to these institutions, the post-modern era never happened at all. so, the authentication board stamps warhols as originals or not. this makes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of difference in their value. the stuff they're working through is tens of thousands of images. for the most part, these items were never touched by warhol except to add a signature, if that. both prints and 'original paintings' were instead more or less designed by him and executed in various shops around town, which warhol didn't even bother to visit. then various prints and paintings were executed that he didn't sign, or where it's not clear who authorized what when.

what is and is not an original warhol, in the art authentication board's definition, depends on what warhol was 'aware' of as they were being made: mere awareness is what is analogous, in warhol, to the hand of pollock. now, in my view, the hand of pollock is harder to distinguish from the hand of, say, a copyist, than such institutions like to pretend. but discerning the direction of warhol's momentary awareness in 1973 from here is really a job for an expert, a true connoisseur, or possibly an omniscient deity. and of course, many of warhol's works appropriated images from elsewhere: warhol swiped them from popular culture in the first place. the whole thing could be interpreted as a pointed demonstration that 'originality' is over or pointless in the era of mass media. 

and yet the entire discourse and institutional context that would be appropriate to, or at was least developed in relation to, a van gogh or a matisse or a picasso, are just reproduced by the warhol foundation, authentication board, museum, etc. it's frigging absurd, like you were trying to account for the latest results in physics using the intellectual equipment of medieval theology. or it's even worse than that because warhol was actually attacking the system of thought he is now completely absorbed into. if your goal is to preserve warhol's legacy, forget this whole idea entirely. if your mission is monetize warhol to the maximum possible degree, just keep right on.

there are, i am going to say, two reasons why, even if modernism died in actual art, it just kept going in the art market and museum system as though nothing had ever happened. first of all, modernism is extremely, extremely commercially excellent. get rid of the idea of originality and genius; ok, now try to sell that sucker for tens of millions of dollars. don't be silly. honestly, a reproduction of a warhol or an image of it on a screen is basically just as a good as an 'orginal,' and for that matter is just as original. in virtue of what, precisely, would you distinguish them? is it that the original was brushed at a distance of some miles by andy warhol's coked-up awareness? warhols were extremely, pointedly 'works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.' so the aura has to be imposed or invented, or is just a matter of let's pretend. and really, the difference is negligible even to its extreme proponents, having to do merely with warhol's awareness of the object, which means he was aware generally, say, that a hundred prints were made somewhere in brooklyn, e.g. this would be silly except for the $$$$.

and also, whole generations of art appreciators were trained in modernist dogma, and the claim of arts institutions to various forms of state or foundation support depend on it completely. you go to the museum to gasp at the stunning works of incomparable or super-human geniuses: incomprehensibly great figures that are infinitely more exalted and more important than the mere humans staring at their paintings. that's why an ordinary person staring at a picasso can experience transcendence of their pitiful lives. they need something higher, something seraphic. also they need us experts to tell them what is the product of genius, because admittedly it's not detectible on a visual inspection without a gigantic machinery of hooha, or expertise. you are really really going to need the hooha when the appreciators are staring at a warhol elvis, a lichtenstein comic strip, or a jenny holzer text. you've got some splainin to do, but all you've got is the van gogh schtick. hope people don't notice the difference, i guess, or that no one has enough self-confidence actually to say aloud what everyone is thinking. you might want to make sure they feel disqualified, to start with. shut up and gape, bitch; we'll tell you what to think and what to feel.

so the whole institutional economics of art - public or private - depends on what rosalind krauss called 'the originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths.' it doesn't matter what you do: if you are an important artist, these institutions will portray you and market you as an original genius. the canvas on which you have someone in bangladesh stencil 'this is not a work of original genius' will be authenticated as a work of original genius and held to be more valuable than the economy of bangladesh as a whole.

it's odd, but the ideology of modernism seemed to be anti-capitalist, and the genius floats above commerce like a seraph. likewise one reason people loathed post-modernism was because it seemed to make its peace with commodification, advertising, and so on. this is a laugh. i think you'd be better off reading modernism as a symptom of capitalism and post-modernism as a critique of it. this is obvious, and can't be more clearly demonstrated than in this case.

so maybe actual artists and people who were trying to understand what they were doing came to think that modernism was just a bunch of bizarre and destructive fictions. and then maybe they even came back to it, or left the critique itself behind as boring, after decades. but the art market and the museum system never budged one iota. and though people might criticize the particular decisions and the venality of the andy warhol industry, it is amazingly effective in making an extreme anti-picasso into a picasso and stacking cash to the moon.

letting holder go

yes, absolutely, eric holder ought to resign. if he does not, i'd think about what recourse there is, up to and including moving toward impeachment of the president. the rosen situation (etc) is really grotesque: grotesquely unconstitutional, grotesquely partisan, grotesquely wrong. and let me say this: if you let the fact that the organization in question is fox affect your opinion on this at all, no one should listen to anything you say ever again, you partisan twit.

athwart rorty

i'm working on a paper on my dissertation supervisor, richard rorty, for a conference in poland this summer. now when philosophers describe me, they often start with the fact that i was rorty's student. at slippery rock u last month i was introduced (among other things) as 'a student of richard rorty, the most famous american philosopher of the twentieth century.' this description of rorty shocked me a bit, actually, but rorty's now-posthumous presence just seems to increase all the time. 

i often assert, which surprises people i guess, that i disagree with everything rorty ever said, adding that i frigging loved his persona of ironist/provocateur and that he was a conscientious supervisor despite the fact that the dissertation was incompatible with his whole schtick. and despite the fact that i did not at all share his politics either, which he knew perfectly well. and politics, it turned out more and more, was central to his persona and his philosophy. also when i was working with him (1985-89), he was going from significant figure to world-bestriding colossus; he was always jetting off to debate habermas or chill with derrida. yet he read my stuff quickly and pretty carefully. at the time i was pushing various versions of 'representative realism,' correspondence theory of truth, and so on: it was a mere reactionary stance (and rorty would have regarded it that way more than anyone; by that time he thought positions like that were boring), and i have abandoned these positions, even while maintaining a version of worldly realism and an anti-social conception of truth.

now, i have never really tried to refute rorty's philosophy or even argue with it in any direct or elaborate fashion, despite a bit of a stab in end of story. the reason for this is because everyone else in the world was already attacking him, and even though i thought they sometimes had good points, i have also been a bit protective. and all that attack is exactly what has made him a candidate for 'most famous american philosopher of the 20th century'; every attack has elevated his status, and if you do think his philosophy is mediocre or wrong or whatever, you're a fool to keep paying obsessive attention. meanwhile a strand of much more positive rorty-interpretation has emerged, especially since his death.

at any rate, i've been reading achieving our country (1997). now there is much to admire. for one thing, it does show the real moral seriousness that was there all the time underneath. also, the defense of left reform over left revolution, and the attack on marx (rorty defines his position as 'leftist anti-communism') are compelling, or could be compelling in debates within the left. but, since the man's dead, i might as well say it: the book also shows many of the problems with rorty's authorship. i'll give a couple of examples.

rorty there as everywhere else habitually lines up lists of names like that is an argument, and even keeps sort of asserting that his own philosophy is the future, because he's just narrated the history of modern philosophy to culminate in it. indeed, i think this was his primary argument for his positions, and the fact that it is irrelevant to their truth might cause one to reflect. see we labored under all this cartesianism, kantianism, foundationalism, 'representationalism,'  'logocentrism,' etc. but look, said rr, the most eminent philosophers of the twentieth century were all agreed that our experience of the world was linguistic all the down (and on all rorty's other basic teachings): are you really going to argue at once against the whole flow of intellectual history, or stand athwart it? (matter of fact i am. why not? but i wouldn't say i need to with regard to these doctrines.) athwart dewey, heidegger, wittgenstein, derrida, sellars, quine, brandom, davidson, all of whom said the same thing? 

Dewey abandoned the idea that one can say how things really are, as opposed to how they might best be described in order to meet some particular human need. In this respect he is in agreement with Nietzsche, and with such critics of 'the metaphysics of presence' as Derrida and Heidegger. For all these philosophers, objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman. Insofar as human beings do not share the same needs, they may disagree about what is objectively the case. But the resolution of such disagreement cannot be an appeal to the way reality, apart from any human need, really is. The resolution can only be political: one must use democratic institutions and procedures to conciliate these various needs, and thereby widen the range of consensus about how things are. (34-35)

 

so, you might think for a minute about whether nietzsche, for example, or heidegger, thought that "objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings". dude, you have got to be kidding; not only is that not their position; it's a position that cannot even be formulated on either of their terms. what role does 'objectivity' and its definition have in the philosophy of derrida, or any of these figures? it's true that in rorty's writings, all the people he admired just ended up saying what he wanted them to say without regard to what they did say. also it's true that this strategy - rorty's basic strategy - is a non-stop appeal to authority, and would be at least as fallacious as that would indicate even if the interpretations were better.

i just want to say that 'truth is whatever is polling well this week' is the very worst theory of truth ever articulated: you'd be better off with 'truth is whatever appears in a green font,' say. (see, now if you attack that view, you're begging the question, because after all the view itself appears in a green font and so is true according to itself.) and you would certainly be better off with the negation of rorty's theory. or this is my theory: truth is what your contemporaries torture you to death for saying. i also don't think that the pragmatic theory of truth is even vaguely plausible, but it is not as bad as rorty's theory. and his view that these are the same theory is false no matter what color the font. on the other hand, 'truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying' and all those incredibly dismissive formulations might just be a way of saying: this truth stuff is useless. let's talk about something else. he was just saying that truth is boring and the concept is really doing no work: certainly not at the abstract level of a theory or definition of truth. course the way he framed it made us all scream and refute, just a bonus for the playful strategy.

there is a defense of political correctness in the academy in achieving our country. and that is a completely typical rorty provocation; where most leftists pretend not to know what 'pc' means, rorty just embraces it, as he did 'bourgeois liberalism'; i'm telling you, at provocation, the man was an incomparable genius. and more widely, he gives an argument, or rather asserts, that the academy ought to be, or even by definition is, dominated by various leftist orthodoxies. now first of all, he portrays the left-right spectrum as an obviously valid trans-temporal structure for understanding political positions. i assert that it is a wacky conceptual mess that emerged in the nineteenth century, and that there's no hope for anyone to articulate a coherent position within it. also rorty has an egregiously simplistic and entirely tendentious conception of the left-right spectrum. "the right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed," he writes, for example. er, what? 

or how about this: "It is doubtful whether the current critics of the universities who are called 'conservative intellectuals' deserve this description. For intellectuals are supposed to be aware of, and speak to, issues of social justice." that's just mind-numbing jive. i could define you out of the debate or your job entirely too, dick, by asserting that 'intellectuals are supposed to be x.' what are they supposed to be and by whom? well, i personally suppose that intellectuals are supposed to think freely even about such concepts as justice.

at any rate, with all that and much more, dick rorty is a beloved memory for me now. just that little sparkle in his eyes, that half smile, the shrug when someone attacked him, was more than worth the price of tuition. on a good day, he was playing, batting stuff back and forth, relishing disagreements, even vituperative ones. i actually think it was this playfulness and the apparent lack of seriousness that it apparently entails, that pissed people off as much as anything. seriously, you'd hit him with the decisive refutation you'd spent the last few months working up, and he'd just kind of smile and shrug and throw something intolerably meta back at ya. that sort of play is one of the things i always wanted from philosophy, and the extreme seriousness of most academics is inversely proportional to the seriousness with which most people take them. if this isn't a game, it's pretty much indefensible; it's not like we're going to answer the questions, etc.

above all, my experience of richard rorty was of a really kind and decent person, which might be a better reason to take his positions seriously than those he actually gave. i have obviously gotten some professional mileage out of being rorty's student, and i'm grateful for that. i'm also uncomfortable having that centralized in my biography, for precisely the sorts of reasons i've been giving and because i'm all oedipal and shit and want to consider myself rorty's equal. (however, though i have often hinted that i came to my positions by systematic rejection of his, that's not true, fundamentally. i came is as an anarchist/libertarian, and also as a realist who believed in a hard real physical world to which truth is a surrender.) also because i don't want to be associated except under inversion with his positions. also because i am opposed to discipleship in philosophy. (or i might go a little further and say discipleship, or even real reverence for particular figures, is the opposite of philosophy, entirely incompatible with it. i would not at all associate philosophy conceptually with reason. but there is no philosophy where there isn't independent thought.) one of rorty's teachers was rudolf carnap, btw, so i imagine maybe he felt some of the same things.

 

liberace and liberation

guardian:

Soon after moving into Liberace's gaudy Las Vegas mansion in 1977, Scott Thorson, then a teenage hunk in the foster care system, learned that the jewel-smitten showman could love just as extravagantly as he decorated. Touring the premises before their relationship began, Liberace pointed out some decorative highlights, which included 17 pianos, a casino, a quarry's worth of marble and a canopied bed with an ermine spread. On the ceiling was a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel with Liberace's face painted among the cherubs.

When the pair became a couple, Liberace, who was 40 years older, was just as excessive. He couldn't bear to let Thorson out of his sight.

"We were at a hotel in Florida, and Liberace had the manager give us another suite, with windows that faced the beach," said Thorson, now 54. "He knew I'd be near the water and he wanted to be able to look at me."

i guess liberace is being treated as a profoundly liberatory figure. now, was the admirable part the abuse of foster children? or maybe it was the music? it's as though we were lionizing the lifestyle of roman polanski, and also it's as though roman polanski's movies just sucked all day every day. if you make such people your heroes or aesthetic exemplars, you better face up to the fact that you could have chosen something else instead, and the fact that you didn't really says more than i need to know about your taste or decency or intelligence.

look i understand that you can get into a mode where the worse something sucks the better it is. maybe you get sick of stuff that keeps trying to mean something; maybe good taste gets oppressive. but there are many kinds of cool schlock, mindless yet amusing cant, kitsch that arises from the depths of human depravity or consumer capitalism. the liberace variety of grotesque conspicuous consumption, excruciating mediocrity, and total, fatal corruption is only one of your myriad liberatory possibilities. for god's sake try something else.

i suppose one possibility is that all the aesthetic and ethical problems are redeemed by the homosexuality. really, you might want to think about that again. or: maybe my critique is driven by homophobia. so, really, you're going to put liberace above criticism on the grounds that he had sex with men (while denying it in public)? there's nothing wrong with men having sex with men (though i do hold that there might possibly be smething wrong with men having sex with boys), but on the other hand there isn't anything heroic about it either. also it doesn't per se improve your art, if any. also, if you will excuse my saying so, it's common as dirt and just not that outstanding or interesting.

rolling the other way for a moment

on the other hand, obama is really very good at what he does in many respects. the way he handled that heckler today was sort of magnificent, and then he worked her into his peroration, which focused on all the ways we can know we're resilient. we're still going to times square, still going to the game, still raising our kids, still yelling at our president.

whatever bashes you over the head and buries you in the back yard makes you stronger

it would amaze even friedrich nietzsche, i think, that all murders, disasters etc make a people stronger. cameron and obama go further than nietzsche: what kills you makes you stronger too. we should want things to descend into a completely depraved random war of each against all; then we will have become strong and united indeed. like cameron or obama, i think our best or only hope is complete disaster, and that will be my reform program in the 2016 election.

there he is! our black richard nixon

i never found my black cinderella. but we all found our black richard nixon. really. so just listen along, replacing her with him in the lyric. what progress means is that eventually there will be a female richard nixon, a latina richard nixon, one richard nixon each for l, b, g, t, and q, etc.

 

yo one run through that bassline is worth all the words that have ever come out of barack obama's mouth, and much more.

 

 

god of the bloody hands

i guess we should keep pretending that it's not the case that islam is a problem. that we shouln't say it, of course, does not entail that we don't all know it's true. in fact, i think that the main or even the only thing we should prohibit people from saying is the truth. i mean, there's no real reason to repress what's false; you might as well just refute it. nazism was never itself a problem, of course; people just made bad applications of it; it was a peacable philosophy of universal love and prosperity.

It hurts my head when Fox News is in the right on a matter of principle

In which Crusader AXE mutters into his amontrillado about Harry Frankfurt, bullshit, talking points, the relationship between Roland Hedley and Winston Churchill and whether or not Jay Kearny now showers after or before or during each press conference....hands and soul never get clean. Oh, and involves Montaigne, Rolling Stone b-sides and Bob Dylan...with Popeye. 

collectivism and terrorism

dzhokhar left a note, probably in a botttle.

The note, scrawled with a pen on the interior wall of the cabin, said the bombings were retribution for U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims collateral damage in the same way Muslims have been in the American-led wars. "When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," the note added.

one thing on which all the parties to the worldwide war of/against terror are agreed is that the locus of moral responsibility is collective. so, blowing up random people on the streets of boston is attacking 'america,' which is in turn attacking islam. the whole interpretation of the event frames it as an attack on america, the city of boston, and so on. if people were not actually distinct from one another, then attacking random bodies on the street would be a rational way to wage war on a collectivity, sort of. that it is demented should show you something about the premise.

maintain absolute silence

everyone - every single person and organization - has a conflict of interest when it comes to talking about the irs.

dangerous documents

the irs/tea party scandal sure is a beaut. for one thing, the whole thing perfectly justifies the self-presentation of those groups; it is a lovely confirmation of their worldview. the best thing is the notion that the irs targeted groups that "sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Consititution." i do think the irs is just the group which ought to be in the business of repressing that document, which is entirely incompatbile with their conduct of life.

dread soldiers have come to mash down rome

alright i'll start blogging. true, the world is always rich in bloggable material. anyway, my brief history of rastafarianism is incorporated as an appendix into the 2013 guide to reggae & new jamaican music.

 

Battle of what, exactly?

Certainly not of ideas, unless we're focusing on really bad ideas...in which Crusader AXE ponders the nature of treason implied by Republican antics in the House over the credit limits and uses Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter to foretell the future.