cheese it, the cops!

What Russell Got Right that was Important

 

Although a pedantic and math-oriented analytic philosopher and bore, Bertrand Russell got a few things very right...

Nuclear Weapons

Free Love

Wittgenstein

And, most interstingly according to the Economist, Work. Russell wasn't afraid of hard work, he just didn't like it very much. Thought there were other better uses of time for all of manking. And, the numbers seem to indicate that he was right...

wild and blue

alan jackson is doing the circuit, promoting the bluegrass album, even showing up on npr and so on. well, what you should understand is that he's a figure comparable to, say, johnny cash or merle haggard. this will be slowly dawning on people, and eventually he'll mutate into a kennedy-center honoree etc. he's got a quarter century of pure country, as a writer and recording artist. look every album cut isn't amazing; neither was it for johnny. but there are at least a couple of dozen songs that could reasonably be regarded as classics, and many other great moments. it's definitely one of the strongest songwriting portfolios in the history of the form. as a singer, he's unassuming, but he sneaks up on you in a big way. maybe he's always a quarter-tone sharp or something? one of these people who makes wrong sound right, another thing we could say about cash, for example.

also the period of, say, 1988 to 1995 might be my favorite era of country music, a golden age comparable to the late 60s. jackson was one of its great spearheads, along with people like patty loveless and the now-so-sad randy travis.

 

the bluegrass album is good, and unusually for this sort of project, consists mostly of originals. i'd particularly draw your attention to "blacktop", which is a sly reversal of rural romanticism from inside ("i was glad to see the blacktop/when they laid it down in '65/i was glad to see the blacktop/no more dust in my eyes"). he covers one of my favorite songs ever: "wild and blue". also the album features the great mandolin virtuoso adam steffey (i'm trying to learn the mandolin). jackson's baritone makes everything country again, though. well, that baritone, for me, just is  the sound of country over the last quarter century. actually i think he should have hired one of the great bluegrass high tenors - jamie dailey or russell moore, say - to sing harmonies throughout, and de-emphasized his own voice a bit (that would be in keeping with the ensemble ethos of bluegrass).

 

 

 

 

 

(for mw)

a failure by any standard

sat scores are declining. now, didn't y'all just spend the last fifteen years devoting all of american education, and all the innovative thinking of great human beings such as arne duncan and the bill and melinda gates foundation, to doing nothing but increasing sat scores? didn't you, in a series of initiatives from no child behind left to race to the top, base your entire conception of education at every level on the sat? isn't that why every child in america spends days every single year now doing sat-style tests? even according to the insane model of education that you yourselves deploy - according to your own arid mechanical minds - you are failing. but i don't think you were ever trying to educate anyone, just producing thingamajigs to enhance american competitiveness in the global economy. that is what you said you were doing, actually. dude, you can't even do that. time for a whole generation of educational visionaries, reformers, and experts to dissipate like a poisonous mist. 

on to the common core, you mugs.

harry reid on the senate floor called ted cruz etc 'anarchists' and 'fanatics.' everyone constantly goes 'crazy,' which you'll find every day on the nytimes op-ed, or in gene robinson. i guess that expresses their willingness to engage in constructive dialogue, etc. i'm surprised they don't just go right to 'terrorist' and open up some new internment /torture facilities for republicans. that would justify the use of gas, for example, which they are surely contemplating.

Channeling Yeats, King Solomon and the APA, kinda sorta

Download The Unlearned Lessons -- Ethics Assignment

 

beg, beg for forgiveness

God may not know much. but He knows that bruce springsteen is not Himself. for one thing, God knows of Himself that He is not that overblown. to teach this important lesson, He will punish new jersey continuously in a cataclysm of flood and fire directed at its 'amusement' parks until it repudiates its idolatry. awwww repent, bitches!

yet another apocalypse

boy people sure are nostalgic for the days of prestigious publishing houses that conducted themselves scandalously and served as august gatekeepers of taste to the whole world. the latest round has to do with a book on farrar, straus by boris kaschka. jason epstein in the new york review of books does the usual suspects: cerf and knopf simon and schuster, etc., and then lines up the nobel prize winners by the dozens. and always the same names and pics pop up: sontag, roth, edmund wilson. then he writes this:

The United States and indeed the world, without a viable book industry and leaders like Robert Straus to energize it is awful to contemplate. Within a bookless generation, or two, or three, human beings would have lost the better part of the knowledge acquired by their species over millennia, from making an omelette to parsing the universe and removing an appendix.

don't we think, on reflection, that this might be a trifle overwrought? thanks for keeping dreiser in print, though. but i like the very decentralized publishing world that can emerge now much better. these houses were like the hollywood studios: they promoted people into world-shattering geniuses, but the stables were awfully small. the tastes were elitist and often merely fashionable, if you will pardon my saying so. in many cases the genre or even pulp literature of the same era turns out to be more interesting, and at any rate more vividly written. remember when the new yorker was so good and carried so much cultural authority? well yes it has been good on and off. but it never should have had that kind of cultural authority.

more blurbs: from an ad from polity books in nyrb, for philosophy and the event, by alain badiou:

"Those who haven't yet read Badiou's work have got delicious pleasures in store." --Simon Critchley

this is striking, but perhaps somewhat misleading.

Reflections on a bad idea using a competent rubric

 

 In which Crusader AXE has an existential crisis, smokes another cigar, and relects on being a gadfly and not getting involved in the Syrian Civil Wars as being entirely too easy and too smart. 

stalinist aesthetics

from a review of a book on the albanian writer ismail kadare in the tls: under the leadership of enver hoxha, "the young poets Trifon Xhagjika, Vilson Blloshmi and Genc Leka 'were shot merely for having written poems that were too lyrical".

best and fullest tv coverage of the wal-mart protests is on al-jazeera america; live from several sites, for example. they are repressing some of them in one way or another.

6:55 if you are anti-attack, you have a good advocate in the hearings in rand paul. quite a sharp and entirely rational series of skeptical questions. kerry came back ok, though.

incredible credibility

the worst argument for a syria strike is the one everybody's making: look, if the president draws a red line and there are no consequences, he looks feckless, etc; american credibility is at stake around the world. that's just macho super-power bullshit. if it's a terrible idea to do it, or it is liable to have disastrous results, or there's no clear reason to do it, and you do it anyway because of some shit you talked last year, you are really not making policy - much less war - on a reasonable basis. 

blurbological bravery

here's a blurb (from an ad in the times literary supplement).

George Minkoff is one of the bravest men alive. He has gambled that a three-part epic novel about 17th century Colonial America - written in a language that mimics the speech of the time - can hold the attention of 21st century readers.

---Paul Auster

george minkoff could have jumped on a grenade or something, but instead he sat with a computer on his lap, typing. if only he'd chosen the grenade. i'm not too impressed with the searing honesty and transcendent courage of memoirists revealing their promiscuity, drug abuse, and low self-esteem either; it's a thin line between unbelievable physical courage and compulsive exhibitionism, and maybe after the millionth person does it in a herd the risks have been reduced. it takes supernatural courage to compose a sestina, in this day and age, or a bold new cookbook. 'like diana nyad paddling about among the sharks, hayley mchale wrote semi-sweet sex and hot chocolate without securing an advance'.

ok, ok, pretty slick

true, the syrian regime has engaged in monstrous acts of mass murder. but they do have some skills! seems like they brought down the nytimes site for a bit, and now they messed with a u.s. marine recruiting site. they posted this:

“Obama is a traitor who wants to put your lives in danger to rescue al-Qaeda insurgents,” according to the posting on the website, marines.com. “Marines, please take a look at what your comrades think about Obama’s alliance with al-Qaeda against Syria.”

now you have to admit that's pretty clever, putting right-wing obamaphobes in alliance with assad. throw in far-left anti-americans, and you have got an amazing coalition. somehow i feel it won't hang together, though.

fusion

the frankfurt school is often described as combining marxism and freudianism, a strategy that remains alive in the acdemic world, for example in the work of terry eagleton. maybe there is a piece of marcuse or adorno where they work that out carefully on the meta-level. but really you should ponder this combination, for it makes no sense. and at its worst, as in eagleton, it just kind of randomly leaps between orthodoxies that are obviously incompatible with one another. you might as well make it marx and locke, or freud and skinner. lacan and althusser aren't going to help at all, i believe, even if you're zizek. what is the nature of the unconscious, according to marxism, and how does it bear on politics and economics? so say we spend the next twenty years exploring my childhood traumas, my anal phase, all the mythological narratives and complexes that constitute my self, my dreams, and so on. what, according to marx, have we accomplished? on the other hand, what is the role of class structure and material conditions of production in the thought of freud? i think you could regard these both as interesting or historically important movements of thought (i do regard them that way; also as completely over, thank god), but tossing them like bouillabaisse and marshmallow fluff into the same food processor and hitting puree is not going to leave you with a good meal. i guess you could toss in nietzsche...wait, just stop.

part 2 of chris mayer's interview with me for laissez faire books

pop now

i finally watched the vma awards with jane last night. right. miley. but i want to acknowledge that we are actually in a really good and interesting phase of even maximally-commercial pop music right now: various, creative, and sometimes non-meaningless. it was awfully hard even for me not to be impressed by the like 20-minute justin timberlake extravaganza; if nothing else the dancing was brilliant, but actually it was pretty damn impressive in every respect. lady gaga is actually a serious and wild and highly sophisticated pomo performance artist, though the music has its ups and downs. but it's usually got an interesting bend. i suspect if you hung out with her a bit, you'd realize she's studying russian futurism and hannah wilke. bruno mars just killed on vocals, and obviously the soul revival continues apace. i'm not huge on katy perry, and one more self-esteem anthem is excruciatingly redundant. but her culminating performance under the brooklyn bridge shows exactly what i was saying about her in relation to miley: that was an extremely well-crafted object.

and i think macklemore has brought something absolutely necessary to hip hop at this moment, and also that he is good and interesting in every dimension. 'same love' is quite an inspiration, and the performance of it killed. honestly, i am pretty tired of jay-z and kanye, talented though they are. they're also kind of empty, and the songs make good sprite commercials and they are too beautifully produced, which to me gives them a glossy-bullshit quality. but mack brings that underground thing back again, which is where this music is alive. also, he has really thought about race, sexuality, and so on, and he expresses that directly and well. i do sort of excuse black overground mc's for crazed egomania, total devotion to brand-name consumer products, obsession with $$. oh you know it has to do with history of racism, origins in poverty, and so on. that doesn't mean it is ultimately a very admirable set of values, however, and there's room for whitey in the thrift shop too, obviously. also he has good flow; maybe not mad insane eminem/talib kweli/immortal technique flow, but good flow. they should have put him on the steps of the lincoln memorial on august 28 instead of, you know, boring hacks such as oprah winfrey and barack obama, because believe it or not i think something like that is as close as we get now to 'i have a dream.' so i think that song and several other moments actually meant something, which is never a given at such an event. 

bands like fun or even mumford and sons, etc: look i have some reservations about actualy listening, but they do have something going besides computerized beeps and auto-tune. on the other hand a good dubstep or techno-type dance/drink song is fine, as long as there is some other stuff happening too.

 

Get More: 2013 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

 

 

 

Get More: 2013 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music, Katy Perry

 

 

 

Get More: 2013 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music, Lady Gaga

  

 

 

that's so bourgeois

i have to say that the continuing infestation of the academy with marxist theory is a sad thing in a number of respects. one respect is this: there just seem to be no emerging or creative or even responsive modes of leftism; y'all need something new. zizek shows this on the upper intellectual end, for example.

so, communicating with some colleagues about let's say arts education, i quoted friedrich schiller to the effect that art is a form of play. one thing i got back: well, that sort of romantic individualism was just capitalist ideology. i think the idea that you're going to dismiss someone like friedrich schiller as a bourgeois ideologist is just sad. really, however, everyone y'all disagree with is a bourgeois individualist, just like this was 18fucking70.

first of all, the history of individualism of various sorts (and actually i would not necessarily call schiller an individualist) is, as i have been arguing for many years, pretty damn complex. the brand that ends you up at thoreau or kierkegaard, for example, starts in religious, not economic life; the basic idea is that the individual conscience is important, which i think you can only deny at the cost of nightmares. but the marxist interpretation would make the spiritual and political dimensions illusory: all of this, protestantism, republicanism, and capitalism, are just capitalism. i'm just going to baldly assert that you need to ditch the idea that only economy is real. the religious, cultural, aesthetic, and economic developments are all intertwined, and none is the only real thing. if you're looking at vermeer, the quakers, schiller, milton etc and all you can say is 'bourgeois', then you are being very primitive and missing a lot of great stuff.

anyway, the 'bourgeois' crap has got to go. first of all, every damn person making the accusation is herself bourgeois by her own acccount, and i guess trance-channeling the proletariat. however, if you were trance-channeling the proletariat in the states - and if these categories made sense anymore at all - you'd be flying 'don't tread on me' and stockpiling ammunition. you can trance-channel them because, unlike them, you know what they think and what their interests are. stop right there, tear down your intellectual structure, and start again from scratch.

second, to say of a doctrine or a figure or a painting that it is bourgeois: is that supposed to be some kind of refutation, or bear on its truth or its quality? one right answer would be: so what? wake me up when you have an argument. well, the bourgeoisie will be left on the slag heap of history (not; marxism has been left on the slag heap of history, however). but even if it was, that just does not bear on its truth. i mean, on your own account, we're in 'late capitalism' (just keep wishing, y'all). does the persistence of capitalism (well, that's how y'all see it yourselves) show that bourgeois ideas are true after all or something?

anyway, dismissing someone's politics - much less northern european and north american intellectual, aesthetic, religious, and political history from 1517 to 1848 - as bourgeois, is sad and really not attentive to the material in any way and irrelevant to its truth or value. and of course the idea that, for example, the concept of individual rights is bourgeois is really just an extraordinarlly empty and irrelevant justification for silencing people, taking their stuff, interning them, or executing them: i suppose on behalf of the proletariat. if your first move is: well, really, you have no rights; that's just bourgeois ideology: ask yourself: what do they want to do with the claim that you have no rights: why is that an important claim to them? the answer, i believe, is that they want to violate individuals in every possible way on the journey to collective identity.

anyway, the whole structure of thought is a meat cleaver: it's irrational; it's irrelevant; it's crude; it's false; and if history has demonstrated anything, it's that it's extremely dangerous. and it's so bourgeois.