cheese it, the cops!

quasi-lives of the philosophers

astoundingly, the library of living philosophers volume on arthur danto, under randy auxier's editorship (and with my essay on danto as a writer) appeared the same day he died. the basic format is pieces by various folks (including david carrier, the late denis dutton, george dickie, frank ankersmit, noel carroll, etc) each with a reply from arthur. probably of most enduring interest is the 'philosophical autobiography' that introduces the volume. as in auxier's extremely excellent rorty volume, this turns out to be central to any interpretation of danto's work from now on.

 

picasso: little jive-ass babygod

i do love the history of painting very much. but i cannot tell you how tired i am of sentences like this (first sentence of a tls review by jack flam of t.j. clark's new book): "No artist has remade the visible world in a more radical way than Picasso." it's the classic modernist, look-there-goes-god-with-his-floozy superjive that has taken on by endless insufferable repetition the triviality of a cliche. but if you thought about it for a moment you'd see that it was completely insane. no one remakes the visible world by pushing paint around: picasso operated entirely in every respect within the existing visible world, and the only way he changed it at all was by literally physically re-arranging it, a highly localized effect. of course, this whole idea is based on the actually psychotic notion that the visible world is a subjective artifact, and that if you see it differently you've changed it globally. by this logic, for example, you could transform the visible world by putting on a pair of sunglasses; you don't have to stare at another cubist thingummy and then try to see the world that way, which - excuse me - does not work anyway. you destroy the visible world every time you blink, you god-like fuck. this whole idea was based on literally worshiping artists as world-creators. dude. do you actually know any artists? we did not create this world; this world created us.

the idea that picasso re-made the world is either an extremely hyperbolic figure of speech to capture your enthusiasm for what he actually did do - a kind of groan of ecstasy rather than an assertion - or it really represents a completely supernatural belief system, as wacky as any superstition you could readily name.

returning to the art-historical level from the very origin of the cosmos: it's routine to say that the purpose of cubism (for example) is to 're-make the way we see the world' or 're-make the visible world' (these phrases being regarded falsely as synonymous). but this just can't be right. if you lose a sense of the distance between cubist pictures and ordinary visual experience, you have certainly lost a sense of what was ever radical or interesting about them. they do kind of challenge your visual assumptions...at least about paintings. but you can't possibly understand it as a challenge if you don't see the contrast between cubism and realism of various sorts. nor has the world shown any sign of re-configuring itself in imitation of cubist pictures, though such pictures have become so commonplace that they've lost their power to surprise. i think the best you could say about the dora maar, above, is that it's funny, an exploration of the outer reaches of caricature.

you actually completely miss the humor once you take the approach of 'creatah, destroyah, bulbous bubbah'. we need to keep these people with us, retain them as members of our very own species. i do think picasso played with his reception, unveiled the very bathos of his godhead, which is admirable: he really did produce many jokes.

as to the death of lou reed: it would be imprudent simply to declare that i am entirely opposed to it. tomorrow ran out of parties when lou ran out of liver.

(oh dang)

arthur danto

i will have much more to say about arthur danto, i hope. to me he was, among the very large philosophers of his generation (almost all of whom are gone: rawls, rorty, baudrillard, quine, derrida; perhaps habermas and cavell are still with us? i saw joe margolis stalking krakow recently) the one i would take as a model. he had extremely broad interests: unusually broad interests within philosophy, believe it or not (eastern, nitezsche), as well of course as all those wonderful and sometimes amazong excursions into visual arts in relation to everything. 

it is as a stylist that i admire him most, by which i also mean to indicate that i wouldn't particularly agree with his philosophy, though it is somewhat characteristic that it might be hard to say what that means, exactly. among philosophers, he has few equals in the twentieth century as a craftsman of english prose (we might mention russell, j.l. austin, quine). really, he plays the damn language like a strad, and in a completely particular way: it's an supple structure of digression upon digression or within digression, erudite tour de force within erudite tdf, shaggy dog story after shaggy dog story. sometimes, one feels that the sum doesn't amount to all one wished, but you will never regret reading anything he wrote, from the most sophisto art theory to the philosophy of history or action to the art criticism. go buy and read the transfiguration of the commonplace.

danto was never my teacher, but i met him on a number of occasions, dined with him here and there and so on. one of my first publications was a kind of literalistic attack on the basic stance of the transfirguration. he sent me a gracious reply. i have written about him on many occasions, notably in six names of beauty. i'm scheduled to teach his book the abuse of beauty starting tomorrow. i told my class thursday, as i often do, that we were about the start reading the greatest living aesthetician, the greatest living philosopher of art. i guess in hindsight that was misleading. i must say he was about the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet: not a given in particular at the topmost reaches of my profession.

it lives: a very brief counterfactual history

i don't blame john kennedy for being a pretty party boy whose biggest legislative priorities were pills and poontang. no one's really in control of stuff like that about themselves, and he did what the best and brightest do do in such a situation: he hired good writers and delivered their woolly hooha with remarkable pseudo-sincerity. no, i blame us, the idiots, for following someone like that around drooling and throwing money. basically, all anyone wants is to find a model and do what he says. there's a thin line between politica and erotica. 

what would kennedy have done if he had lived? how would history have been so very different? as it turns out, he made sgt. pepper two years before the beatles and revolutionized world pop. then he nuked hanoi. then he gave everyone everything on their christmas list. finally he died in a freak chimpanzee attack. the chimp's digestive tract was the only remaining source of dna, so when we cloned kennedy to be our pres again, we had to clone him from chimp shit. chimpshit kennedy exuded so much charisma you could smell him in central asia from the white house. then, in an unholy conspiracy of edward snowden, pope francis, and oliver stone, he was gunned down in the streets of his beloved hohokus. when chimpshit jfk bit it, a nation lost its innocence.

but what if chimpshit kennedy had lived?

driving the leam

it's true, i have a review (of luc ferry's on love) in the october 25 times literary supplement. it's paywalled (indeed, i'm a subscriber and i can't quite figure out how to access it), but here's a pdf. well, having something in the tls might possibly be something someone such as or much like myself might have been fantasizing about for approximately decades.

Doom, despair and agony oh me...

In which Crusader AXE avoids the snark to reflect semi-seriously on how the current attitude toward science research, funding and community will kill us all thus saving future generations from the problem of debt because they'll never be born or all be dead. 

Problem solved! Gomert-Paul in 1016!errr...2016.

 

pro-obama hate speech

i think i actually do end up offending people by always formulating in terms of 'you'. i don't mean you. join me in attacking you. the mainstream left has really gone hysterically partisan: really kind of hyper-partisan tizzy where you can't even understand your opponents as human. here are some slices from a typical piece in salon: 

our government is under attack from a band of domestic anarchists—presumably everyone can see that

The victory already claimed by those out to drive the American government to its knees will simply embolden the infidels to mount another attack once they’ve licked their wounds

the Tea Party jihadists leading the crusade against a functional federal government

it’s the same old obstructionist strategy that’s been pursued by traitorous Southerners 

the vituperative Confederate agenda of anti-Americanism has managed to spread its irresistible redneck poison

But to deny that the current attack on the federal government isn’t part of the hidebound Confederate agenda is to ignore the people who have engineered it and whose sedition will be rewarded with reelection

[nice piece of writing]

ignoble menagerie of clampdown Clampetts

a pathology sadly worthy of Calhoun and his whole sorry legacy of tantrum-throwing quack parliamentarians 

 

he finishes by calling for 'an end to the division.' probably he thinks his opponents are irrational and listening to wacky propaganda. really, self-knowledge is difficult. for its audience, this sort of material is completely non-controversial, just obvious. the point is just to make your opponents incomprehensible so that you can pretend to be the only decent sort of person. this, the routine rhetoric of the mainstream american left, is further out by a way than cruz or even glen beck. it's similar to beck, really, but less constrained, just a non-stop accusation of racism, treason, insanity, and so on. 

the whole idea is to make it impossible to examine their position rationally, or to make all disagreement pathological, a strategy we might call soviet. but if you think that it would be impossible rationally to disagree with the direction of the country toward an ever-larger welfare/security state, you are tripping. indeed, i propose that it is precisely because you know your position to be fearsomely dangerous and without rational justification that you resort to these paroxysms of vituperation.

real conspiracies

not to sound like ted cruz or nothin, but i do note that now your healthcare info etc is is connected to homeland security, the irs, and so on. ed snowden is downloading your data right now, matter of fact.

guess who?

what i want to say about the 'glitches in the obamacare rollout' is this. i love human beings! i am being sincere. we are so earnest in our aspirations, and so sort of general in describing the results of our upcoming transformation into a better condition. but in every case, it's really the grinding everyday mediocrity, the constant stupidity and fuck up and corruption that just is us. all your experts and rhetoricians, all your ivy-leaguers and economists and public servants and transcendent inspirers or whatever it may be: it's really just us down here!

no thing, y'all

i just want to point out that the congressional tea partiers didn't actually commit any felonies. for example, they didn't hold anyone hostage. and i doubt that they are, overall, less sane than congresspeople as a whole. they didn't rob the economy of billions of dollars, and all those people trying to give you totals and stuff are completely full of shit. in fact, they merely availed themselves of the procedures there are. so, they lost, and if so democracy worked even on your account. so really, tone down the extreme rhetoric of vilification, will you? seriously, y'all have sounded hysterical for weeks. 

misunderstood ideologies

speaking of marx, etc. it's true, capitalism has had its bad moments. but you show me where adam smith or milton friedman were all like: people should be brutally exploited! there should be chronic systemic poverty for most people! or anything like that at all. have you even read friedman? capitalism is a beautiful, harmless vision of human freedom, though of course every attempt to realize it in fact has been a horrendous moral disaster. that's just been kind of random, really; sometimes we ideologies just have a run of bad luck out there in the 'real world'. we get misinterpreted by assholes. sometimes it's nothing but assholes and their victims for centuries, really, but you gotta believe! real capitalism has never been tried. that's why i'm calling for immediate deregulation in every respect.

disrespectrum

as you may know, i reject the left/right spectrum as a way to describe anything, though sometimes i slip and use the locutions because everyone else is working with it. so the nyt or guardian, say, while in every sentence using 'crazy', also in every sentence go 'far right.' is cruz to the right of john mccain? in virtue of what? what does that mean? think of the set of positions you yourself associate with 'the american right': cheney's poisitions, say, and also rand paul's. really we need a taxonomy and not this bullshit anymore.

also i want to say this to the american left: you are outraged that someone would try to stop obamacare or whatever it may be; you want government running smoothly (and you regard protest movements as insane). now, i want you to understand what you are supporting when you support the democratic party, obama, and so on: among other things wall street in a huge way, and a total surveillance state. you are supporting the most intensely bourgeois vision of america ever articulated: government by lawyers, professors, bankers, google, and standardized-testing experts. are you comfortable with that? are you aware of that in yourself? i have this funny feeling that by your own ideals you are endorsing something terribly wrong. and you and many others are being pushed into taking a set of randomly grouped or flatly incoherent positions, or positions poised exquisitely opposite your professed principles, because you are flummoxed by this left-right bullshit.

"No other book on Duke Ellington has followed the money so rigorously, laying bare the interworkings of art and capital."

---Times Literary Supplement

 

from the uchicago press sale catalogue entry on duke ellington's america, by harvey cohen

 

joey + rory

i'm listening obsessively to the records of 'joey + rory' = (him and her) feek. feek? feek. it's hyper-trad country, sounding like the more homemade side of keith stegall, i.e. like alan jackson. the songs are sort of faith and family-oriented, but get over the reaction to them as reactionaries (ask yourself, can you really do without such things in some form?). i say that joey feek is about as good a country singer as it is possible to be; on some of these performances i would't edit a single note. and there are some flat-out killer country songs (where are they coming from?) (though it's a bit inconsistent), with also a line in cheating. they really wear the hyper-traditional thing easily. and their daughter heidi feek makes kind of chris isaacsy atmospheric hipster country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

she's one of the few singers who could stand up to the, um, demands of a song called 'sweet emmylou'. she's definitely not imitating her. but she's emulating her, and she can. she really kind of rings more like the open-voiced linda ronstandt, who i've been thinking a lot about lately, and in relation to emmylou of course as well. but honestly she is her own thing, and where she rings and where she catches, for example, or the dynamics, are very distinctive. she can shape a whole song as a very coherent performnce. anyway, just sayin. 

i guess they came from the of-course doofy cmt show 'let's duet,' where blake shelton, currently on the country charts with brand-new dreck, was a judge. speculating, the people who beat them were like thompson square or lady antebellum. bad, in other words. at any rate, you can't think less of unknown artists for being in those competitions; you'd try anything, like a magazine writer pitching the new yorker for decades. any way you cut it, that there is a country star.

disintegrate, for god's sake

the two-party system might actually be too entrenched to dissolve, but on the other hand it makes no sense. mike murphy, the republican consultant, was on morning joe this morning suggesting that ted cruz "take a vacation to little bighorn", while scarborough was supposedly quoting the very biggest donors to the republican party (who dat? kochs, etc?) as saying they couldn't contribute to the party under these circumstances. understand, the cruzians are completely incompatible with wall street and with k street. so murphy and david axelrod are collaborating across parties to stamp that out. the center is broadly technocratic, wall-street oriented, national-security state. axelrod and murphy or obama and mccain have much more in common with each other than with tea partiers. now, were a center squishy totalitarian party to emerge, the real left would almost have to jump ship. are they going to sit there agreeing with lindsey graham? so i like a three-party set-up: a libertarian right, a wall street/nsa center and a real like socialisty left. 

if you really thought it was billionaires who invented the tea party, you were wrong. there were certainly attempts to appropriate it or use the term for your lobbying organization etc. but it was and is also a grassroots movement, blazing across parts of america that you may not be familiar with. it knows itself to be incompatible with country-club republicanism. it wants to battle internally to control the republican party, but it is about to be quarantined and crushed. so, secede!

karl never ends. but you do.

someday, there'll be somewhere for leftists to go besides marx. you'd think that these overwhelming geniuses, be they badiou or zizek or whatever, would have had a new idea by now. hardly. so i suppose you think the twentieth century didn't provide enough marxism-related suffering: not enough idiot propaganda and bullet-riddled corpses, eh?  one thing we can comfort ourselves with: the people who really achieve that marxist revolution are always the first to go to show trial. it amounts to self-execution, which is rational in this case. i wish you all the luck in the world.

Brave men trying to do their job...

Reflections on the nature of valor...

 

this means war

i find paul krugman irritating, and i have attacked him many times in this blog etc. but somehow he has really pissed off niall ferguson, who has systematically trolled his work, trying to detect and expose every error. actually i hope krugs fires back in kind, for there is nothing quite as intense or amusing as a real war between academic egomaniacs. put them on stage together and i will buy a ticket.

 

 

in defense of amazon

publishers hate amazon. bookstores, if any, hate amazon. the government of france hates amazon. etc. now, putting it mildly i was an early adopter, and i don't want to know how much i've spent there over the years. everyone always goes all jonathan franzen or nicholson baker or whatever and yearns for the time when one was browsing and making discoveries and talking to book enthusiasts at your local bookstore, if one ever was. but the local bookstore was good for some things and not others. probably a good spot to discover alice munro, say, and find people to enthuse about her with. but how many of them had even a half-decent philosophy section? and how many owners cared about stuff like that? the answer is merely 'not'. more or less they were all fiction heads who thought life was a story or whatever woolly jive people like that do believe. i used to go bookstore to bookstore, never finding the things i needed, or even anything i wanted, or even the very basic classics. mention this or that and they'd just look at you blankly. then i'd give up and maybe special-order it. they'd call me three months later, by which time i was on to something else. the idea that i could order any book in print and it would show up on my doorstep two days later seemed miraculous, and it has been extremely useful to me as a scholar: i can't imagine life without it now, really. 

p.s. what the principles are by which french legislators operate, or what they take to be the scope and limits of their power, are matters incomprehensible. they'll yell 'liberte-with-an-accent!' and then arrest you for wearing the wrong outfit. if i were them, i'd drop their entire political tradition and adopt the british one, har har.

Republican Congresscritters -- Weasel Taxonomy

 
Most of us would not think of damaging the United States for our own political benefit, monetary benefit or just for kicks. (Well, there was Crispin's advocacy of BushII over Kerry, but that was probably sunstroke at John Edwards' teeth...) Obviously, Republican Congresscritters, as Molly Ivins used to call them at times, are more malleable. 

 

news notes

they're treating the 9-year-old stowaway case like it's a security crisis. i prefer to think of it as fun and amusing.

jay carney, expressing obama's disappointment that boehner would not permit his entire caucus to go to the white house: 'the president wanted to talk to the people who forced this economic crisis on the country.' look can't you stop the partisan reflex for ten goddamn seconds? why don't you at least act as though you do actually want to talk to them and not just rant at them or use them to to score points? right, false equivalences banned. but it's just amazing how autonomic the partisanship is, how impossible it for obama or his opponents to lay it aside even for a single sentence. is there anything in anyone's head at all except the desire to manipulate their listeners? it's all 'framing' and strategies born in communications programs. they focus-grouped the frame of the shutdaown as an economic crisis; now it'll be in every sentence. if i were actually sitting around with barack i'd ask him this: look back on the moment you declared your candidacy for president: what would that person say about the way barack obama conducts himself now?

unspontaneous data combustion

alright, i'm going to admit that for some time i have been pondering how one might introduce "fiery explosions" - or indeed, explosions of any kind - into the nsa data center: you know, just casually turning over various ideas in my mind. not, of course, that i would actually commit such a crime...unless i could figure out something that would work and leave me alive. indeed, i would say that anyone who is even vaguely an american or a decent human being must have been having such thoughts. but, evidently there's no need: the thing keeps fierily exploding on its own. i think these explosions are little warnings from on high. i probably can't do anything about the absolute end of human freedom, but if there is a god, then he in turn has the nsa under surveillance. and if he is a just god, the whole complex and all its devices and monstrous totalitarian enthusiasts will be thoroughly immolated and sucked into hell, like rihanna in this is the end. 

at his discretion

obviously, the administration can keep open whatever bits of the government it pleases. e.g. chuck hagel recalled the defense department. and though they have suspended many programs that help people, they have preserved all oppressive mechanisms: the military, fbi, our amazing structure of universal surveillance. so let me ask you this: does or does not the budget of the us government have to originate in and spending be authorized by the house of representatives? i propose not at all, and if congress went on strike, the whole thing would just keep right on. obama seems to be shutting down bits in the order in which it makes for the best propaganda, but i don't detect the limits: what can he not spend without authorization, etc? anyway, if you think the constitution has any connection to the way this sucker is actually governed, i say you're wrong. it's like, you know, the soviet constitution: a beautiful model of reason and freedom that had nothing to do with anything in the actual world.

resist

ladar levison, who shut down his secure email provider lavabit - snowden's provider - rather than turn over his encryption keys, is rather heroic.

do you like bubes a lot? yes, i like bubes a lot.

i've rather neglected martin buber in my philosophical wanderings, though on a number of occasions people who have heard my schtick (esp with regard to metaphysics or ontology) have been all like, "you better go read buber". at any rate, in this rather stunning bit from the third part of i and thou, i recognize my sort of position: 

All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of a human spirit bent back on itself - the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man - between man and what he is not.

the context is a discussion of the teachings of the buddha, and 'doctrines of immersion' are doctrines according to which we have to more or less annihilate ourselves to achieve an identity with things, or with the world, or with god. buber thinks such views actually presuppose a human spirit trapped in itself, and no human spirit is trapped in itself; it is always in transaction, or it is a series of transactions. for philosophy-heads: this also appears to be an expression of externalism about the mind, or at rate the spirit (whatever that may be, exactly; anyway, it's not much more mysterious than mind).

what the world needs is more female vigilantes

as an anarchist, i'm always asked about the criminal justice problem. one issue with the whole thing is that the authorities are themselves often the criminals. but at any rate, here is some sort of model. the statist model is this: to constrain crime (whatever that means exactly), we will institute an irresistible armed force. after you do that, of course, you're liable to be its victim, with no recourse, and you've potentially constituted also a massive criminal enterprise, or just assigned the proceeds of all criminal enterprises to your little martinets. spontaneous organization for self-protection tries to resist both state and non-state killers, rapists, dealers, and so on.

i hear voices

miriam carey, along with the bizarre notion that the government was monitoring her communications, was subject also to the delusion that obama was talking to her. i feel like that too. lord, that dude's voice has been all over the television and radio for frigging years on end. it's coming out of the furniture or at least the appliances in my living room, and, since i installed the brackets, out of the very walls. my car talks to me every so often in barack obama's voice, when it's not tuned to the country station. i hear barack obama's voice in my dreams, singing light opera and reciting my to-do list. 

terror and courage

they're describing the dc drivetime woman as 'delusional', on the grounds that she believed the government had her under surveillance. but i will express my appreciation of our heroic first responders, capitol police, and everyone that helps turn dc into an armed and surveiled camp, a fucking beacon of democracy. with only automatic weapons, body armor, armored vehicles, and so on, they managed eventually to stop an unarmed dental hygienist and her toddler from assaulting the government of the united states. and yet the tea partiers don't think they should be paid! 

they finally took her out in front of the botanical gardens, which eventually will be getting a historical plaque as the site of my first acid trip. looking back on that event, i'm glad it didn't include any rogue luxury cars or automatic-weapons fire, though i did see some pretty weird shit.