cheese it, the cops!

I despise Upworthy, don't you...cue Emily Dickinson

 

I really don't like that bloody thing. Upworthy -- what the hell does it even mean? It's kind like RL Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse which some people find poetic but I always found it to be saccharine, maudlin "why the hell did they give me this instead of the book about Vikings I wanted" even when I was a kid. But, in the words of the old Russian proverb, Даже слепая свинья находит желудь иногда, or as we say in Dusquesne, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THIS SCREWY INTERFACE?

Ok, it's ok now. Actually, it translates like this...

Charlie: You're getting on. You're pushing 30. You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition. 
Terry: I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it. -- 

 

 

Anyway, there is also music provided by that twanging philosopher, Mr. Dwight Yoakum. But, watch the Ted Thing and I know you'll like it

And if you're taking a course in Aesthetics and Politics with Herr Professor Doktor Sartwell, compare and contrast values based on this contrasting versions of the Clash piece by Mr. Yoakum and Ms. McColl with extra credit if you can describe the similarity in the personal sitations of Ms. McColl and Mr. Strummer in 2012. Guaranteed C-, I tell you. Trust me. I used to be in govenment...

 

garner on freud

dwight garner can be so, so good. here's a line: "You turn each page the way a rat hits the little lever for another pellet of crack." so, lucian freud, 'probably-the-most-important-painter-of-the-late-etc-period,' was certainly a grotesque monster. really some lovely moments:

A boxer when young, Freud loved to thump or head-butt his fellow Britons. One of his daughters recalls, “Dad used to hit taxi drivers and punched people in the street if he didn’t like the look of them.”

 Freud leapt on women (and occasionally men) throughout his life as if he were a flying squirrel in paint-flecked work boots. 

In Mr. Greig’s account, he could be a sadist. “He became quite vicious, really hurt breasts and things,” a lover comments. He liked anal sex with women, an acquaintance reports, because it was redolent of utter domination.

now, am i going to use such things to bash the art of lucian freud? that would be so typical! because i've never seen what all the fuss was about. but here's what i think is disturbing: i think this stuff is actually part of why he is regarded as 'the most important painter.' by 1973 we were running out of gigantic modernist art heroes; picasso must have been off someplace expiring. pop and conceptualism and whatever were cool and all, but they didn't give you the painter-god: the modernist colossus who re-makes the visible world. so people yearned, and they yearn still. well, as this makes perfectly clear, it is a masochist yearning: utter domination is the mark of genius, expressed in an anal assault or in a masterpiece.

the bacon/freud mini-renaissance in england was like a late efflorescence, a last gasp, because for one thing england never quite got on top of modernism and drove it at all, really: the bloomsbury group were as much late-blooming aesthetes as figures of high modernism (clive bell or roger fry's art criticism appeared merely quaint in paris even as it was written, i should think). they came late, partly because of that. these two guys were like modernism's last chance, the great white hope in a sea of post-modern crap. i'm sure people wanted to build a revival around them, but i think it just petered out. let's add henry moore, maybe. really modernism unfolded at different rates and of course different looks in different places: teens and after and earlier in some parts of europe; 40s/50s in new york/ca; 60s/70 in england. by then, they might have been the only vital fresh forces still doing that with a good conscience. 

at all these moments, a basic driving idea of late romanticism/modernism is that you can't judge art morally, that great art is above morality = l'art pour l'art. that was, among other things, an argument against censorship. so that's good. but however, it gets slightly extended, which is where it goes horribly wrong: it apparently entails in the wrong hands that the great artist is outside morality. so, we think we are finding these monster-gods, like they're a quasi-natural phenomenon; genius just seizes them, another reason that they are above our petty little moral rules about sexually assaulting people or whatever it may be. but we are also teaching everyone that to be a genius, you'd better start acting like an unbelievable asshole. and then, though garner doesn't exactly do this right there, we actually accept them as geniuses in part due to their assholery: the bigger the asshole, the bigger the genius. then you get these myths in which it is next to impossible even to see the actual artistic achievement, if any, so stupefyingly do they radiate domination that all you do is acquiesce. we created, insisted upon, constructed, the monsters who are, you know, doing us. 

also, the modernist babygod is a psychological anomaly of some sort: diagnosable, dude. so, they're suicidally depressed (van gogh), they're extreme substance abusers (don't get me started), they're literally paranoid schizophrnenics like john nash or whatever. so it does come in various flavors: tormented little toulouse-lautrec! the young doomed poet who radiates sexual heat like a furnace, say verlaine, and who suffers simultaneously with all maladies. the sadist hyper-masculine godling (picasso, hemingway, de kooning, beckett)  is only one such flavor, and maybe the important thing is just to be bent: your symptoms: they are your talent. madness lets you see what conventional people miss. but the sadist godling is also a central bit: i think the dominance and submission relation is central to the experience of art on and off, but never more than here. as kierkegaard might say, the actual artistic genius might just as likely be indistinguishable from a grocer or an accountant. at any rate, don't let this make you think that going mad or simulating madness or shooting all the heroin you can find will in itself enhance your craft.

really you're under full anal assault right there in the museum, at least once you accept the critical apparatus, the decades of praise that make resistance socially impractical.

yo

astoundingly, as i was doing these blog entries and making public challenges to the editorial board of the nytimes, they were busy putting up this outstanding column by the outstanding ta-nehisi coates. know what? my hat is off, chris, though dang you made me look kinda silly. a problem remains, however: could someone like me make that argument? i'd like to get the point where that too is possible. of course i think i have a pretty elaborate machinery starting with frege etc for this. but it is also a version of coates's argument, or coates' argument would be entailed by it. also i straight-up extend it to: calm down about anyone using these words. that is not where the problem is in our culture.

a challenge for the world's opinion editors, and profs of media ethics

here is a note i wrote to an editor at the nytimes, and i am throwing it out there for any ethics person (howard kurtz, say, or a prof at columbia) to solve theoretically, or for any actual editor on a mainstream-press opinion page to solve practically, with a column by me or anyone else. if you know any such people, see what they think.

hey  ****,

i have an interesting challenge for you. or at least i think it's interesting. indeed, i think it sets the editorial board of the nytimes a seemingly insoluble, fundamental moral dilemma, a new wicked wicked question in journalistic ethics (or would if they noticed it). 

 

my view is that the use of such words as 'nigger', 'fag', and bitch' should be entirely unrestricted. in a couple of long blog entries, i argue this sarcastically, elaborately, and - in my own opinion - devastatingly.

 

the supernatural power of morphemes

anti-woman words

 

really, i'd pitch you a column on this, geared to the amazing lily allen video. however, as i remark in the second entry, i could not possibly express these opinions in the new york times without betraying them, deploying layers of euphemisms, observing precisely the taboos that i am arguing are superstitious nonsense.

 

i do not think that the other side has this problem. their views can be expressed in the language they themselves need to express them in. you're not going to take a feminist who is arguing against 'bitch' and force her to use that very word in her column.

 

so i say this represents an actual conceptual dilemma that has the actual effect of making it impossible for me to express my actual opinion - which is surely one of the basic possible opinions on this question - in the mainstream press. it's so unfair! you're suppressing my argument for free expression!

 

so here's the challenge: find some way that it would be possible to make my perfectly legitimate argument about an important issue in the times without making myself into a laughable hypocrite in the process. (that does not entail accepting any particular column!). 

 

now, why do i say that the dilemma is fundamental? well, think about it from the point of view of the editorial board at the new york times, the washington post, the guardian (as it publishes snowden): you have to choose between your fundamental professed values - fairness to all important sides of an important issue, free expression of ideas - and your actual policies. so, it's pretty simple: your decision shows what the actual values of your publication are. that's pretty fundamental. it is not a new dilemma for me: i had a long go-round with several editors at the los angeles times about it after i submitted a specific column in, i think, the late 90s. it appeared with 'the n-word'. i was a chump under my own by-line, a betrayer of my own convictions. well, homie don't play that no mo. but it's still a problem for y'all!

forget where you were, for god's sake

i just woke up. is the kennedy assassination over again yet? i cannot imagine how all these tv networks, radio shows, news sites, etc. possibly do what they do. really, every single one put someone on the air to just say the same ritual sentences. every piece had the same shape. 'everyone remembers where they were' is the first sentence and then it goes on through the same snatches of tape, the same super-blown-up hyperbolic contentless cliches. the editor who assigns that, year after year, who assigns you to say precisely the same words in the same order as everyone else, really has got no business in this business. i heard that same piece two dozen times even though i tried like hell to avoid it. every time it came on, i screamed and turned the channel; still i got the whole thing many times. it is sheer cult of political leadership, focused on an absurd object. i'm beginnning to wish that everyone who was covering it back then etc was dead, so we wouldn't have to listen once again to their dramatically re-shaped repetitive accounts. or wishing them dead is a little harsh. i wish them alzheimer's and the blessing, to all of us, of forgetting where they were.

no one can forget where they were when they heard the rigidly conventionalized narrative delivered again for the 8 billionth time.

it becomes a little unclear, if you ask me, whether we are mourning kennedy's death, or rather being really, really into it, celebrating it. we can't watch that assassination enough, can we? it's addictive, like that last robin thicke video.  frame by frame through the zapruder film: i think the fundamental motivation is that we really find the killing of jfk very fun and entertaining. how are the ratings? i bet we can get a couple of more movies and tv specials out of it, which seems incredible. still, i don't think that bullet to the skull has been exhaustively monetized. i want spiellberg, daniel day-lewis, doris kearns-goodwin, and tony kushner on it. we can start with a scene of spielberg licking lewis-as-kennedy's toes, move on through daniel day-lewis's crucifixion and resurrection, and from there to oscar glory. you might think that daniel day-lewis doesn't look much like kennedy, but with dap-brand spackle(tm), anything is possible. if he does that voice from lincoln again, though, we're going to have to assassinate him harder this time.

i was five, and who could forget that moment? when i heard, or rather saw, that kennedy was dead, i was on the grassy knoll, fumbling to re-load. i missed that dickwad john connally, though. well, i was only five! i blame montessori education. still, that moment where i didn't even wing connally was the moment i lost my innocence, my naive idealism, my self-confidence as a young nation.

bad-for-women sounds

as you know the main instrument of women's oppression is the word 'bitch'. it makes me open my mouth in an o and touch the flat four fingers of my tiny right hand to it in apparent shock. i deeply admire the sort of feminist who fears and loathes phonemes, and attributes patriarchal oppression to them. christ, at least they're not holding me responsible for my actual misogyny, which is a big relief, because it's been a struggle. what people don't understand - even though everyone says it all the time and even though it could not more obviously be false - is that words create reality. why are so many women struggling in poverty, sexual exploitation, abusive relationships? the root cause is 'bitch'. i do think it works particularly well applied by men to men, however. at any rate, to avoid saying or writing 'bitch', i refer to it as 'the bitch word'.

lily allen must be banned, because she's using intrinsically bad-for-women sounds.

  

if that means we must leave the grotesque idiocy and exploitation of hip hop and r&b videos without a response or critique, then so be it. we're too scared of the words to be able to respond at all. now you might think that it takes a bit of courage to do what lily alen did: it's like, faced with an actually oppressive musical world, she stood up to fight. you might think that, if lily allen were properly scared and intimidated by the word 'bitch' and couldn't use it at all, she would be frozen in capitulation in a world she despises. but at least she wouldn't be impolite. the coincidence of magic-of-words feminism with, say, the etiquette of the bourgeoisie circa 1956, is remarkable, and of course speaks to the origin of this sort of feminism. it's going to be amazingly difficult to eradicate the bitch word, of course. we need a sort of logocide that does to words what round-up does to weeds.

alright let me come off my conceit (which i sustained a bit too long. sorry). this whole thing goes for images too. consider, for example, leni riefenstahl's triumph of the will. it was intended to glorify the nazi regime. those images, though, are central in almost every visual presentation of nazism: they don't come pre-interpreted, and now we look with a horrified amazement. those same evil images help us understand, if nothing else, how the nazis wanted to present themselves. if you repressed those images, say under your austrian anti-nazi-propaganda laws, you're just depriving yourself of understanding, achieving a willful blindness. i think that makes the rise of neo-nazism more, not less likely.

now, lily allen's feminism on body image etc is well-(and extremely pointedly)expressed in that song, but it is pretty predictable. what is most interesting is the likewise-pointed critique of the way black women's bodies are depicted, for example, in music videos. now, that there is a bold and questionable move for a white artist. but if you think the nature of the images themselves is inherently exploitative, you really don't understand the way images work. lily has to be able to do that. we have to be able to watch it. and so, i say, the male r&b artist who produces the sort of images that allen is parodying has to be allowed to do it too, because there is no way to distinguish them by the nature of the images themselves. indeed, lily could have made almost as good a video by using actual clips from the sort of thing she is attacking, right? so if those images were repressed, lily's critique would be repressed too. the whole transaction of repression and silence, whether performed by an active censorship regime backed by force or by extreme social sanctions, if you ask me, leaves the culture untransformed or freezes it in place.

but the free circulation of images and words cuts in all sorts of dirrections, makes possible all sorts of critiques, parodies, ridicule, rejection, appropriation, redeployment. see, that video uses the oppressor's own images as a weapon to attack him. in the realm of images and words, that is the most effective weapon, the weapon actually most dangerous to the oppressive use of images etc: she shows you what these images actually mean. but you cannot do that if the images themselves are verboten. they use those images to lie. she uses them to comnfront us with the truth about our culture. this is absolutely typical, with both words and images, and you cannot tell who is going to make what creative re-interpretation. the last thing you want to do is make that impossible in a regime that silences or blinds people. 

so the right response to that barrage on bet that so harms our daughters and so on, is not to shut down '106 and park', but to make videos like lily allen makes them. i showed that video to jane last night. and here's why: lily allen makes girls aware of what they're really watching, arms them with knowledge that they need to negotiate this world, gives them a new kind of critical distance, with a good beat. jane was absorbed by it.

now how serious is our situation, really? well thank god for youtube right now, and anything that displays lax enforcement of copyright law. obviously, you will not be seeing anything like that video (i mean the actual video, the words and images as she produced them) on television, which is insanely ironic. not on the radio. i would like to adapt this thing i'm writing right now into a column and pitch it, say, to the new york times. but my column about this in the times would be a complete enactment of mindless, pointless hypocrisy. i couldn't tell you what words i'm talking about. i couldn't link to the video i was writing about. i'd compose an absurd structure of euphemisms, evasions, and jive. i'd have to observe precisely the taboos i'm trying to expose as superstitious nonsense. go to a public school classroom and see if you can pull that thing up on one of the computers. no, extremely safe search is extremely on, like it is in china. by and large, we are trying to protect our daughters from lily allen's message, correct? we are repressing that mesage. not entirely, of course, and what we should do is watch for further encroachments while drawing attention to the braying asininity of basic media unfreedoms we all take for granted.

what sort of woman do i want my daughter to turn out to be? actually, i want her to be whatever she wants to be. but if i were saying, i'd say i want her to be a woman like lily allen: a woman with the guts and the vocabulary to say exactly what she means and to represent herself with truth, and to express that in whatever way seems most effective, most amusing, most creative, or most real.

 

 

i am gathering many allies in my campaign to eradicate bad little squiggles. meanwhile, 'vagina' has been added to the list of evil sounds. obviously, you need to take out all slang terms, as well as latinate terms from medical anatomy, that refer to the female sex organs. oh hell i just violated the ban! meanwhile, of course, people should be broadly encouraged - or indeed, required by law - to say 'penis', 'dick', 'cock', 'schlong', 'phallus', etc.

Defending the indefensible...

So after a day at the dentist for a deep scaling, an afternoon at the allergist for a shot or three and  in-between periods of defending our friend and favorite nouveau Zimbobwaian food evangelist, Crispin Sartwell to the the readers of Veterans Today who regarded him based on something as some pointy-headed intellectual fag outside Jew Yankee commie agitator -- VetsToday can get rough! -- it was time for dinner. And, hilarity prevailed...

 

my argument against 'the n-word' grows ever-more elaborate, almost tumescent, you might say. ok, sue me, fire me etc: i am inordinately proud of the thing.

ponder well the word 'overseer'

on the anniversary of the gettysburg address, i want to point out the completely obvious fact that government of the people, by the people, and for the people has perished from the earth. that concept is from an entirely different set of political commitments than, say, an effective government program of universal surveillance. but it is obviously, breathtakingly incompatible with the idea that such a program is a state secret. this is the thread that connects obama with lincoln: the first black president has participated enthusiastically in everything lincoln fought the civil war, by his own account, to destroy. were lincoln around now he would, unlike daniel day-lewis, be raising a rebel army, possibly in the south and west, to resist the enslavement of everyone directly by the government of the united states. thoreau and douglass got a little pissy about the fugitive slave law: they thought this meant that, for example, the government of massachussetts was implicated in slavery, and hence that they were themselves implicated as citizens and taxpayers. the dred scott decision is being enforced, now, on us all: we have no rights that the government of the united states is bound to respect. we're all niggers, baby.

universal surveillance, again, is not every aspect of totalitarianism. but it entails, if you also have overwhelming police or military force, every other aspect of totalitarisnism. obviously, the government is inside the internet and the companies that run it etc to the tune of being able to control media and communications much more thoroughly if they want. indeed, we have no idea to what extent they actually do; they are certainly already monitoring such things in every respect. they know where you are if they need to grab you, and it is extremely unlikely that you could evade them for long if they wanted to catch you. they have enough on you to throw you in jail, i predict, if they are in the mood, or blackmail you into doing what they say, including saying what they tell you to say. put it this way: much active totalitarianism is actually in place, and every possible aspect of it is implied by the powers these people claim and the means they have to exercise those powers. plus resistance is futile. it is. perished from the earth, y'all.

in terms of a comparison to american slavery itself, the current situation does not feature very common officially-sanctioned rape, for example, or routinely break up families or literally work people to death, usually. but first off, american slavery depended absolutely fundamentally on surveillance: ponder well the word 'overseer.' it depended on a system of surveillance that basically included as agents all the white people of america who wouldn't go to heroic lengths to violate the law. every white community in the south was mobilized to watch the slaves, and they were twisted to monitor each other. but the degree of surveillance operated by the united states government today would give a plantation-owner an orgasm: if he knows what they're doing at all times, he can take steps to control them completely. no escape.

one thing to focus on in the text of the address is the relative roles of liberty and equality. on the anniversary and for the last x decades, the equality part has been relentlessly emphasized. and equality is certainly one good reason to try to emancipate slaves. but i think that any purported opposition or tension between these concepts forces you into extremely unfortunate political orientations. so, first of all, lincoln's and founder's basic vision of equality is equality precisely of liberty, and any plausible vision of human equality has to include that. where many or most people are subordinated politically, and even if that subordination is used to try to level incomes, for example, you have a profoundly unequal society. (also, in such a situation, incomes overall are extremely unlikely to move toward equality, because the subordinating power is actually a bunch of people, operating this subordinating power at least in part for their own benefit, and inevitably constituting a frozen economic as well as political hierarchy.) and i do want to suggest that people read that address again and see the extent to which it really does crystallize on liberty, or consider that as the central message of america.

why were abolitionists, including, very eventually, lincoln, opposed to slavery? because they were advocates equal basic rights, because they were committed to human liberty. they were individualists, even. but surely you can see that this is itself an egalitarian position. it is not every aspect of egalitarianism; it is an imprtant aspect, and the rest is nonsense without it.

Pushing through the doors of perception to coffee or suicide....

 

Crispin and I disagree about a number of things, people, trends and so on. I thought his advocacy of argyle underwear matching your socks was a bit off, and he has always mocked my preference for Gibson guitars over Silvertone instruments made and marketed by Sears in the 60s. Anyway, one of those things that we disagree on is Bob Dylan.Crispy admits he doesn't get Dylan and he doesn't like Dylan and he doesn't get people who like Dylan and he wishes Dylan would just go away and die. I have a different perspective. 

 

I'm a few years older than Crispin and I remember discovering him as a road to something else...he doesn't really want to be an anything to anybody, but he is still best summed up with his line in Don't Look Back. "They called me an anarchist, man...give the anarchist a cigarette..." 

The Bob Dylan – “Like a Rolling Stone” Interactive Video showcases a patented technology platform, created by the digital media company Interlude, which allows viewers to play an active role in the story of the music video. The experience begins when users press play and have the ability to surf 16 different “TV channels” within the video in real-time. These channels are comprised of American TV formats in which, no matter what channel you are on, the hosts and actors are all lip-syncing the lyrics to "Like a Rolling Stone" as the song continues to play seamlessly. No two people will engage with the video in the same way twice. The full interactive video can also be experienced on iPhones and iPads and is easily shared across social media platforms.

I get why Dylan makes people like Crispin crazy. At his base, Crispin is a very grounded type of thinker and human being. Fundamentally, Dylan calls into question the entire purpose of being grounded. This new official video of "Like a Rolling Stone" seems based in that. If you don't like the video you're looking at or are curious about other views, well, change the channel. But ultimately, it's all the same...ungrounded, full of angst, confusion and possibility. (Although Drew Carey lipsyncing along while doing The Price is Right is a shattering metaphor in some ways...and bizarre in others.) 

 

Dylan obviously didn't do this project  by himself. But, he's been pretty fierce about artistic control of his music and his vision. (The way Al Cooper's organ got into the original was based on Dylan's demand to turn up the organ, saying "I'll say who's a keyboard player" to an apologetic and slightly irritated producer.) So, he had a lot of control of the vision and I'm sure had to approve the execution. This is what Dylan is at his best -- challenging us to push through the doors of perception not to ecstasy but to acceptance and maybe a bit of tea and sympathy...he makes other musicians better, he makes other writers better and he makes other thinkers better. Him, he's still on the road, headed toward another choice, challengng us to feel the same but see it from some other point of view...

 

splitsville

i wouldn't necessarily take the u.s./israeli split on an iran accord with the utmost seriousness. if israel were in favor of a deal, iran could never sign. i would think the portrayal of the split in the press relies on the public prouncements of the israeli leadership and leaks by israeli and u.s. officials that are designed to exaggerate rather than minimize this split.

discharging one's obligations

somehow, anonymous keeps rocking. in my view, anyone who has the ability to disrupt, sabotage, or destroy the u.s. government's information infrastructure is morally obligated to do so. it is at the center of world oppression, and will be the basis of a new surveillance-based totalitarianism from which no one, anywhere in the world, is safe.

kacey the great

i think pop music is very gay. but both hip hop and country have been among the last cultural bastions of homophobia; we live in a rather complex cultural landscape, don't we? the tv series nashville has a sub-plot involving a closeted male performer who is a sex symbol for women. one theorizes that this may have happened to randy travis, for example. back in the 90s, you could still say things like: travis has been accused of being gay. i speculate that that very great country singer may have been having a very difficult life ever since. on the other hand, i don't think you could say that country music is infested with actual anti-gay rants, routine insults and so on like hip hop is. what it's full of is normative heterosexuality. but on either racial end, it is only now even becoming vaguely conceivable for, say, a major artist to come out. (there have been attempts. chely wright came out, but maybe only after her commercial possibilities had petered out. at any rate she was never heard from again.)

i do think the macklemore song 'same love' and his performance at the vma's was a moment. now let's see kanye do something like that. and, in parallel, though without the star-studded mega-spectacle, the first anti-homophobic country song that i've ever heard from a major commercial artist was performed at the cma's: 'follow your arrow' by the really amazing kacey musgraves, who is also, at age 12 or whatever she is, one of the best and most important songwriters in nashville. anyway, i think that the thing below was a bit of a turning point. maybe country music doesn't much matter, but you might contemplate the possible effects of the expression of a completely changed attitude in the places where country is dominant.

the line she's dropping under the usual meaningless censorship constraints is 'roll up a joint...or don't.' really, we don't give a damn how your song sounds. only we can't let you make the noise 'joint'. reallym though, you can't blame anybody, because your little censors, whether at the fcc or wtihin a network, are not in control of the extent of their own intelligence. you know? no one decides to be stupid. it's all inadvertent, really.

 

 

that song is by far the most optimistic thing on kacey's 'same trailer, different park'. as many have remarked, kacey's is essentially a very bleak vision, and, i would add, also a very traditional realist project (courbet's, e.g.), which is also a project of hip hop (or was until there was nothing left except brand-name consumer products): representing the experience of, say, shattered working-class or impoverished families and neighborhoods (try 'merry go round') . 

 a ritual enactment of heterosexuality and a great country song:

 

 

 

one way to think about kacey would be as a melancholic taylor swift, natural because they're both about the same age, they're both astonishingly good writers, they both are kind of modely-looking. but that would unfair to kacey, who is an original figure. also they each have a very distinctive melodic sense, and they are very different. still, it's pretty cool to sort of have the light and the dark side of of girlish genius; they're a nice yinyang.

you know, it is kind of annoying how much easier it seems to be for pretty than for non-pretty people to make it as musicians. it's kind of irrelevant. but on the other hand, one shouldn't infer from the fact that someone is pretty that they're not good. if the looks helped in these particular cases to get the music out there, the looks did us all a favor.

i believe in the supernatural power of morphemes

i thank whatever gods there may be that i live in a world where we hang people for making the wrong sound. consider these items: fag. nigger. cunt. ok now really look again at the actual things you just experienced: they may seem to be mere squiggles on your screen that couldn't do any harm to anyone, but as the whole world knows, they're actually supernatural weapons that can destroy people at a distance if you say them with the right inflection. indeed, having read them just now, intensified in their awful power by italics, you are already exactly as dead as john fitzgerald kennedy: real dead. (i hope that's not offensive.) or at least i have done you incalculable harm. my bad!

on the other hand, insofar as i wield these words, i am a being of unfathomable power! i can literally assault and profoundly damage the whole world by sitting here typing! that is too much power to entrust to anybody, much less everybody who is not an illiterate mute who is unable to use sign language, etc. and of course, anything that gets alec baldwin's insufferable mug off our televisions, or at least reduces his meaningless ubiquity, is most welcome. i want to emphasize that i'm perfectly sincere about that part.

let's consider together how we can make this a better world for all, and keep more alec baldwins from arising post-execution. if we want to prevent people permanently from saying or writing 'fag', we need to go to the heart of the matter, the real source of the problem: the shapes  'a', 'f' 'g' and the sounds aaaaa, fffff, and guh. if we simply banned their use, no one - not even alec frigging baldwin - could say 'fag' at all! then we'd all be equal.

think of it this way: the word 'fag' is like the evil number 11, which of course we prohibited in the year of the kike because it was being used by the necromancers to control our beloved king's alleged mind. owing to its role in this history, people find the number deeply offensive. now the fact that we couldn't mention the number 11 in the  policies that banned the number 11 made it conceptually impossible to ban the number 11. but, in our quest for progress and equality, mere conceptual impossibility should never stop us from doing what is right. we won't make the same mistake again with 'fag', or we wouldn't if it were logically possible not to. as latifah said in a song that, thank god, was banned from the radio, who you callin a bitch?

admittedly, when we announced that the number 11 was banned - or would have announced it if we could have without mentioning it - the mathematicians as well as the necromancers got pissy, if that's something i'm permitted to say. in fact, they purported not to be able quite to grasp what it meant to eliminate the number 11. (i remember the horrifying last words of the monster david hilbert: "right, what's 12-1 then?" we shot him a second too late.). but we pointed out that there were, according to their own account, infinitely many other numbers; they just were not going to run out. likewise, the idea of deleting chunks of english seems to irritate writers and such, as though there weren't plenty of other words. one novelist even wanted an exemption so he could portray everyday nineteenth-century dialogue among evil slaveholders. another 'author'/terrorist/bully wanted to explore the history of homophobia in order to expose its monstrous underpinnings. sorry, that's impossible, or it would be impossible if we could institute the ban without violating it. while we're at it, we'll need to suspend the logical principle of non-contradiction. well, there are a lot of logical principles, though admittedly that's the wrong little jenga piece to remove.

but it's one thing to erase all inscriptions of the word 'nigger' and silence all its utterances, while also of course erasing its inscribers and silencing its utterers. we can do more. we are americans. we dream big. we have at our disposal the most insanely destructive military machine the world has ever known. we can fly to the moon or annihilate the world with the touch of a button. we will bring every bit of our know-how and derangement to the fight to destroy the word 'nigger' itself and all its components. 'nigger' is this generation's moonshot, this generation's hiroshima, a fallujah of our very own. if we do not undertake this, our destiny, historians and white suprematists and hip hop artists, drawn by 'nigger''s dread aura, might always come upon it lying around somewhere, apparently by chance. like a ring of power, such things have a way of not staying lost.

admittedly, the word 'nigger' is a purely abstract object, which is why its evil both permeates the universe down to its itsybitsyest hadron and appears nowhere within it at all. sadly, lobbing it into a volcano has no effect on it whatsoever. to destroy the word 'nigger', we're going to need new interdimensional quantum beam weapons that can be deployed against the abstract realm, which is where our real enemies are concealed, like osama in abottabad. the cowards! maybe we can work out a un inspections regime, just to be sure they're not enriching concepts to weapons grade up there. nothing is off the table. or, indeed, on it.

one thing that's super-wrong: the phrase 'the n-word': it's just a euphemism for the word 'nigger', i tell you! and because the latter word is hedged about with mystical taboos and is so deeply offensive to so many, any expression that refers to that word shares in the intrinsic evil with which it smokes, which rises from it as healing power rises from the relics of the saints. i personally am at least as offended by 'the n-word' as by 'nigger.' really, i propose that they are synonymous (actually they are connected in a meta-referential stack on which preservation of synonymy at the meta-level is built in by stipulation: see below), and hence that if one is offensive, so is the other. if kids down at the high school aren't producing expressions such as 'yo, my n-word, what up?' then i miss my guess. and note that the letter 'n' is itself one sixth of the word 'nigger': that is one fifth too much.

imagine the possible uses of the phrase 'the n-word' in white suprematist discourse or in bullying on facebook! admittedly, calling people a word seems nonsensical. but it's all part of the dehumanization that goes with sounds and shapes of such a nature. when i hear 'the n-word', sometimes the word 'nigger' appears in my mind: i know what it is that they are referring to! that's when i get out the ice pick i keep by me for just such occasions and start stabbing myself in the head, trying to delete that word from my synapses. maybe we should try 'the word that begins with the letter that comes two after 'l''. no wait! that refers to the same word too. in everyday conversation, or when constructing my argument that 'that word' should be strictly prohibited (and i mean precisely what i say, that the phrase 'that word' should be banned, as well as any phrase that can be used to refer to the phrase 'that word,' such as 'the phrase 'that word''; along of course with any expression that refers to 'the phrase 'that word'', such as 'the phrase 'the phrase 'that word'''), i refer to it as 'the fifth word of line 14 on p. 242 of the 1902 harcourt edition of adventures of huckleberry finn', though i also hold that that phrase itself, as well of course as adventures of huckleberry finn, or indeed the 19th century as a whole, should be banned. wait just let me double-check that reference. ack! my eyes! you know what? this ice pick to the head thing is the only road to justice.

now on frege's view, the phrase 'the n-word' refers to the sense of the word 'nigger'. that sense is profoundly offensive or indeed the term itself is defined, for example in the dictionary, as offensive, and hence its sense is offensiveness itself: the very essence of offensiveness, like a precious 'nigger' perfume. hence we need a euphemism to pick out the phrase 'the n-word': possibly the phrase 'the t-phrase'. however, the reference of the phrase 'the t-phrase' is the phrase 'the n-word', which refers to the offensive sense of the word 'nigger'. we're going to need infinitely many layers of euphemisms for euphemisms for euphemisms to insulate ourselves from the Word of Evil itself, and then we are going to have to ban all those layers. eventually, this will entail banning the use of language entirely. so be it. any given word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, book, literary period, conversation, and so on, is likely to offend. it's inappropriate. i often offend even myself with my own internal monologue, as you might imagine.

 

ad

yes, i'm up at nytimes.com on arthur danto today. ole danto, quine, and rorty - yeah i can feel them right here with me, on this silver eagle rolling through the night.

 

that is a perfect performance.

hooray! the greatest blurb in blurbological history

sometimes it all comes together: the concept, the cover, the contents, the supreme blurber. it occurs to me that i'm being hoaxed, but there does actually appear to be a book by mary ann caws, actually entitled 'the modern art cookbook'. i feel the publisher should be identified: reaktion, distributed by the university of chicago press. i salute everyone involved, from soup to nuts.

"Who wouldn't want to taste Allen Ginsberg's borscht, Frida Kahlo's red snapper, or Cezanne's baked tomatoes? Mary Ann Caws has assmbled an intoxicating melange of reminiscences, art works, poems, and recipes. This savory compendium offers imaginative satisfactions of the highest order. I can't wait to bake David Hockney's strawberry cake!" (Wayne Koestenbaum, nyrb ad)

one of our great achievements as a species is the rhetorical question. indeed, this is what separates us from the higher animals. it is how we make sense of our lives. our lives are rhetorical questions, aren't they? but in the history of homo rhetoricus, there has never been a better rhetorical question than "Who wouldn't want to taste Allen Ginsberg's borscht?" and who wouldn't want to taste it again, coming back up? really, i want allen ginsberg to feed me his borscht from a turkey baster. who wouldn't?? but since it's too late for that, this book is the next best thing: it's like being orally raped by picasso, really, and who wouldn't want that? reaktion might want to try a companion volume: paintings of the great chefs. who wouldn't want to witness gordon ramsey's foray into post-fauvism? for now, we'll have to make due with fondling de kooning's dumplings. 

update: actually, on reflection, i think koestenbaum is rather deliciously undermining the premise of this book while also parodying the blurb form. frida kahlo's red snapper. 

 

i heart jfk

the kennedy thing, i have to say, is amazing. yesterday i was listening to another npr show of ecstatic tribute to a great man. so what were his main accomplishments?, asked the interviewer. um, well, the bay of pigs wasn't all his fault: that was one accomplishment. he really understood civil rights deep inside, even though his record on that was...mixed. really he started the vietnam war. but one of his accomplisments was that if he'd lived, he supposedly would have stopped it. ok ok, moonshot and peace corps.

anyway, it soons turns uber-woolly: he was so significant because he was so inspiring to a whole generation. what was supposedly great about kennedy was his charisma, and everyone goes there very quickly: he accomplished charisma. now, in my opinion, either charisma is a supernatural hypnotize-you-at-a-distance-of-miles super-power, or it only means sexiness. i think sexiness was kennedy's real policy accomplishment. probably, one should reflect on who one is following around taking inspiration from, and why. what we're really nostalgic for is our masochistic ecstasy: find a beautiful man and believe whatever he tells you to believe. now, fortunately in the case of kennedy, there were no very definite ideas coming out of that perfect mouth, because when there are definite ideas, this charisma crap is merely dangerous. 

many people pride themselves on the rationality of their political approach. where does their whole body's desire to be bathed in charisma fit in with that?

 

still sucking chode

i've been writing eyeofthestorm/cheese it, the cops! for exactly ten years. i was hoping to get to a million page views by now, but it's 968,021 at the moment. in some ways, blogging kind of spoiled me for other writing; i more or less quit my syndicated column simultaneously (well, and newspapers went broke). like i always wanted to be an op-ed columnist so i could instantly comment on whatever. the meaning of 'instant' changed. plus you can't cuss in the los angeles times. sometimes i've been surprised not to be arrested, or have an angry mob show up here at harbold's school or wherever i was huddled/concealed at the time. 

i've felt burned out and repetitive at times or just left it there for a week or three, but sometimes i've on my own account done some very good blogging. one thing i love: write, then publish, then revise, then publish: it solves a problem i always had in newspapers and magazines: aw shit, now that i see it on the page...

anyway, thanks for reading and thanks especially to frequent commenters over the years (and of course the ol' crusader). and just remember that famous, prestigious stuff very frequently sucks chode: kennedys, for example; pablo picasso; james joyce; plato; the beatles; bob dylan; bruce springsteen; hillary clinton; neil gaiman; ludwig wittgenstein; u2; serious art music; willem de kooning; socialism; allen ginsberg; john ashbery; new york; 'literary fiction';  our heroic military men and women; being proactive; jay-z, kanye, beyonce, and kim; the italian high renaissance; neil young; gay aesthetics; the velvet underground; modernism; postmodernism; elizabeth warren; neuroscience; foodies; europe; and human evolution, which has brought us here and dropped us off. i do love many things too, as you must admit.

 

Most patriotic thing sometimes is to scream incoherently and leave

 

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the cooption of patriotism into something more vulgar than an ad for Stars and Stripes Personal lubricant, the nature of nations as Phrog Farms with the help of noted Management Consulting Anarchist Jerry B. Harvey, and points out some personal responsibility through the prose of a better writer in The Guardian. With music. 

 

 

simon doonan rocks, rather.

socialists for mcauliffe

let's say you're a leftish person in virginia. you think that the terrible problems of the world are basically caused by capitalism. then you go into the voting booth and pull terry mcaulliffe. something has gone horribly funky in your thinking. the current democratic party is at the very center of world capitalism (or as i'd say, of course, of the squishy-totalitarian merger of state and capital). mcauliffe is a perfect emblem of this fact. you are being manipulated into voting against your own basic beliefs. seriously, you've reached the point at which you are voting for the very essence of everything you repudiate. now often, lefties accuse, say, working-class rightists of voting against their own interests. i disagree. but certainly, leftists voting for clintons, obamata, macauliffes are voting against their own convictions. however, perhaps they are voting in their own directly economic interests, in favor of their own gov checks, so i suppose, by their own tiny standards, they are being rational.

now, it can be morally admirable to vote against your own self-interest. think about it for a second. but it cannot be morally admirable to vote against your own deepest convictions. and i just want to say this: 'rationality', used to mean the pursuit of economic self-interest, is a stipulated technical term invented by economists. it has little to do with the meanings of the term 'rationality' in ordinary discourse. to say that people voting against their own checks is irrational uses the term in this stipulated sense. it can be rational, all things considered, to be irrational in the stipulated sense, and it can be irrational, all things considered, to be rational in the stipulated sense.

smoked brain

we live - really, we do - in a mind-numbing age of stupidity. nyt:

Mr. Miyazaki’s film, which is aimed at adults, also features at least eight scenes in which characters smoke cigarettes. That imagery, while historically correct, stirred controversy in Japan because of its potential impression on young viewers and could prompt an even louder reaction in North America, where animation is seen to a much greater degree as a product for children.

so you'd take a great artist, and condemn his work of historical fiction on the grounds that people smoke in it? if this even occurs to you, you should quit our species now. smoking might kill you, but procedures like this are worse: they make you deserve death. in fact, if you're watching a hiyao miyazaki movie and counting the scenes in which people smoke cigarettes, i think you should begin to regard yourself as a disease vector.

Shameless blog whoring and self-promotion

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the current right wing loons in the Right Wing Loon party and their combination of intemperance, bullying and general dickwadedness...find the hidden music and win a prize...actually, just get to listen to the music. 

 

And to celebrate Crispin's continued success in Academe, here's Ray Wylie Hubbard...

 

pro-government extremism

'anti-government,' as in the lax shooting, is routinely used to mean violent insanity. here's what, as an anarchist, i demand from the fcc. every time there's a story about a war, i want both sides described as 'pro-government.' every time you mention assad, for example, describe him as a 'pro-government activist.' 'new leaks reveal that pro-government extremists have angela merkel under surveillance'. 'today, china's pro-government regime warmed its hands at a bonfire of uyghurs'. tim mcveigh might have been an anti-government extremist, but he was also a mere amateur of murder. obviously, history's greatest mass murderers, from hitler to pol pot, have all been pro-government extremists. historians speculate that the people who developed chemical, biological, and atomic weaponry harbored pro-government beliefs. worse yet, pro-government people may well be responsible for the failure of the obamacare website.

it may be hard for reasonable, normal people like us to understand how someone drifts to a pro-government position. i imagine there are pro-government tracts lying around james clapper's house, or wherever violent oppressors and excruciating intellectual mediocrities congregate. seriously, everyone should be on the lookout for warning signs among members of their family and their friends. like say, for example, you notice a copy of rawls' theory of justice casually tossed in the backseat, or hear someone casually saying that he intends to vote or something: put two such factors together, and you may have a very dangerous fuckwad indeed. science is beginning to demonstrate what is really happening: research shows that under scanning, the capitulation region of the amygdala or stupid bit manifests enhanced activity in such persons. astonishing? perhaps. yet that is what the research shows. pfizer's working on it.

unlike anti-government extremists, pro-government extremists always appear in groups, herds, flocks, swat teams, gangs, armies, parties, forces, agencies, or murders, and so whereas anti-government extremists pick off a poor sucker here or there, pro-government extremists and their tiny unanimous followers are always industriously digging mass graves. there is much to be said, qua murderer, for the disgruntled loner. real violent extremism - real, genuine evil - exists, and we should study how people drift to pro-government positions and how this can be prevented. i think they lack self-esteem, and you know, when people tell a kid that she can belong to a big powerful group, such as a cult, and tell her she is worth something because she belongs, she'll inform on her own mom. 

theatrical security

one thing about airports: they've become super-illuminated theaters of security: a lot of what is there is intended to convey the message of extreme surveillance, instant response, saturated personnel, etc. i think they've created that partly to make people feel secure, though you'd have to say it has ambiguous effects. but at any rate, these places have been constructed as symbols of the security state in a regime of total visibility. all the surfaces gleam and every corner is transparent to the light. as i say, it's a theatrical space. it will draw actors like bugs to a zapper.