cheese it, the cops!

personally propping up the economy

one thing that's hard to miss out here in rural and small-town pa: berkshire-hathaway signs are everwhere. they seem to be sellling whole towns (carlisle, for example, or york), as well as rural regions. the sudden uptick in housing prices circa '11 or '12 was key to any sort of recovery, and i've always wondered about the sudden shift. i think warren buffett bought everything, literally propped up the economy. the whole thing makes sense: if you're big enough you buy buy buy, prices increase, and you sell (now) at a handsome profit. only what if you created a demand that doesn't exist, and now can't unload and prices collapse? however, if berkshire-hathaway has a huge chunk of the us housing market, never has there been a better candidate or bailout at need, or anyone better-positioned than buffett to obtain one. it really is de facto guaranteed, like fannie mae or citigroup. 

subversive blimp

now here's an extremely good idea: flying a blimp over that nsa installation in utah. it's whimsical, and yet it shows that there is resistance. also, it has the funny flavor of spying on the spies. it sort of suggests vulnerabilities, but in a harmless way.  it's the kind of thing you do when you can't really do anything. it's especially right that it's greenpeace and the tenth amendment center. nsa and the atmosphere of total digital surveillance shows why left and right don't matter anymore.

american concentration camps

 

latino children interned in nogales. more images here.

a vast criminal enterprise

given what the supreme court said today, they would surely find that nsa surveillance is anti-constitutional. indeed, nothing has ever been more obvious. it is a violation of the 4th amendment to the tune of billions of times, victimizing everyone. putting it mildly, that is extremely impeachable, for example.

lee perry and hip hop

if you want to get the origin of hip hop, lee perry and the upsetters' 'jungle lion' of 1969 is a good window. 

 

kind of an unimaginably radical pomo production. alright here's why it's proto-hip hop: samples galore (this is early for that); it's a sonic collage, achieved by hook or by crook. vocals are chanted or interjected rather than sung. there's even that early kind of beatboxing, invented by prince buster in the ska era. and the artist is the dj/producer, ok? on turntables and mixing board.

the biggest difference in what herc and flash brought to new york almost a decade later is the beat: perry works with layers of rock steady recordings, and they work with disco and funk: a much more foursquare beat as opposed to the rock steady-reggae lilt. but even here, perry starts the song on the square soul sample, then drops in the rock steady beat. i have to say that the jamaicans at their best created a richer sonic landscape than early hip hop.

then of course, the traditions just waver into each other again as hip hop comes to infuse jamaican music in turn by the 80s. it's a good example of how real popular music genres occur. later black nationalist themes emerge in hip hop, but that's there in perry too, of course.

multi-dimensional

i think there are three ways to try to make the left-right spectrum coherent, or to say what it means: (1) state vs capital, (2) future vs past, (3) collectivist vs individualist. obviously one's positions on these dimensions need not coincide, so any particular person's positions can well be both left and right if we're using all three. that is, obviously these are not 3 ways of saying the same thing, though you might wish they were. (2) is just a bunch of wacky propaganda bullshit. people purporting to speak for or as or from the future need to chill.  i dealt with the first in the atlantic piece, or really it needs a lot more than that. the third is the grossest thing ever. just make your mind up to this: collective consciousness or decision-making is compromised by coercion. however, when the left goes 'what about the collective?' they actually do mean precisely and usually exclusively coercion. it is really the most repulsive, most disingenuous reversal one could readily imagine. 

individualism and collectivism really can't be opposed. if you and i unite, it is precisely you and i who are uniting. but still, you and i might always disagree. that could be good too.

late leftism

one thing about the left-right spectrum: it has been such a long, long slog and i am so so tired. it's just sadly fatiguing to watch the repetitions. really it's a century and a half of the same. there's always a revival of leftism in progress: new waves of intellectual marxism from adorno to zizek to pikkety - hardt and fucking negri, here to save the day - new revivals of radical unionism or something. each time it has its energizing quality: a revival of the inspiration. but each time it's harder to get it up, really. i swear, it's still ripples of 1848, itself a ripple of 1789. nothing has been so thoroughly explored and exploded historically or intellectually; the left-right spectrum is still an etiolated version of that now, for some reason. if you can't think in some way outside that, you can quiet down now; i already know what you're going to say. man the phrase 'late capitalism' is very...grueling. likewise "neoliberalism'.

little leftist and rightist totalitarians have devoured millions of people in their projects. one great contribution that they made together to history is the "cult of personailty", which you'd have to say is at least very funny. 

 

hissy grind

i'm re-obsessed with chrissie hynde. sasha frere-jones's piece in the new yorker about her and the new album is excellent, and i feel that chrissie is finally being appreciated at the rate she deserves. the one thing i'd quibble with frere-jones about for a second is portraying her as some kind of pure classic rocker. that is there, no doubt. but it is always bent. she definitely sounds nothing like the kinks, who aren't twisted enough.

 

i've been listening back through to try to generate a more definitive best of. in my own 2008 entry (linked second above) i was realy wrong about viva el amor! i think, a mistake rectified in the list below. like i say, one of great catalogues in pop music since 1980. in some ways one might compare her to her contemporary lucinda williams .

i go to sleep

977

mystery achievement

message of love

i hurt you

i'm a mother

how do i miss you?

kid

stop your sobbing

middle of the road

birds of paradise

back on the chain gang

2000 miles

never do that

millionaires

night in my veins

sense of purpose

money talk

hollywood perfume

brass in pocket

dark sunglasses

you're the one

boots of chinese plastic

can't help falling in love

the last ride

cuban slide

popstar

nails in the road

baby's breath 

one more time

 

 

 

forced to be, you and me

one thing i do really see as running throughout the history of the left is an enthusiasm for collective consciousness. the idea of forging such a consciousness politically goes back at least to hobbes, though, in the modern period. but rousseau's 'general will' adds an inspiring twist and starts to frame the thing in terms of social justice. now, i am going to say that we are not fully distinct from one another, nor from the rest of the world. but the applications of this thought have been nightmarish. even in rousseau, the collective consciousness is forged by subordination (dissenters will be 'forced to be free'). 

we have an impulse to merge, to lose ourselves, to be at once expanded and erased. perhaps it is because we are sexual creatures. but truly, the idea is that if everyone could be fully subordinated by one set of rules or rulers - with the materiel to make it stick - we would finally be as one. we wouldn't be lonely anymore.

plato, in setting out his ideal polis, based it on the idea that the polis is analagous to the human self (it is divided into the same three parts, etc.). the dream of unity is old, so are the mechanisms used to simulate it (plato likes lies and eugenics, which is fairly par for the course).

i think we should agree on things and we should act in concert if the action is good. but we are also stuck with our irremediable distinction from one another, and any of us can dissent from any consensus, which is one reason we're not all one self/will/belief system together. and the consensus is very likely to be wrong, and very likely to be merely enforced.

it is not only the left, though, that likes or worships a merger of many into one. the very idea of the corporation as a legal person enshrines collective consciousness in law. hegel was as enthusiastic about the idea as marx, and called The Thing the nation or state. mussolini liked it as much as did pol pot.

in every candidate for collective identity - nation, class, race, corporation - listen to the high-flown rhetoric, and then watch the actual coercion and force by which the collective action and identity is actually achieved. what is supposed to be an antecedent reality that we're detecting (our 'social nature' etc.) is a fiction brought to a leering semblance of reality by violence.

what i hear when someone brings in the collective or the people or whatever: you have to agree with me, because you are me. so if you disagree with me you betray yourself. thus, by your own fiat i will constrain you: the whole idea calls you a betrayer of yourself in order to attack you. this is what modern political philosophy often means, bizarrely enough, by autonomy, citizenship, democracy and so on. it's what habermas means, for example.

what does irwin s. huber say about the crisis of child immigration?

as i travel this mighty land, many people who are indistinguishable from you come right up to me and say: senator huber, what about immigration? i have focused-grouped this thing and come out tough. i agree with the obama administration what we need is a sprawling gulag of new detention facilities and draconian expulsion procedures for undesirable displaced children of particular ethnicities. we cannot even secure our own border from this destructive, scary scourge: tiny children trying to escape conditions of terrible violence. the law is the law, while these children are mere abstractions. i have no idea why they call me 'senator huber'.

some of the stuff i've written on the blog over the years about that left-right thing.

the dream of irwin s. huber is a deeply american dream. family man, business man, leader, redeemer.

transcend

if you read this blog, you are familiar with my perhaps somewhat incessant attack on the left-right spectrum. honestly i might have been getting a little pissy about the whole thing, and i never had much success getting anyone to sign up. but yo, it's up at the atlantic. dedicating that one to the shade of ralph waldo, baby.

i am the world

sometimes,one wonders who is more committed to collective consciousnesses and general wills, the commies or the cappies. together, we are koch!

 

more war

a deep truth is that in something like the current iraq/syria disaster, all pundits and politicians look for a sentence that they can say together, each producing it like it was his/her/its own idea. right now the mechanical commonplace is that maliki, in order to get military assistance, will have to come up with a set of power-sharing political arrangements. and i agree that a pluralistic government would be desirable. but say he offers to re-write the constitution or whatever, introducing explicit power for sunnis. well, then they would have won those concessions on the battlefield, yes? and the conclusion you'd draw if you were a sunni in iraq is that if you want anything from the state or for that matter the obama admninistration, you're going to have to kill people for it. so i wouldn't see this approach, deployed right now, as a formula for anything except more war.

shirts and skins

wait, you can't trademark slurs? oh man i need to re-think my business plan.

friedrich nietzsche and the queen of country music

 

speaking of brassy, i am definitely feeling miranda lambert's album platinum. she is a very distinctive and more or less wholly admirable artist. she is not one of the great voices in country history, but she can really sing in her very own way. not to be too negative, but replacing faith hill with miranda as the queen of country music is an extreme upgrade. oh man she radiates attitude like a girlish sun. and i feel the material is very worthwhile. actually, she's about as bluesy as it is possible to be in pop music today: basically the accompaniment is blues rock as only them nashville cats can kill it. also i think she's building up a whole account of what it is to be a youngish american woman now, with both good humor and genuine emotion. on the title cut she re-works nietzsche: "what doesn't kill you only makes you blonder", which is far more plausible than the original ("what doesn't kill you puts you an asylum, signing your letters 'god'").

 

Convergence -- Pope Francis, Tom Friedman, Russ Douthart show up at Ana Marie Cox's place for Maureen dowd's brownies

 Sometimes I publish entire articles here, sometimes I do it somewhere else and just give you the Link. This is one of the later cases. I was struck by a variety of articles over the weekend -- the Pope's interview with a Spanish weekly, Friedman and Douthart's columns and then, of all things, Ana Marie Cox's piece in The Guardian this morning. I normally don't read either Friedman or Douthart and the Pope doesn't have a regular byline at the sites I visit. I religiously read Ana Marie.

Anyway, they were all approaching a serious issue -- what the hell should we do about Iraq kinda, sorta -- and seemed to be going at it from different perspectives and getting to the same point. The Pope's interview really triggered it, when he equated fundamentalism with violence. I think there's a lot of truth to it -- show me someone who wants to quote chapter and verse of everything in an appeal to authority, and I'll show you a guy who'd like to smite the unbeliever...which in Iraq boils down to Sunnis and Shiites smiting each other and anybody else like Christians, Sufis and other sects who wanders past. They all make good points == enjoy.

 http://thedefeatists.typepad.com/apoplectic/2014/06/looking-at-the-elephant.html

 

welcome to rednexico, usa

i live in york springs, pa, known locally as 'little mexico' i go with 'mini-mexico', 'micro-mexico', 'pocket mexico', 'nano-mexico', 'rednexico', or 'mexico in an andrew wyeth' depending on my mood. so i've decided i'm rooting for mexico in the world cup. (also, perhaps due to the fact that it is ruled by authoritarian dolts [harvard jd's], i'm not feeling all that patriotic about the usa; mexico is better-governed.) viva el tri!

going south

as it turns out, probably the biggest single mistake that the us made in both afghanistan and iraq (as well as, for example, vietnam) is that the governments we imposed under occupation turned out to be some of the most corrupt and criminal in the world, or even the very most. and as i've said before, one of the few things that could make you want to be governed by religious fundamentalists is that they seem to have some sort of principles other than 'i'ma get mine' or 'i deserve to rape you'. that barack and hillary threw their lot in with karzai after he stole the election in 2009 makes all their professions about democracy merely parodic. i do think more or less the same thing that is happening in iraq will happen there, probably a few minutes after we pull out.

it would take an inspiring patriot indeed to lay down his life for nouri al-maliki's bank account. i'd be taking off my uniform and handing my weapons to the insurgents to.

barack is going to figure out an approach to the iraq situation in 'the next few days'. i'm not sure he has a few days. you could ship the government of iraq sophisticated weapons. these have two possible ultimate destinations: isis, and iran. they are already operating with our materiel. there ain't a damn thing we can do short of re-occupation, and the only scenario in which i could see maliki surviving is if there is a substantial incursion by iran to prop him up. 

i suppose the idea is to be 'realists'; iraq isn't going to be a jeffersonian democracy, as they said again and again (well, the united states is certainly not itself a jeffersonian democracy). but actually the ethical side has got to be attended to or you're just imposing evil on people who will henceforward hate and try to kill you.

right and left: threats to the nation

the pew center survey on polarization is interesting. the most dramatic result, as they emphasize, is that about a third of people who are defined as 'consistent conservatives' or 'consistent liberals' regard the other side as "a threat to the nation's well-being". obviously, both sides are right about that. as you might imagine, i am going attack "consistent', which is defined here. 'consistent' here means toeing the party line. but on each side that just means a random grab-bag of mutually incoherent positions on this and that. so, the basic right-left divide is defined in terms of anti- and pro-big-government. now, nothing about either of those positions has anything at all to do with issues like gay marriage or abortion, for example (on these and many other questions, a 'consistent conservative' has to endorse various incursions by the state into people's private lives, while the liberal position should be understood as attacking the legitimacy of various state constraints on autonomy or choice.) to be a consistent conservative on the pew scale is to be both a small-gov libertarian and an enthusiastic proponent of a big military and the domestic security state. in other words, the most consistent people on the pew scale are the people who most boldly endorse flat contradictions. these, i say, are basically social configurations or something, because they are certainly not anything like actual political ideologies; rather, they are randomly assembled collages of prejudices. seeing how passionate people are about endorsing such things at least provides some comic relief amidst the stupidity and suffering and catch-phrases.

so obviously we are suffering from our political polarization. people are always trying to prescribe a cure; mine is philosophical i guess. try to make your positions consistent not with the narcissistic empty crap of hillary clinton or ted cruz, but within themselves. don't try to be consistent with your facebook friends, but with yourself. then there will be no left/right polarization because there won't be any left and right. 

another love note

one of my favorite handful of pop artists, chrissie hynde, is very back. (i tried to say in the linked entry why i love the music, insofar as one can say such a thing, so i won't repeat it all.) this is her "first solo album" (well, the last was attributed to "chrissie and the fairground boys"), but though i'm sure that collaboration has been important to her, chrissie hynde has always been a solo act.

the fairground boys album (fidelity) was interesting in various ways, more rootsrock than her usual mode. actually, that's true of break up the concrete (the last album attributed to the pretenders) as well. but i guess after living with it for awhile i kind of let it go with a bit of diappointment; i wasn't necessarily completely feeling her man of that moment, 'jp', with whom she dueted on fidelity, the only real non-solo moment in the recording career). the new one, stockholm, is extremely good. "you're the one", e.g., started running chronically through my head after i previewed it for 30 seconds on itunes. the album has all the strengths of her best work, i think, and several songs that stand up well within her repertoire, which is one of the great collections of songs and recordings in the pop music of the last several decades.

 

 

oooh that one is good. nice tribute to austin, too, including mw's old gym.

janie is always puzzled by the way i use 'pop', which she uses to mean hyper-commercial teen-oriented dancy stuff, "pure pop", like katy perry, say. in other words 'pop' is a particular genre, as opposed to hip hop or country, for example (though there can be 'pop country' or 'pop hip hop' in this sense of 'pop'.)  i basically mean 'popular' or all non-high-art music, so more or less everything but "classical" and maybe post-bop jazz. art music should be repressed, with mortar shells or napalm if that's what it takes. 

killer

i used to live in what is now eric cantor's district in va, and i taught while in grad school at randolph-macon in ashland, where cantor's conquerer brat (and his opponent in the general election!) teach. cantor's defeat shocks me as much as anyone else. but i think it is incredibly hopeful. brat won despite being outspent 40-1 or something and one of his lines is "dollars don't vote; people do." he sounds fundamentalist (describing his victory as "miracle from god", which is a bit scarily grandiose). and running against immigrants makes me kind of sick. but he also ran against economic inequality, believe it or not. you can see both who cantor is and part of why he lost here, where they describe how unhappy 'big business' is about his loss. they're unhappy because eric cantor is their little errand boy (quite a repulsive one, too). running against "the establishment" now is running against the government-corporate monster.

if you continue to try to understand what is happening or what people want in terms of left/right, you miss every single actual fact. and if you conflate the tea party with the club for growth or something, you're believing the pitiful attempts of groups like that to annex the grassroots energy. none of those groups rallied behind brat. if you're on the left, you have got to stop expressing your preference for "mainstream" republicans, on the sadly incoherent or entirely empty grounds that they are to the left of the tea partiers, or else you are just the chamber of commerce or the chamber of hillary = goldman-sachs. the spectacle of people who regard themselves as on the left wanting to put the whole economy at the service of citibank while squawking about inequality is one of the many delightfully amusing features of today's politics.

the left-right spectum is a manipulative tool. you will have to vote for hillary because she's to the left of whomever, thus betraying all your professed principles, or a goodly portion of them. in mega-corporate boardrooms here and there, they are snickering about that. they are rapacious capitalists dedicated to putting all the money on a barge and shipping it to the high end of the hierarchy. and they control the american left. 

best tv show ever

it might be partly an enthusiasm born of binge, but i find myself wanting to say that orphan black (bbc america; it came from canada) is about the best television series i have ever seen. it has a great, gritty look and great pace (down to the directing and editing, i suppose). it combines extreme seriousness and dense plotting with completely delightful comical passages, which i would say is a very hard thing to do well. tatiana maslany in the lead role and also as ten-or-so supporting characters (ok, ok, they're clones) is frigging unbelievable. you find yourself not primarily believing that she's playing the roles well, but that it can't possibly be the same actress: fully distinct personalities defined in every way the body moves, every expression. she plays many scenes with herself in multiple roles, and they are completely convincing. perhaps they have indeed cloned tatiana. but the supporting cast - like the dude who plays the waygay foster bro felix - is also outstanding. i'm bereft that i've exhausted existing episodes. 

one way they use the clone theme is to explore gender in various ways, perhaps more interestingly than has ever been done on television. all maslany's personae are constructed by contrast with one another, and though they are palpable individuals, they are also flavors of femaleness from soccer mom to transsexual. and it's not only her characters. amazingly, orphan black does all that without didacticism or some painful pc jive.

the good critic

i think philip kennicott of the washpost is one of the best critics working in the mainstream press. here's a really rather rich and surprising review of the 9/11 museum. the range is part of what i like: so it's actually a broad piece on contemporary museums, which have moved to a model where they construct the experience as a narrative, which among other things might be too directive with regard to the experience of museum-goers. also it works through the question of where the culture is on 9.11 and the war on terror etc: in other words, there's a lot of good context.

to my way of thinking, the idea of mourning 9/11 is utterly polluted by the fact that it was used as an occasion to complete the transformation of the united states government into a profoundly authoritarian system: the end of anything i would recognize as the american experiment. we're still blahblahing about the supreme court or the bill of rights, or we still effortlessly call ourselves a democracy, comparing others unfavorably to ourselves. but try to picture what jefferson or tom paine would say about a government engaged in universal surveillance of its own citizens, a government that practices indefinite secret detention, torture, and so on. that is what i would mourn at ground zero. those deaths turned into a mere tool for the consolidation of abusive power. it wasn't al qaeda that accomplished that: it was american politicians and citizens quaking in fear. they showed that, though they've got the missiles, they are pussies, all day every day.  

bow down to the white girl

there have been some conspicuous absences in the history of hip hop, such as out gay artists and also white women. now white men have been extremely present in hip hop since the beasties/rick rubin in the early '80s, and black women have mc'ed from close to the get-go (get ahold of mc lyte, e.g.: i'm not going to do the whole history, starting with the real roxanne etc). and there have been occasional rapping white girls (oh, princess superstar, for example). but iggy azalea is the breakthrough. she's everywhere. she's good. she makes her own whitegirlness a theme, even as she sounds blacker than chuck d. it's like we elected a black president, only without the severe let-down.

 

 

ok i say the one below will be an extremely #1 pop hit.

 

(it helps to have a 13-year-old daughter!) ok a couple of slices of the early history of the female mc.

 

 

the main difference between black women and white women is that black women are sassy, whereas white women are brassy. 

 

tryin real hard to adjust

continuing lp excavations: one of my favorite acts of the 80s was the bellamy brothers. if you are me, you hesitate on that a bit: you want to say you were listening to george jones or whatever it may be. the bellamy brothers are no hardass country act, but represent one of the basic pop modes of the era. there are many gimmicks, jokes, etc. ("if i said you had a beautiful body", "lovers live longer".) it's a sort of guilty pleasure.

and yet i'm not guilty at all. they had a bunch of great songs. the arrangements and vocals are extremely straightforward and have aged well. some of these songs have been running through my head intermittently since 1985; these are some of the songs i find myself humming, whistling, etc. most often. one move they made was to try to integrate reggae into country, sometimes rather primitively ("get into reggae, cowboy"). still they actually play it well for good ole boys.

it's not always the case that greatest hits packages are the best representations of their artists, of course, but i do think that's the case here. if i'm recalling correctly, "greatest hits, volume 2" was one of the last lp's i bought before switching to cd's. or maybe it was among the last lp's that record labels sent me in my capacity as a critic, before they all switched to cd's.

 

that is a very beautiful song, i think.

 

 

 

 

 

nature, you beautiful bitch

the wild roses are extraordinarily successful around here: they grow up over trees and buildings.

the wild rose is the third most-dominant organism in latimore township, after poison ivy (indeed the bower of roses above is next to a scenic poison oak grove) and the stink bug. after that comes round-up and then humans (and after that, water, and then groundhogs). all of these, it might be noted, have their spiky side, and i could see getting fouled in a patch of wild rose briars and dying of starvation or blood loss. and yet they all contribute to the vicious, ravishing imbalance of nature.

the wild roses

out here in adams county, it is an awfully good year for the wild roses, which are everywhere. here's the the blush pink version, though they are mostly white.

p.s. there are no non-invasive species.

English Comedian Awakens Me from Dogmatic Slumbers

 

Not so long ago, a buddy of mine named Eric Garland tweeted that he didn't think most of Thomas Piketty's critics had read the book. I responded by asking if he had just learned about the nonexistence of Santa Claus. Eric, a somewhat anarchical economic analyst and bass player responded with "No Santa? Next you'll say no confidence fariy." 

But, his ironic comment about the critics and Piketty makes a great point. If you're reading this blog, you probably recognize the name, and have an idea about what the guy has established as a position. Accrued wealth accrues more wealth faster than labor...or, rich people get rich faster than workers.This results in imbalance and is not a positive factor. But, sheesh, it's a thick book and most of it is review of research and a lot of it is boring stuff about calvados and cheese production in Normandy or something -- is there a Powerpoint adaptation? 

Last weekend, John Oliver ranted for 13 hilarious minutes on his new TV show, Last Week Tonight about the problem of boredom. We have the collective attention span of gerbils. So, if you want to sneak something by us, do so in the most boring possible way. In the Senate and the House, they can use their rules to safely put those of us not working n the capital to sleep-deprived fever dreams in no time. With bureaucratic things like Net Neutrality, they can do it with discussions of rules. 

I have Oliver's piece and my thoughts on the mess available here. Short form, they want us to trust the broadband industry to take care of our interests. Sure, trust the bureaucrats (did you know the guy running the FCC is the former chief lobbyist for the Cable industry??) and the lobbyists because...Benghazi?