cheese it, the cops!

let's twift again like we did last summer

alright taylor. first let me drop my little tears. as someone who is very identified with country, i regret the loss. on the other hand, the genre should have nothing but gratitude for her songs, her persona, and her demographic effect. also, the extent to which country song forms are actually distinct from other pop songforms is not all that dramatic. really she's often writing in the same vein as ever, and a mandolin ring would transform it into a country song. also one misgiving overall: i do feel that vocal effects are used excessively. that is one way you signal 'pop' now. i think the emphasis on vocal effects in pop has gone on too long and has run its course. it's not interesting anymore. i think it will make the pop music of 2005-2015 sound pretty dated and kitschy pretty soon. also, taylor just does not need this, or not on so many songs; she's a beautiful singer, often on multiple soaring simultaneous tracks. it does work on some of these songs very well, however; but if i were mixing the album i would de-process vocals throughout.

certain of her very great strengths as a songwriter are well-suited to a country frame; she often wants to tell stories. she still does that on some cuts here. she has also had astonishing moments of writing in personae - an abused boy on 'mean', for example, a 'barbie on the boardwalk, summer of '45' on 'starlight'. i think there's less scope for moves like that on the sort of pop anthems that dominate 1989. and i'm just going to say it: from multiple points of view including dad, i liked the relatively innocent romantic persona that taylor constructed as a country star. i'm not that into what katy and miley portray themselves as getting up to on a given friday.

but if taylor were to continue to sort of portray the small-town high school sweetheart or something, it'd be straight fake at this point. and i do think that her basic project is an autobiography; she really has, i think, sung quite thoughtfully and honestly about her own life at every stage, though of course she is also mythologizing her own life or dramatizing it shamelessly, yet with evident sincerity. this is very much what touches young women and also other people about her music. (like say you've been watching your daughters grow up, move to new york, and stuff.) and she seemingly effortlessly treats her own story as emblematic; you know she wrote '15' when she was 15 (well, maybe 16), '22' when she was 22, and the stories she told in those songs really did take on a funky universality in their specificity, like a good memoir should. (listen back to '15' and realize it really is about her best friend, who has told her own story, and loves that taylor told it.)

 

[take in the audience response. each girl in that crowd is her.]

so look she's on the cover of every magazine, dating hot pop stars or whatever, jetting around the world. i am going to say that might be a hard story to tell honestly. but i really think that within the parameters of pop music she has done so. the album represents a move to new york (already in process on red) and that represents a stage of life - hers, and others'.

 it's in the lyrics, but it's in the music on multiple levels; everything gathers around this transition. taylor's writing is remarkably sophisticated, and here the styles of music - often leaning on a version of the '80s-revival synths currently in fashion - themselves have an autobiographical force; her music now corresponds to how she lives now. within this frame, many of the greatest strengths come through just fine on 1989. for example, as i've said before, the transitional elements of a taylor swift song - intro, bridge, ending, and so one - are always frigging perfect. also her lyric turns of phrase are consistently better than they need to be, which is especially evident with the pop frame. 'i'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream'. 'boys only want love if it's torture'. 'the monsters turned out to be just trees.' "i can read you like a magazine". "band-aids can't fix bullet holes." often the phrase and thought is almost familiar, but has some element of displacement or reversal. taylor was never a cliche; she has always been a cliche with a twist.

in other words, she writes a perfect pop song, and she does that here over and over. within these parameters there is a wide range of moods. also, even more than usual - and again appropriately to the genre shift - there are earworms galore; it's very head-infesting. 'how you get the girl' has a kind of perfect ethereal lightweight synth-pop thing going that works beautifully with that lighter-than-air soprano. maybe a little echo of ed sheeran, here and elsewhere.

'bad blood' would be another example of the earworm effect, and the basic form is an arena-full of fist-waving taylors chanting the hook. maybe it's partly about katy perry and partly in the style of katy perry, and in general i would say taylor's friendships and musical fanships are inscribed throughout, again as part of the memoir. (something tells me that even with all the love stuff, there's nothing taylor swift cares about more than music.) so apparently she's very close to lorde (what a great witchy yinyang), and lorde's infuence appears again and again, either directly (as on 'i know places') or passed through several stages. it doesn't feel derivative; it feels like taylor has really incorporated the whole thing into her own life and hence style. 'wildest dream' sure owes a lot to lana del rey, but obviously it is taylor not lana (not least on the bridge), and the mood is wistful, not suicidal.

right now i think the strongest songs are, first, "out of the woods", which is a good capsule of the album and just an outstanding piece of song-building.

 

and i do gravitate to the slowest and most meditative moments. few people can write a pure love song as well as she can ('sad, beautiful, tragic', e.g.). and i give you 'this love', flirting with valentine's-day cliches, but such a beautiful and subtle and also simple melody, and such a beautiful vocal arrangement, with an underlying melancholy. my favorite song is the one that ends the album: 'clean'. you wouldn't think someone could do a compellingly fresh version of 'i'm addicted to your love', but there it is, and it also marks the transition of taylor into someone who, perhaps, has been exposed to things like drugs and drug problems. quietly, it is a masterpiece: "the drought was the very worst, when the flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst...'

 

they've kept the album off youtube so far pretty effectively. but maybe this is better anyway. all over america, girls are up in their bedrooms working up these songs. this one really gives an intense and beautiful rendition; it's a good representation of the spirit of the song, and of what taylor means.

me on the last album, 2012's 'red'

me on taylor, circa 'speak now'

and again

 

 

 

an undoubted foundational classic

here i am, teaching plato's republic once again. i will assert flatly that it is the most disgusting book ever written by a famous philosopher. what i would like to do is write a book attacking and refuting and ridiculing it line by line, but publication of such a thing seems unlikely, and it would embroil me in long months of loathing.

really, western political philosophy has had many miserable or evil moments, many lurid or pathetic or desperate attempts to justify oppression of various sorts, from hobbes to hegel to marx, or the pitiable history of the attempts to establish the legitimacy of state power. but plato just goes straight for the extreme caste elitism, lies, eugenics, extreme censorship etc etc, on the basis of a metaphysics of world-hatred. the thing is sort of an amazing intellectual achievement, but it defends every aspect of what came to be modern totalitarianism. the people are animals, and must be broken. that he's doing this in the midst of the first democracy is essential info.

absorbing viscous lava through our pores

yes, i will be assessing sailor twift's 1989 after a day or two to absorb it (i'll give you something on the new lucinda too). i think when i first hopped on (with my daughter, circa speak now), people were all like "i hate that poppy auto-tuned bullshit!" to which i responded: i can hardly imagine a critic listening attentitively to this album and not coming away impressed. that has been borne out: she is a critical darling, and even brats who hate everything but indie dirge-pop can't frigging help themselves. 

i do have some concerns about the decline of rock criticism, however, perhaps encapsulated by the lead of marlow stern's review in the daily beast. of the best pop songs, stern writes, "Ever present, they absorb the viscous lava of contempo culture through their pores, let it course through their veins ‘til a diffuse plexus of melodies and rhythms form, and then release the bubbly potion onto an unsuspecting audience." dave marsh and greil marcus might have been kind of boring and predictable in their opinions - they might still be - but they didn't write sentences like that, and if they (or we) did, their editors didn't wave them through. maybe it's supposed to be lesterbangsy? lord.

i guess the people i read most in the msm these days are the folks on the guardian: alex petridis (who loved the taylor album) and kitty empire, for example. i do think sasha frere-jones in the new yorker is good, so i'll give the old monocled one that.

alright, so, i started writing rock criticism at the washington star in 1980. i was a copy boy; our critic was on vacation when i started but i got to do records and shows by people like the ramones, clash, bb king. then the star croaked and i went to grad school in baltimore. i wrote for the city paper through the early 80s: hundreds of shows and records. it's funny to think the free-circ urban weekly should be shrouded in nostalgia now; really we did generate a lot of content. i was watching the wire recently, and noticing that rafael alvarez was all over the writing credits; he was all over the cp then. jd considine, who i started reading when he dominated the old baltimore news-american, was in the sun and then the rolling stone publications, so that was a a kind of model, though i'd have to say the actual critical approach was a counter-model.

so in the usual fashion i sent out clips, and soon i was reviewing for a number of mags. record magazine was probably the main outlet; it was a sub-rolling stone put out by the rolling stone dedicated entirely to music. but i guess i sort of knew the rs-type critics and editors of that era (anthony decurtis, for example), mostly at a distance. i reviewed many amazing shows and many turkeys, from donna summer and pat benatar to flipper and the dead boys, run dmc and the fat boys to tammy wynette and chaka khan. i kept almost but not quite reviewing records for rolling stone, but i did have the lead review in record sometimes. prince's purple rain, e.g.. they killed my review of born in the usa for the reasons i came to hate the whole operation: they were always trying to manufacture a consensus or pretend there was one, and soon the critics just didn't have very individual tastes or voices, which is how they wanted it.

my wife at the time, rachael, had a certain wanderlust, and we were always driving across the country or settling temporarily for the summer here and there. i would always pitch the local paper, so for example i wrote up roger miller and barbara mandrell for the albuquerque journal, or did stuff for the weekly out in seattle.

then she managed to drag me to london, which was the height of my little career. there has never been more rock criticism anywhere at any time than london in the '80s, and they had three tabloids the size of the new york daily news of that time every week, entirely devoted to music: sounds, new music express, and melody maker. i took my clips around; just walked into the newsrooms and pitched the editors. i caught on at melody maker, and soon was reviewing a couple of gigs a week, a variety of lps, etc, and doing features and interviews too. i met the nicest person in the world, cyndi lauper,

 

and the nastiest people, the members of x, for example. i got to see like everyone who played london in '83 and '84, which looking back on it had a lot to recommend it, even though i was pretty ambivalent about the 'synth-pop' then dominant. (god i hated depeche mode, live or on record, but culture club was excellent, for example.) chrissie hynde slammed a door in my face. i got knocked unconscious in the mosh pit at a killing joke concert by heavily booted mohawk punk thug, or thunk, as i think of them.

 

(everyone else was very nurturing, and i found myself under solicitous care propped up against a wall at the...hammersmith palais?)

 

[that represents the dominant pop sound of that moment in the uk; i must have seen twenty or thirty groups in this mode, swaying around and playing synthesizers. all the vocalists somehow sounded the same.]

i lost a night in paris where they flew people over to see inxs; me the nme guy ended up in a coke-and-groupie limo discohopping paris adventure with hutchence &co that i basically don't remember. the band rolled us into our hotel at 5 and we both missed our plane back to london.

 

so then i started turning pretty seriously toward the academic career and writing in that mode, but i did work through the late '80s. i interviewed lemmy for creem, etc. then around 2000, marion winik, disconcerted by my monthly country cd budget, suggested i pitch someone a country column so people would send me free cds. the guys from the balt city paper - russ smith and john strausbaugh - were doing the super-odd rollicking nypress, and i wrote the farm report in the persona of a 300-pound ultra-rightist farmer named crispin sartwell. then blogging...

come to think on it, i might could scan in some clips.

bonfire of the banalities

i seem to have a lifetime subscription to the new yorker; maybe my mom got it for me in 1996 or something. they come faster than i can burn them. the oct 27 ish shows some of the reasons i try to keep up. fiction by tom hanks, while the movie review pays tribute to spielberg and saving private ryan. a stirring appreciation of billy joel. the lead political piece in talk of the town has been duller this week than last week for 1,497 consecutive weeks, for these are people whose view on anything - and the very sentences in which that view will come to be embodied - you cannot fail to know before they open their word processors. they must spend editorial meetings nodding along and off. this week jelani cobb points out that there aren't that many women and black folks in the senate. ironically, only extremely or chronically white people can even pretend to read the new yorker; it's like every issue is co-edited by tom brocaw and sting (= tom hanks). one of the books reviewed is described as "a fairy tale of middle class loneliness", which is a pretty good description of the magazine overall. 

spread your legs; here come da genius!

pico iyer in the times book review, arguing once again that geniuses are above the little moral rules or everyday decency that of course ought to govern others. the revival of this really quite stupid modernist hoohah is disturbing in a minor way, and you'd have to think that underlying it is iyer's justification for being an asshole to his kids tonight or whatever. one thing to notice: all the geniuses who transcend the petty irriatations of treating people decently in iyer's thing are men. also, let me just mention that in some cases the assholery may well be one of the main reasons we're thinking that someone is a genius: iyer obviously expects geniuses to be assholes, and it is but a slight shift to start regarding assholes as geniuses. so in virtue of what was steve jobs a genius? maybe writing all that great code and designing all those sleek devices? no that wasn't his role. his role was to be an asshole. oh, lucian freud was a disgusting human being who made disgusting and mindlessly overrated art. but he was a late-breaking modernist genius-asshole so it almost doesn't mater what the paintings look like as long as he was abusing people all day.

"All of us know — we almost expect — that an artist will use up everyone he meets in the hope that the payoff in the public sphere will make up for casualties in the private." wait, all of us know what? i almost fucking expect, excuse me? oh you know i've known some very good artists, writers, thinkers and stuff: do i figure they should be as vicious as they are good or something? i am dating a very good painter, for example. do i expect - or, like iyer's happy victims - want, to be used up, along with everyone else? christ why would i expect that? art is supposed to require casualties, like barrel bombs cause collateral damage, only why that should be is rather mysterious. but then you'll be able to recognize the geniuses by the scorched corpses in their wake. that makes it easier because, um, sometimes it's hard to tell from the work.

the moral impunity of artists is something we added circa 1860 and deleted circa 1960, but which people still yearn for: the genius as sadist, audience as masochist. it is a devastating reflection on the people who think this way, incompatible with even rudimentary good taste, for example. really, i do believe it has led to extreme critical mistakes, as when you fall in love with the persona of a picasso, a joyce, or a wittgenstein, and feel the glow of the morally exempt superhuman who lies behind it. then the objects take on a sadistic aura and you prostrate yourself before them (think of the women who had to be sacrificed to make hemingway's novels, or get picasso past the blue period! the casualties were worth it, though, because if picasso hadn't made women suffer, there would be no art. really this is the way this line of thought tends). this i believe makes it difficult to see the work clearly and place it plausibly into a normal human context which we might co-inhabit. the work, i have to say, is almost unbelievably disappointing relative to the standard, but even if it wasn't....

the worse you are, the better you write. i would like iyer to reflect on whether that is actually borne out in his experience, and i would suggest that he reflect on why he would want to believe something like that. according to iyer, the question of why great artists are fuckwads was already ancient when yeats asked it. i would like to see some evidence of that. in fact show me a clear example of anything of that sort before 1800 and i will be momentarily chastened.

this genius crap needs to be over, and iyer's piece is as good an argument for shooting geniuses on sight as for celebrating them as transhuman god-monsters. actual human beings produced these items, and no argument gets them out of the demand to treat people kindly, or try to keep their promises, or to not rape people, etc. i think you had better paint a lot lot better than freud to justify being freud, or really it doesn't matter how you paint. and insofar as iyer is saying  'i am exempt from decency because i am working on a novel', he is making an argument for pistol-whipping literary novelists, as if we needed another argument.

maybe other professions should take the philip roth-v.s.naipul approach: being an ethics professor isn't an ethics contest! i just had a good theory, but that required abusing 17 people. oops, sorry sweetie but i was out last night with two call girls and an ounce of blow, again. it is the demand of my work! but you will be happy to be a casualty. 

 

 

i want to emphasize relentlessly that islam is a beautiful religion of peace. it reminds me of quakerism like that, only more hipster.

still doing time

as you may know, i think most leftists who are left of, say, obama, are post-marxists, whatever they may say: they are still trying to make marx's predictions come true, still trying to read history through his lens. no empirical data can budge or change this at all: it has nothing to do with reality, but with the emotional momentum of a century-and-a-half old quasi-relgion started by a prophet/messiah with the power to foretell the future (admittedly, he asserted that it was scientific, but so did many eschatological preachers of the 19th century).

so here are some aspects of the content. first of all, since we haven't flown as predicted into the commmunist ecstasy at the end of history, we must still be in the phase of capitalism. so we don't even notice that capitalism and socialism have merged: that it's state/corporate economic/political/military power that's the problem. but, it has to be odd for any marxist to think that capitalism has avoided the terminal crisis as the prophet predicted. starting as long as a hundred years ago, marxists referred to the contemporary phase - whatever it was at the time - as late capitalism, a lovely expression of wishful thinking. seems like you'd get embarrassed about that as the decades tick by, and i would have suggested a number of other dialiectical phases: "late late capitalism," "extremely late capitalism", "unbelievably late late capitalism" and so on.

maybe they got too embarrassed by this approach, though they are not folks who are easily embarassed. so now we're in "neoliberal capitalism" or perhaps since we're thirty years past reagan and thatcher, we're in "late neoliberal capitalism." well the power of capital and political/miltary systems connected with it just keeps consolidating, shows no sign whatever of disintegrating: quite the reverse. so this is where climate change comes in: it will provide the terminal crisis of capitalism: it is the realization of prophecy. people, i must say, are sitting home wanting it to be as bad and imminent as possible, and asserting - while brooking absolutely no dissent - that it is as bad and imminent as possible. it's still science, too.

anyway, i have no idea why you'd want to enter into this line of thought, or even how you'd go about making yourself believe stuff like that, but it is very pitiful. the left has just got to got to got to grab something else, or worship a new messiah or something, cause this shit is boring and ridiculous and interminable. 

 

well-deserved

the notion that obama would appoint a 'messaging expert' as ebola coordinator shows that they don't understand their own problem, which is that they have been unable to distinguish 'messaging' from responding to reality. this is why no one really believes what they're saying, and really, it's why no one has believed any american politician or bureaucrat for some decades now about anything. i think it's a kind of banalized post-modernism, narrative-theory thing. so sometime around 1970, someone pointed out again that there was no external world, only 'narratives' and so on. pretty soon, nike was running ads: 'we are the stories we tell'. it may be that people like obama and bush and clinton really can't tell the difference between the world and a story they are telling. that the story is incredibly self-serving is very hopeful: i can make the world adore and obey me if i can just utter the right phrase. their adoration of me will be their salvation, and then we'll all live in my hopey reality forever. let's focus-group some phraseology and work on 'the narrative', 'the message'. we've got to control the narrative, be more effective in our messaging. then, i think the growth of 'communications' programs and theories and 'strategic communications' exacerbates the effect, and some of the killer clowns who teach in those programs have a straight-up theory on which all communication is an attempt by me to get you to do what i want, and then the only question is, what noises can i make that best accomplish that? all communication is advertising.

in their human-centered, narcissistic, obviously false structure of non-thought, there can be no difference between medicine and messaging.

reality, see, is social, consensual, or 'what your contemporaries let you get away with saying'. then the only question is, what reality can you get people to consent to? unfortunately, the ebola virus is indifferent or impervious to whatever they consent to, as is everything else, even themselves.

for an actual creature in an actual world where something like natural selection operates to lose contact with reality, or to begin to live in its own fantasies and hallucinations, is to flow toward extinction. also, in this particular form, it is to deserve extinction.

A new peak in Crusader AXE's productivity

 

I realized recently that I have made several attempts at the blogging equivalent of the unified field theory, that is, following part I of an essay several days later with part II. I just don't usually do that because I'm lazy and easily distracted. 

But the continuing debacle of policy and politics that has prevailed since Bush and the Rehnquist stole the Supreme Court 14 years ago has hit a point where the outrage meter is pegged out here, and it's easy to remember why I was so pissed off the first time. 

I admit that I consider the Republicans in the House and Senate, the leaders especially, to be lower on the chain of consciousness than sunflowers and slugs. But I have absolutely no clue what the President is doing and why...he's a smart guy. OK, got it; so was Herbert Hoover. He's trying to be Kennedyesque, except most of us who remember John Kennedy and Bobby are members of AARP. Being Kennedyesque today comes off as Mike Dukakis. 

So between them, I'm irked. And, this Ebola Czar nonsense is insane. McCain the Rs have a bad idea -- we need a Czar! Long live th Czar!'; Obama appoints one, and they start screaming "Not that one; another one." Meanwhile, we have a very logical CZAR, the unconfirmed head of the National Health Service. Since nobody in Congress is bothering to pretend to do anything, aren't they recessed? Couldn't Obama appoint him? Or at least make him the CZAR? Nah...too easy. 

Screw these people. 

 

health and self-defense

when the first nurse fell ill in dallas, cdc & co blamed her for failing to observe their protocol. and they blamed her before they actually knew anything about how she contracted the virus. this, i suggest, is probably the knee-jerk doc approach: blame the nurse. that was only one of many things that pissed the nurses off (one of the other irritations being that the cdc and everytone else appears to be quite cavalier about their lives). then there was a public backlash against that, and they sort of apparently reversed field, saying that nurses are heroes, and then hinting strongly that she violated the protocol. startegic communications at its best.

yesterday, testifying in congress, frieden simply refused to say whether it was the nurses' failure to observe the cdc protocol, or the cdc protocol itself that was at fault. (the other day, sanjay gupta ran through the whole cdc protocol on cnn, getting spattered with bodily fluids on exposed skin.) i think it was scalise who just kept saying 'did she violate the protocol or not?' 'it's raining outside, congressman.' 'yes or no?' 'here's a picture of my dog, congressman.' it was an idiotic display of inability to admit when you're wrong, and a classic defend-my-bureaucracy reaction. that's always irritating and yet pitiful, but here it's liable to be deadly. a decent, open, and truthful bunch of spokespeople and officials is necessary

how reassuring

there are various problems inherent in authority, and various problems inherent specifically in medical authority, that are very likely to make the ebola situation here in the states worse, and also to result in a major public freakout, already underway. so, a major part of the placebo effect of modern medicine is projecting an air of sort of casual omniscience and a firm reassuring demeanor. i bet they teach young doctors how to project this sort of authority. the first wave of cdc and cdc-mirror statements went like this. "there's no danger of an outbreak. we understand how ebola is transmitted and we understand how to control it. our super-effective selves and ourr super-effective health institutions are on the case." 

first, i think it is very likely that the total improvisational mess that was the dallas hospital's and the cdc's response to the duncan case rested in part on the fact that people actually appeared to think that infection was extremely difficult. reassuring us about that on evidently insufficient data might actually kill healthcare workers, you doinks. apparently on these grounds, the hospital administration was absurdly cavalier in handling duncan. and the very same people who said that we understand how it's transmitted etc said two weeks later that "we need to understand more about how ebola is transmitted". then they let very dire-sounding things escape their lips, and real fear in particular about the situation of healthcare workers. then they lurch right back to 'an outbreak is extremely unlikely', 'everything is under control' stuff, which they are repeating as a script, now incompatibly with the fear in their eyes. these are quotes from this bearded brit cdc mirror on cnn; i'm not pulling up his name, but it's the same with dr. anthony fauci, e.g. then invariably wolf blitzer of chris cuomo thanks him for making it all clear and reassuring us all.

so maybe the extremely authoritative presentation even of things about which you are not sure at all has the momentary effect of reassuring people. the problem is merely reality: when what you're saying turns out to be incredibly false, people stop believing you. they start generating alternative speculations on this or that. they start believing random websites, which indeed have more credibility. at some level they freak out in the awareness that they've got no idea at all what the truth is. nothing causes chaos like the breakdown of authority, and nothing causes the breakdown of authority like authority.

here's what i'd tell these people: ditch the self-esteem festival and the strategic communications. stop manipulating anyone and start speaking the truth as clearly as possible, including what you yourself do not know. we're going to need a new bunch of experts and spokesmen and authorities however.

Whadda Maroooon...Bugs Bunny

The Wascallwee Wabbit may or may not make a personal appearance in this but...

If I were Barrack Obama, I'd feel justified in asking God what the hell I'd ever done to him that merited this whirlwind of insanity. I think that smart, thoughtful presidents in the 21st Century aare at an awful disadvantage politically, and have been really since the Kennedy assassination. The guy is trying to do good things, but the world doesn't cooperate. It can't -- it's the world and consists of a lot of insane people with guns, money, lawyers, ski masks  and a mass of contradictory hidden agendas and open manifestos. In some ways, ISIL is a nice change -- they don't have a secret agenda, they're pretty open. They don't report to the same God that most of us recognize in the 21st Century. Still, they may call him Allah, but I think they worship Cthulhu or some other very dark overlord with a completely different agenda.

 

animal faith

a bit of knowledge without justification on santayana's argument that empirical knowledge, including science, rests on faith:

In Scepticism and Animal Faith Santayana goes so far as to assert that all knowledge is faith precisely because we are never in a position decisively to refute scepticism, that is, to remove objective uncertainty. Santayana sets out the familiar sceptical arguments elaborately, and in fact endorses their conclusions. That is, he affirms that we are in a position, as far as the exercise of reason with no assumptions is concerned, of radical and unrelievable doubt as to the existence of the external world, the deliverances of memory, even as to the existence or at least the nature of the subject. Or rather, if we were in fact creatures that generated beliefs by the emotionless exercise of reason with no assumptions, our doubts would be radical and unrelievable. But as agents, as passionate, individual creatures of the sort we are, we happen in fact to be under no serious doubt about these things. (The similarity of the position under consideration to the "naturalized" epistemology of Quine and others should here be remarked. Like Kierkegaard and Santayana, proponents of that project hold that scepticism is irrefutable and that how we actually come to acquire beliefs is relevant to how we ought to acquire them. And the similarity of the position to my reading of Diogenes, Johnson, and Moore need hardly be emphasized.) Santayana says: "the scepticism I am defending is not meant to be merely provisional; its just conclusions will remain fixed, to remind me perpetually that all alleged knowledge of matters of fact is faith only."(20)

This does not mean that all factual claims are wholly unjustified. Rather, Santayana's view is that all such claims rest finally on beliefs for which no justification can be produced. Knowledge, says Santayana, is faith mediated by signs. We take our intuitions to be signs of external objects and events. Taken in that way, such intuitions can lead to justified beliefs. But there is no justification for taking them that way. Animal faith, then, consists in the treatment of intuitions as signs of the external world, in "supposing that there is substantial there, something that will count and work in the world" (SAF p.39)

stray graph that might have been in the atlantic piece:

I want there to be no God, and I am speculating that it is the same for Richard Dawkins. We would find a God-centered universe less open, less fascinating, less challenging than a material universe, and perhaps also more oppressive. We need to acknowledge that, like everyone else, we believe not as reasoning machines, but as flesh-and-blood human beings.

so if you were wondering about the word 'riff', the thing below's all hook + turnaround = essence of the blues.

 

i have an essay on atheism up at the atlantic. i might put the point a bit more strongly: no one lives without faith, and no one's belief system can establish itself with no assumptions or no passionate commitments or no irrational kierkegarardian leaps.

probably the best statement of the sort of position i develop in the piece is santayana's scepticism and animal faith.

in connection to the movie 'kill the messenger', some writing i did in the early sdays of this blog on the whole affair:

iran/contra/crack and gary webb

my piece on webb and iran/contra/crack from 1999

slavoj

this webchat with zizek shows various things about him that i like and various things that i don't like so much. so first of all, i like that there's a philosopher doing a webchat at the guardian, and in general how free-wheelingly and frequently zizek writes about contemporary issues in the day-by-day media. at least a philosopher exists in that space, and he is quite the swashbuckler, either doing high-end history or philosophy or metaphysics, or writing columns on the economy. i think he writes boldly and relatively clearly in english for a continental killer. we need more folks who do all those things; these are things i would like to do and be.

now, on the very other hand, i would prefer almost anyone to hegel, marx, and lacan as figures to push into the future. i think he constantly constantly flirts with totalitarian communism, and always withdraws the most achingly disastrous conclusions. but he's always opposed to any sort of anarchism, and that's one of many things that lead one to think that, like everyone else, he's got the same old giant leftist state coming at you. the totalitarianism takes care of itself after that, btw.

indeed, most of the questions in the chat are political, and really several of them have that quite bizarre marxist-scholastic tone of like soviet apparatchiks. i guess in the back of my mind i figured that there were still people like that, but lord.

but zizek in response is typically both playful and always slightly fudging at the pivot points. it's awfully hard to know how seriously to take him at any given moment, and i think he's quite a bit more improvisational and probably ultimately more unpredictable than people usually give him credit for. these are good things to blow into the academy at this time.

xscape

 

 

Preface

   The items here probably the represent the 'light' or fluffy side of my authorship, which might be unfortunate, because the light side is also a rather dark side. They range from a personal essay on addiction to a satire on race to an amazing "solution" to the question of the meaning of life itself or, thinking about it from another angle, to the question of the meaning itself of life, or perhaps to the question itself of life's meaning.

     The centrality of the arts for understanding history and contemporary culture, and our coming rapture/damnation by comedy in the Cynical ecstasy at the end of history: these are related underlying themes of many of these essays. Often I apply ideas and taxonomies from art history and aesthetics to various sorts of materials, for example to gender and sexual orientation, or to popular music forms, or to the structure of history, and then try to let the material re-map those areas of inquiry. I don't insist that any particular one of these essays constitutes philosophy or aesthetics or anything else; I've tried to follow from thing to thing, idea to idea, fiasco to calamity, rather than worry about where precisely I was in the disciplinary maze.

      Some of these essays reflect engagement with stage and parlor magic and sleight of hand; a number discuss or obviously reflect obsession and addiction; a number display a lifelong love of popular music; a number reflect engagements with my favorite writers and questions about writing. All of these obviously have various autobiographical connections, and I suppose they are all attempts to determine what you can see from here, wherever 'here' is now: including, white heterosexual middle-aged person; aficionado or enthusiast; daddy, American, me, etc. I'm happy to let these connections emerge explicitly, or not.

     As I've gone on writing, I have tried to get less showboaty and more obviously committed to subject-matters other than myself, though it might not seem that way. Nevertheless 'I' weaves in and out here, and I do think that even academic writing - which this may be or not - should be more personal, insofar as persons, with their passions and pathologies, still lurk behind it or create it in some way. The 'I' changes in different essays, but I am not going to be precious about it: by 'I' I mean me. I mean me perhaps at different moments or moods; certainly 'Detritus' was written at a nadir, and I'm doing better now, and would have something happier to say about myself. I am content even if uncomfortable leaving that essay as a trace of then. It's not, on the other hand, that I'm 'a different person' than I was in 2008. If only. But you know how we end up being transformed without meaning to be, under necessity, like ramshackle ships of Theseus.

 

      Most of these texts were read in some form as lectures/multi-media extravaganzas; others were pitched to various sorts of publication with varying success.  Thanks to Muhlenberg College, Slippery Rock University, Notre Dame, East Tennessee State, Southern Illinois, Concordia College, Cal State Chico, Oregon State, Gettysburg College, the Nordic Society for Aesthetics, Duquesne, the International Country Music Conference, and others who hosted me on occasions when this material was presented. Parts of pieces appeared in Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, The Rolling Stones and Philosophy, How Does it Feel to be a White Problem?,  and Tricksters and Punks of Asia. Each paper has been at least somewhat revised, though they are still to be taken as representing the time they were composed. For example "How to Escape" was written before the killing of Osama bin Laden. In some cases, related blog entries from eyeofthestrom.blogs.com or related journalism by me from various sources have been annexed.

 

     Near the end of his life, my father, Franklin Sartwell, gave me editions of Mencken's autobiography and Beirce's Devil's Dictionary with an air of passing on key bits of family lore. For him, as for his father - both newspapermen in DC - Mencken was the greatest of their own kind, or what they aspired to be: irascible, politically perverse, hilarious hard-drinking bastards who knew everything, especially about writing. Also Frank took to me to see the Seldom Scene, Thursdays at the Red Fox Inn in Bethesda, Maryland.

     For better and disaster, the effects of Judith Bradford and Marion Winik on the thought and prose style of this book, and the experiences represented, are obvious, at least to me. I think Arthur Danto's influence is pervasive; oh, probably Richard Rorty's too. I read Heinrich Wölfflin's Principles of Art History in high school and am still battering my old Dover edition; amazing how something like that can infest your thinking. Throughout, art historical terms, such as stylistic terms or periods ('soul', for example, or 'classical') should be understood as sketched out in the lexicon, pp.   .Thanks to Andrew Kenyon for collaboration on this volume. The city of Baltimore and the countryside of South Central Pennsylvania. The Maryland Institute College of Art and Dickinson College.

   As usual, you should blame those people and institutions, rather than the author, for all the infelicities, fatuities, solecisms, barbarisms, contradictions, absurdities, and blunders you find here.

get it from suny  

  

with a bullet

my book of esays is out. it's in my less academic, more rollicking voice. stuff on magic, bluegrass and punk, graffiti and dutch painting, cynicism and the meaning of life, addiction and terorism. some bits are from this blog.

 

i'm currently ranked #14,763,620, with a bullet.

 

music expresses emotion

making music with whales, making music to fight climate change, chattering with the squirrels, etc: these are very bad ideas. and the amazing thing is that even as you are frolicking grimly among the whales as they bellow like bono, you are doing less than nothing to save the planet. at least the music is irrelevant, though. but the new york times cannot run even a piece about singing with the whales without going brainbrainbrain. possibly, the idea is to compensate for not having a brain by saying 'brainbrainbrain' all the time. it's like getting hungry and feeding yourself the word 'sticky bun.'

Music expresses emotions, and that’s why we love it so. Whales and humans may share a capacity to express complex emotions. You see, both our brains contain a mysterious kind of cell called the spindle neuron, that until recently was known only in the brains of primates. We don’t know exactly what it is for, but scientists believe it has something to do with the ability to experience complex, layered emotions. And whales have three times the number of these cells in their brains than we do.

as per usual the spindle neurons are doing nothing for anyone, just stuck in there for the sound or something. the pseudo-science is completely out of keeping with the tone or point of the piece, but you can't write anything for the nytimes without putting that paragraph in it. scientists speculate that it is possible that mystical mystery neurons may be involved. astounding? yes. but that is what science shows.

and not to rag on y'all too bad, but i do want to point out that the times just published this sentence: 'Music expresses emotions, and that’s why we love it so.' scientists speculate that the 'blank' neuron is responsible for the production of such sentences, and though whales have blank neurons too, they are so amazing because they never yap the boilerplate like that. climate change, though, may induce a human-like neurological erasure even in humpback whales. it is the tragedy of the commons.

giving off positive vibes

sometimes i seem awfully negative as a blogger. anyway, i think the thing below is one of the best pop songs of the last few years, by one of the best artists.

 

the lightness of touch should be a lesson to all bludgeoners, from bono to bruce. it refers to all sorts of moments in the history of soul, funk, hip hop, pop, but ed at his best is also inimitable and extremely contemporary. and he can extremely rap and play guitar and write.

oh and of course there this one - showing all them skills and then some - which conquered the world awhile ago.

 

smell the reeking pile of horseshit

i have no idea what arthur c. brooks thinks he's doing in this piece, but the attempts to naturalize or biologize the left-right spectrum  are just pitiful. some folks want to imprint it on your amygdala, while others go olfactory. folks have wound themselves into such partisan tizzies that they cannot think their way outside at all; they have lost even a rudimentary power of self-reflection. they are trying to say: everyone in the whole world, insofar as they are human, is trapped in the democratic/republican, or socialist/laissez-faire dynamic forever. this would be surprising, since the whole thing is at most a couple of hundred of years old, and both sides are miserably incoherent authoritarianisms. of course brooks also goes for the jonathan haidt chestnut defining liberals as those who oppose authority and conservatives as those who enthuse about it. this too is surprising since every single liberal solution to every single thing is the state the state the state, which is just coercive authority, whatever people may have convinced themselves it is (our collective identity etc). and one thing i want to say about questionnaire research of the haidt variety: it shows either that liberals are anti-authoritarians, or that they are skull-crushingly self-deluded. seriously, i say the data supports either hypothesis equally, which might make one reflect on the methodology just a bit. fortunately we have an external reality - the actual solutions advocated and the actual political system as it stands - by which to measure the truth of this answer.

anyway, at least start grappling with this: people in dallas are more conservative than people in chicago. men are more conservative than women. rich people are more conservative than poor people. white people are more conservative than black people. now, wouldn't this tend to entail that this is at least partly to be explained by, or that it is correlated, with a set of smell facts? we would expect, if this line of research is right, that people from dallas tend to smell different than those from chicago. and of course there is a long traditional history of the claim that poor people smell different than rich people, or black people than white people. or indeed, that their brains are different or that they have different bumps, etc.  even y'all can do better than this.

 

the renaissance in nashville and new orleans

as i may have mentioned, i'm teaching a course on american popular music. it occurs to me that the twentieth century in american music was comparable to, say, the sixteenth century in italy in visual arts. i am quite serious about that.  so, you know, botticelli, leonardo, michelangelo, girgione, titian, up to correggio and caravaggio. or: louis armstrong, charlie parker, bessie smith, blind willie mctell, robert johnson, jimmie rodgers, hank williams, tammy wynette, waylon jennings, billie holiday, duke ellington, sam cooke, otis redding, thomas dorsey, aretha, janis and jimi, run dmc, public enemy, biggie, eminem, bill monroe, early scruggs, muddy waters, little walter, b.b. king, duane allman, professor longhair, oh there is no need ever to stop.

 

i blame neoliberal capitalism for this great pop song

stephanie convery in the the guardian on iggy azalea: "actually, she is the inevitable product of neoliberal capitalism, and in some ways she is much a victim of it as a culprit." really, you have just got to, got to, got to stop this bullshit (rap that line). 'neoliberal capitalism', i assert, is a non-referring phrase, and the fact that people are still picking non-stop at the rotting scraps of marxism is just pathetic. you've got an intellectual structure, but no contact with reality whatsoever. and also that intellectual structure is stupid and useless and extremely over and extremely disastrous. just grapple with this assertion: iggy azalea is the inevitable outcome of economic forces. seriously, the dialectically material process of history was always going to culminate in 'new bitch'. you are talking about iggy azalea. shut up and enjoy the damn album, will you?

the idea that iggy is a victim of whatever economic structures are around her encapsulates much of what is wrong with this whole obsolete line of thought. she may appear to be a powerful and creative person who is expressing herself boldly in public space and who gives pretty damn good flow, but really it's all false consciousness, and if she knew her real interests, she'd agree with me, stephanie convery, and go work at a non-profit. actually, i think neoliberal capitalism is being victimized by iggy azalea. one might focus instead on the ways she is playing with race and gender, using the signifiers in her own project. the deafness and joylessness with which this post-critical-theory leftism approaches music is a good sign of the world that it wants to induce.

 

soon tom cruise will stride alone through the smoking ruins of civilization

this ebola thing is not going perfectly well. cnn got the story that no one has cleaned up the dallas guy's apartment at all: sheets and god knows what else, with people still living there who had, let's say, no training in hazmat clean-up. there are many scenarios for a flare, even supposing people suddenly started doing competently now what they've been doing incompetently up to now. i would say that i am not finding the cdc and their echoers as reassuring as they think i should. i am very not clear whether they regard their primary mission as providing accurate information or 're-assuring the public'. sadly you can't always do both. also re-assuring the public and showing how wonderful we here at the cdc are is the very same mission, which could also cause truth-type issues. 

so tom frieden and his mirrors (such as the doctor/healthcare reporters on the news networks)  have almost scoffed at the idea that we could have a significant outbreak in the states, because of our '21st-century health infrastructure', 'excellent public health system', and so on. oh the entire handling of the thomas duncan case in dallas makes quite the little hash of that. a hospital sent an infectious ebola patient home. the cdc showed no interest in cleaning up the site, and no one else did either, until cnn broke the story.

so: the idea that ebola is extremely difficult to spread and cannot be spread by people who are asymptomatic: how absolutely actually certain are they about that? to what extent has the transmission of ebola been very carefully and systematically and widely studied before now, in those tiny sporadic outbreaks? because tom frieden and co are betting their lives on it. if we're not certain on that, who counts as a contact is so very very much larger. the problem is so very much larger. i find the difficulty of transmission a bit difficult, though perhaps not impossible, to square with the idea that ebola is increasing 'exponentially' in africa, or projections of a million or more infections in the next few months.

 

there will be chardonnay

ah, women. wait, can you still say 'ah, women'? or is that discriminatory harassment? if so, let me just say that mistakes were made. from a review of samantha ellis's how to be a heroine (tls sept 26): "Ellis re-reads Wuthering Heights once a year, in the run-up to her birthday, often in a hot bath with a glass of wine." then she writes a book about that. perhaps the whole thing is a devastating parody of bourgeois white het femaleness? like maybe 'samantha ellis' is a fiction created by angela davis or dorothy allison? yoga is likely, and scented candles. but two things i do know for sure: novels made ellis who she is, and there will be chardonnay.

punctured

meanwhile matt bai is everywhere with his book about 'when american politics went tabloid': the gary hart sex scandal during the 1988 presidential campaign. so one thing's obvious in the radio interviews etc: hart is bai's hero and he thinks that's where everything went terribly wrong. i can see the argument that who one may be fucking is not really the most relevant piece of info with regard to political leaders. but what i like about this era of examining leaders' private lives is that it continually punctures the mystique in which power enshrouds itself. it shows people wearing suits or uniforms who emerged from yale law school to run our nation are at least as gross and stupid as anyone else. it reveals over and over and over why people want power and what they do with it when they get it. when you get to the point where there just is no mystique, no possible cult, of state power, when all glamour has been scrubbed clean, then everyone is a de facto anarchist,.

ours is a cynical time...

the secret service fence-jumper scandal is the only thing they want to talk about on cnn and msnbc. war in the middle east has dwindled to irrelevance. amazingly, this is in a situation in which nothing really bad actually happened. whatever. chill and re-think your security.

meanwhile, morning joe among others is bemoaning the fact that one 'pillar' after another - all the institutions that the american people apparently trusted - the secret service, the nsa, the irs, congress, etc - has lost all credibility. thank god we still trust the military, seemed to be the consensus. so why would trusting the government be a desirable state, and when were the american people ever doltish or submissive enough to trust the irs or congress? i don't even think that is is physically, morally, or intellectually possible.

i hope they are being sarcastic about the military. trust the military? have you lost your fucking mind or been asleep for the last half century? also, what the hell, the military is precisely what gave us american hero omar gonzalez.

people who trust those who seize and hold power over them, or trust the institutions in which they are embedded, by which they are surveilled etc, are likely to be raped and executed, and, honestly, it's fundamentally their own doing: evidently what they want and deserve. right now people are just visibly yearning to submit, and are so upset and alienated that watching the news makes that harder. but a situation in which it is glaringly obvious that only a masochistic cretin would trust the authorities is better than a situation wherein everyone or indeed anyone trusts the authorities. that can only be based on secrecy and lies, because the fucking authorities are no better than you or me, to put it mildly.

inappropriation

somehow the united states went from 'congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press' to “There are a lot of names and descriptions that were used over time that are inappropriate today,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said. “And I think the name this is attributed to the Washington football club is one of those.” in other words, we used to value a bold brawling discourse; now our speech is run by little schoolmarms: 'inappropriate!' honestly, that something is inappropriate, other things being equal, recommends it. i suppose 'appropriateness' is the constitutional standard on prior censorship of expression in our jurisprudence?