cheese it, the cops!

nobob

i have been ragging on dylan, a lot, for a long time. i do actually think bob dylan is some kind of mass delusion. it's like i can't believe - really can't believe - that anyone thinks he's any good, much less that everyone nods along to the notion that he's is a god-touched genius or whatever. i regard him as a charlatan and substantially less  than a mediocrity. this month's nyrb has a piece by the poet don chiasson: "the genius of bob dylan": i bet there have been hundreds of pieces with that headline over the years. if people didn't just nod along with this after all these decades despite the actual hooey, the piece would be just be obviously absurd. none of the quotations have an iota of poetry in them. he starts with this, evidently the tour de force that's supposed to blow people away: "Early one morning the sun was shining, I was laying in bed,/ Wondering if she'd changed at all, If her hair was still red." he spends a couple of paragraphs analyzing the use of pronouns in this passage, detecting the signs of transcendent genius therein. one wonders whether he detects genius in every conversation with a waitress, or every note from hubby: 'would you pick up a half gallon of milk on the way home?'

in groupie tones, chiasson reports that dylan has performed 'tangled up in blue' 1,400 times. how does he know this? because websites keep track, as though they were following jesus around waiting for the crucifixion (the wait is interminable, i admit) and writing gospels. nothing chiasson quotes does anything or goes anywhere, but at least none of the pseudo-surrealist hooey from the '60s is included. he is amazed that dylan mentions t.s. eliot in a song, evidence i guess of dylan's literary importance. well he definitely needs some sort of evidence, because all he's got so far is bilge. he praises the harmonica playing. i recommend 7 seconds of little walter as a permanent cure. somehow ersatz + suckass = authentic to white people, which is a devastating indictment of our race. so, let me ask again as i asked before: what if it turned out that a man must walk down 138 roads before you can call him a man? what then, o wind?

don't make me quote and quote and quote. i don't think people are even seeing or reading or hearing what is right in front of their face. i don't doubt that, despite his overweening meaninglessness, dylan meant something to people at a certain moment, though there were thirty other loutish folk singers who'd have been better in the role. but at any rate, the moment is over, and you're not getting it back by listening to tangled up in blue another 1400 times. on the other hand, knock yourself out. i'll lend you my hammer.

 

 

poe the cosmologist

here is columbia physicist brian greene:

In an infinite universe [more precisely, I would say, in a sufficiently large universe], most regions lie beyond our ability to see, even using the most powerful telescopes possible. Although light travels enormously quickly, if an object is sufficiently distant, then the light it emits - even light that may have been emitted shortly after the big bang - will simply not have sufficient time to reach us. . . . The important point is that regions beyond a certain distance...lie beyond our cosmic horizon. . . .

Using a two-dimensional analogy, we can compare the expanse of space, at a given moment of time, to a giant patchwork quilt (with circular patches in which each patch represents a single cosmic horizon. Someone located in the center of a patch can have interacted with anything that lies in the same patch, but has had no contact with anything lying in a different patch, because they're too far away.... The same idea applies in three dimensions, where the cosmic horizons - the patches in the cosmic quilt - are spherical, and the same conclusion holds: sufficiently distant patches lie beyond one another's spheres of influence and so are independent realms. (The Hidden Reality, 32)

and here is poe, from eureka (1848).

We comprehend, then, the insulation of our Universe. We perceive the isolation of that - of all that which we grasp with the senses. We know that there exists one cluster of clusters - a collection around which, on all sides, extend the immeasurable wildernesses of a Space to all human perception untenanted. [This a spherical space, for Poe.] But because on the confines of this Universe of Stars we are compelled to pause, through want of further evidence from the senses, is it right to conclude that, in fact, there is no material point beyond that which have thus been permitted to attain? Have we, or have we not, an analogical right to this inference that this perceptible Universe - that this cluster of clusters - is but one of a series of clusters of clusters, the rest of which are invisible through distance - through the diffusion of their light being so excessive, ere it reaches us, as not to produce on our retinae a light impression - or from there being no such emanation as light at all - or, lastly, from the interval being so vast, that the electric tidings of their presence in Space, have not yet - through the lapsing myriads of years - been enabled to traverse that interval. . . [We have a right to infer] - let us say, rather, to imagine - an interminable succession of the "clusters of clusters" or of "Universes" more or less similar. (Library of America Poetry and Tales, 1328-29)

 

live-blogging the death of the blog

andrew sullivan is quitting the dish, and ana marie cox (the delightful original wonkette) is basically declaring the blog over as a medium, or whatever 'the blog' may be. i guess i started blogging - right here - around when they did or shortly after (2004). now first of all, burnout is legit. when i started blogging, i was getting tired of writing a weekly op-ed column, and really after i started blogging i realized i wanted to quit that gig, even if i also wanted back on the op-ed page from time to time. i've often taken a month or six weeks off without notice, although at other times i'm posting like mad. 

but i've got to say: i fucking love the form, alright? for many reasons. i am a much better writer now, i believe, because i've written however many hundreds of thousands of words for 'publication'; some blog entries i've refined dozens of times. i publish, revise, and then publish again, the perfect cure for the problem of suddenly seeing a piece in print and so seeing it from a different or outside angle, and wanting and being unable to fix it. genres like the 700-word op-ed or the academic book or a twitter feed have some rigid parameters; a blog entry can take any length, any form; it is improvisational or jazz publishing. i poach it all the time for academic or opinion-journalist-type writings. i just love it as a place and way to write.

and also...it is an autonomous press that i control completely. there is something to be said for good professional editing (john timpane at the philly inquirer and i worked on a couple of hundred pieces together, i think), and something to be said against bad professional editing (naming no names). but there is a lot to be said for the unexpurgated individual human voice that knows it will not be edited except by the person who emits it. and that is what i think a blog ought to be, even if there are several voices on a blog, you old crusader. i published an underground newspaper starting in 7th grade, which was not unique in my era. my heroes william lloyd garrison (the liberator), josiah warren (the peaceful revolutionist), and emma goldman (mother earth) figured out how to make a free space for their voices, to tiny or big audiences. they had to figure out how to print it themselves. i see the blog as a continuation of that. i've said many, many things here that i could not say at the daily beast or huffpost.

andrew sullivan and ana marie cox were great bloggers at times. but they literally sold out the blog, if i may say so. cox's thing is that there are better ways to make money as a writer. on the other hand i have never myself sold advertising or done anything but pay to blog. i respect professional writers, coming from long lines of them, and i realize i have a nice position as an academic from which to do this (which is not to say i ain't broke). but cox and sullivan wanted to blog for someone; embed their blogs in the atlantic or the guardian or whatever. others were always calculating how to get the largest audiences and thus a good flow of advertising.

they sold their blogs, ok? it's not the worst thing, but maybe that's when they stopped blogging and just became staff writers or wheeler-dealers, with a comments section and a time posted, etc: the accessories but not the essence. this was a pretty straightforward choice for them, because they are people of relatively mainstream views who aspired to the biggest possible audiences. but there are plenty of bloggers for whom that wouldn't be an option, one way or another.

for years i just argued that there were no blogs on the nyt's opinion page, no matter how they were presenting stanley fish or whomever; they just called a column a blog, basically just edited it the same way, and so on. i'm not going to put any weight on the 'real' meaning of the term, but let's say the blog got co-opted and then died. that is ok, because post-collapse it might again become a space of eccentric voices with small audiences; it never stopped being that too: a verson of the diy zine. and it will remain one of the possibilities. at any rate, i've got no plans to stop.

 

more poesy

alright, i'm grappling fairly seriously with poe's eureka. it is brilliant.

a few remarks about genre. there is evidently a theory abroad that it's some kind of parody or satire of a scientific paper. not at all. he called it a "prose poem", which really is a joke with a point. it is a completely serious and extremely profound essay in natural philosophy. and it is a very serious scientific treatise by someone who knows himself not to be a working astronomer or physicist, but who has assiduously studied the available writings of those who are. it is fully, pointedly, rational, and systematically presents arguments and proofs.

now, there is a fair amount of religious language, but it is used to express physical laws and events. i'm not saying poe didn't believe in god, but the god he uses here is a deist god, or is explicitly identified with the physical laws of the universe. if the religious language was read out completely, it would still work beautifully, but also there is a sincere undertow that betrays a certain profundity. understand that he's writing in america in 1848, alright? you're going to have to do some translation.

i am going to do a long entry on his method and epistemology, which are extremely sharp and interesting. also i will just remark that the metaphysics and the epistemology are similar to mine in entanglements (forthcoming). i think it is one of the great american philosophical essays. 

one question that robinson is asking in the nyrb piece and that others have asked is whether it anticipates bang-and-crunch cosmology. oh yes it does. but there is more. i don't know why i'm always talking about physics when i don't actually know very much about it. but some things are pretty frigging obvious. so, consider the 'cosmological principle' in 20th c physics. 

In modern physical cosmology, the cosmological principle is the notion that the distribution of matter in the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic when viewed on a large enough scale, since the forces are expected to act uniformly throughout the Universe, and should, therefore, produce no observable irregularities in the large scale structuring over the course of evolution of the matter field that was initially laid down by the Big Bang. (Wikipedia)

(then they go on, sadly, to define it in terms of observers. poe is aware that he is trying to describe the distribution of matter in the universe, not his own or someone else's mental images. i don't figure he deserves a lot of credit for that; physicists' mistaking their own discipline for psychology seems like an extremely difficult mistake to make.) but anyway, not only does poe formulate it, he formulates it beautifully. and he is arguing for it on the grounds of spherical expanding universe originating at an infinitely dense point of unity. in 1848. he calls what makes it bang a 'divine volition', partly to signal that his own explanation runs out there. here is poe: 

I mean to say that our solar system is to be understood as affording a generic instance of these agglomerations [other solar systems, galaxies, and so forth], or, more correctly, of the ulterior conditions at which they arrived. . . . We shall be inclined to think that no two stellar bodies in the Universe -- whether suns, planets or moons -- are particularly, while all are generally, similar. Still less, then, can we imagine any two assemblages of such bodies -- any two "systems" -- as having more than a general resemblance. (It is not impossible that some unlooked-for optical improvement may disclose to us, among innumerable varieties of systems, a luminous sun, encircled by luminous and non-luminous rings, within and without and between which, revolve luminous and non-luminous planets, attended by moons having moons -- and even these latter again having moons.) Our telescopes, at this point, thoroughly confirm our deductions. Taking our own solar system, then, as merely a loose or general type of all, we have so far proceeded in our subject as to survey the Universe under the aspect of a spherical space, throughout which, dispersed with merely general equability, exist a number of but generally similar systems.

Let us now, expanding our conceptions, look upon each of these system as in itself an atom; which in fact it is, when we consider it as but one of the countless myriads of systems which constitute the Universe. Regarding all, then, as but colossal atoms, each with the same ineradicable tendency to Unity which characterizes the actual atoms of which it consists -- we enter at once upon a new order of aggregations. The smaller systems, in the vicinity of a larger one, would, inevitably, be drawn into still closer vicinity. A thousand would assemble here; a million there -- perhaps here, again, even a billion -- leaving, thus, immeasurable vacancies in space. And if, now, it be demanded why, in the case of these systems -- of these merely Titanic atoms -- I speak, simply, of an "assemblage," and not, as in the case of the actual atoms, of a more or less consolidated agglomeration: -- if it be asked, for instance, why I do not carry what I suggest to its legitimate conclusion, and describe, at once, these assemblages of system-atoms as rushing to consolidation in spheres -- as each becoming condensed into one magnificent sun -- my reply is that mellonta tauta -- I am but pausing, for a moment, on the awful threshold of the Future. For the present, calling these assemblages "clusters," we see them in the incipient stages of their consolidation. Their absolute consolidation is to come. (this is at page 1323-24 of the library of america poetry and tales)

as explicitly as possible, he argues that the matter is roughly evenly distributed through the universe if you consider it at a large enough scale and so it can be described mathematically, but if you zoom in to any region, you see radically uneven distributions of matter, each local region being unique.

 

 

review

i am often frustrated that my books rarely get reviewed; i know a lot of authors who feel that way. but i did find a nice review of political aesthetics from the journal of aesthetics and art criticism, by paul voice from bennington.

i love the praise, of course, and he praises the book for strengths i do think it has. and i also think that his criticisms poke some of the weak spots. it is true that i have a hard time with the concept of 'the aesthetic'. i certainly have been worrying about it for decades, but even when a student asked me today in my beauty class what i meant by 'aesthetic' (properties, aspects, experiences) i fumbled around. and it does have a tendency to get bigger and bigger until it's not surprising that it engulfs everything. i am not satisfied with the general characterizations of the aesthetic i gave in the book, and i have no pop-up definition. but of course i could and do say something and then something else and so on about it; i don't think it's completely nebulous.

Not in the same area code, not even in the same zip code

Interesting day, and I'm ignoring my wife to post this. I happened on a Dangerous Minds Article this morning that was focused on a recently discovered live performance of John Lee Hooker. There were other things I could have done, but I decided to just look at that. Damn...I realized that I had a lot of work to do. 

 

We tend to forget often that Hooker was not a part of the Chicago Blues scene...He was a motor city blues man -- a rougher, grittier sound and a bit closer to the Delta than the Loop. While eventually the Motor City Blues led to Motown, that route was pretty convoluted. But, if you want to hear the influence of John Lee Hooker and others check out some early Bob Seeger, or Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels or MC5's legendary Lick Out the Jams, Motherfucker from 1967. 

 

 

Now the Link takes you over to my piece at The Defeatists which has a helluva lot of music embedded in it. And, as is normal with me, some politics, circa 1958 and 1947. Anyway, God does love a Boogie-Man, and John Lee Hooker was a notoriously nice gentleman, shy and nothing like the surly precursor to RunDMC that he appeared. And the music, damn...I really need to practice more. 

 

rock the index

i'm working on a review of a book called british ethical theorists from sidgwick to ewing. admittedly, this is the sort of thing jeeves would hold up in front of his face just to intimidate bertie, and perhaps it is not primarily intended to provide amusement. however, it has got me reading things that i had long neglected or forgotten. i have to say, it's hard to imagine clearer or more solidly-constructed work in ethics than that of h.a. prichard or w.d. ross. one re-discovery: the very excellent five types of ethical theory, by c.d. broad. it is written with extreme confidence and a lot of flair.

when i did the index for obscenity, anarchy, reality in the early '90s, i thought i had invented the comical index, or at least had done the first one in an academic book, or for heaven's sake the first in an academic philosophy book. (you can actually check out the index in the look-inside bit of the amazon page; no one but randy auxier really noticed, though.) but frigging c.d. broad was there ahead of me. some sub-entries: 

Bentham, Jeremy; tentatively compared to God, 160

God; may possibly be a Utilitarian, 81-82

Green, T.H.; his power of producing prigs, 144

Hegel, G.F.W.; was a philosophical disaster, 10

Paul, Saint; less widely appreciated than Mr. Charles Chaplin, 173

Russell, Hon. B.A.W.; his inordinate respect for psychoanalysis, 24

Socrates; less widely appreciated than Mr. Charles Chaplin, 173

etc. also this is an artifact of an era when a professor could actually express bold, slashing opinions definitely and amusingly. we long ago transcended that era.

 

another reason to panic

one thing about a national-security/surveillance state that is obsessed with terrorism: anyone could shut the sucker down at any moment. (notice that i am describing, not advocating this. i don't see what constructive purpose would be served and it's wrong to cause people hassles unless you've got a good reason.) here are two  examples. (honestly, growing up as a baby revlutionary in dc, it did occur to me to wonder whether you could fly a model plane onto the white house grounds.) but really, anybody with a twitter handle can scramble the airforce or disrupt air traffic all over the country or world. a few backpacks would be enough to shut down a major city. there is a panicky, pussy-like, hysterical quality to our anti-terror efforts that is itself a vulnerabilty. procedures like this require a lot less expertise than hacking the power grid or something. any teenager is aware that he can shut down his school with a phone call if the need arises - the thing is fairly routine in any given county - and it generalizes to any situation where you have a lot of people and prickly, testicularly challenged authorities who watch them all day. right now, not to put too fine a point on it, you could stop paris without committing a crime, using only a parked rental truck, a funky outfit, and an ambiguous phrase. (i say that in my capacity as a security consultant, to help governments identify emerging threats.) everybody's focused on not making the fatal mistake, which is a fatal mistake.

science and poe-sy

like a lot of folks, i have always been fascinated by edgar allan poe. i kept returning to his criticism, though it's a mixed bag. but he forms a good withering realist (!) foil for some of the woolly happy excesses of the transcedentalists. he thought the fads for spiritualism, water cures, and the sprawling 19th c. new age universe was amusing horseshit, notwithstanding his association with 'the uncanny'. i want him to be a devastating precursor of my three stooges of the apocalypse: twain, bierce, and mencken. all of those guys had poe on board, though i'm sure they had their reservations. what i always wanted to find in poe, and always half-assedly missed - was some sort of statement of how he saw his own intellectual orientation, what he was trying to do or show. i wanted something philosophical, in short. somehow until i read the marilynne robinson piece below, i missed eureka, possibly because of its subtitle: "a prose poem". ok ok i tend to steer clear of poetry, especially poetry of the 19th century.

honestly, the thing is a fairly straightforward philosophical essay, and i think the 'prose poem' thing is ironic. it's playful and triply ironic and such; i might compare its tone (and also a number of its positions) provisionally to kierkegaard's, emerging at the same moment (though i am not putting it on a par with sk). for philosophy, it's pretty literary. also its withering and almost self-ridiculing tone very much reminds me of bierce. he's aware of his own pretentiousness as he writes; he's sorry that he's doing philosophy, but here it is. there are many jokes.

but it is dedicated to von humboldt. he contrasts the positions of aristotle, bacon, hume, kant, bentham, and mill, for example. he quotes them. it is a defense of imagination, intuition, and improvisation in all the paths of human inquiry, including the sciences, and it is a reasoned defense by a cosmopolitan intellectual who read everything. i am still grappling with the overall positions and structure of the argument, and i'll have more to say about these after i've read the whole twice.

but what i want to say at the moment about poe, robinson, and epistemology is this: we do wrong (i did wrong below) to contrast science and (say) aesthetic or poetic or intuitive paths toward the truth. look poe was a literary person and he struggled toward these ideas out of that sort of material. einstein was a mathematician, or whatever it may be, and he moved toward a (somewhat similar) set of ideas from that direction. but poe's technique actually has rigorous applications of reason all over it, while einstein - this is a commonplace - is engaged in acts of imagination, intuition: an aesthetic of beauty. these things are integrated on the ground at the most fertile moments. like a lot of people for a couple of hundred years, poe's quite working on lucretian-newtonian lines. and i think lucretius lurks in the background not only as having the right sort of universe, but as doing poetic science. and if we viewed einstein as emerging in that same history, we'd have a point. 

one reason to delete the justification condition on knowledge is that it's always trying to foreclose on the paths to truth a priori. i don't think we can tell now what all the paths may be, and i don't think we're sufficiently appreciative of the many different ways that people have found the truth, or the fact that these are always working in combination.

in general, we need to destroy this obsessive contrast between reason and its others, which gets stamped in everything from star trek to brain science (where your executive regions are contrasted to your amygdala or whatever). this really is a theme of poe's fiction and poetry. we'll be doing a lot better science and a lot better prose poetry once we throw these distinctions into chaos.

the figure of poe is a symbol of the reason-beast dualism: he has become a mere study in pathology, an interesting addict, as also an arch-romantic, an american baudelaire. it's all supposed to be darkside, a spiralling tumble into hallcination. but it takes about a second with poe's criticism to realize that's wrong, and as robinson points out, the stories often resolve morally or are emblems of a moral crisis and emblems of its resolution. or really, it's an oscillation in poe that at its best shows a resolution if not a harmony. 

poe, marilynne robinson, and k=tb

marilynne robinson's essay on edgar allan poe in this month's nyrb is profound. here's an example of the motivations underlying my view that knowledge is merely believing the truth, and does not require any particular sorts of reasons or justifications:

Poe’s mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

right: aesthetic reasoning. might lead you very wrong. but it might lead you very right. and if you think that aesthetics isn't central to science or reason or practices of inquiry or justification, i don't think you've been watching!

king, the afterlife

one more bit on king, and then i'm done. we need to think about how king has functioned as an image, an icon, a symbol, and so on, how 'king' has circulated, what he or his picture or his words mean at any given place and time. it is a well-nigh universal american image, as common an image as we have, less problematic even than the flag. i have written a lot and perhaps intend to write more about 'unconscious racism'. let's say i believe in it in a pretty extreme way. i think it is incredibly obvious on the ground: in the gap between how we white folks think about ourselves/what we say, and the structural racism that persists (income levels, education and educational segregation, incarceration rates, residential segregation, police violence, and so on). it's been decades since i talked to a white person who considered him/herself a racist. it's like reality is a hallucination. black people must find that annoying.

well, the image of king has a role here, a use: really, anti-immigrant activists quote him as a shelter against the charge of bigotry. but just the average white liberal person - who harbors all the attitudes that make the situation, who is still looking for some white experts to tell black people how to remediate their pathologies, still wanting to oppress black people to make them free, still thinking basically racially all the time - takes shelter in king. we march to selma, which is sort of like, is a wan reflection of, marching to selma. of course we already agreed with every sentence, and really felt it when oprah was crucified in the street. we all hated the cracker segregationist police chiefs and governors. and were we to run into cracker segregationists, we'd know what to say. but guess what? today's cracker segregationist only wants to judge people by the cointent of their characters. we have met the cracker segregationist and he is us. king (among others) taught white folks how to talk.

if king's image now is a double-edged sword, that is not king's fault, putting it mildly. he aspired to universal brotherhood, universal values. but any rhetoric, any image, is subject to unpredictable circulation, and those tropes have remarkable possibilities for ... problematic appropriation, because anyone can potentially nod along, and is meant to. king's image can easily be deracinated, im-paled. but then an examination or critique of how a particular image or sentence is being appropriated is always possible too, and people are always re-radicalizing king as well.

the beat becomes your body

 

dub music from the roots reggae period (circa '70s) is probably what i listen to most, when i'm puttering about the house, tooling down the empty rural roads etc. my writing on it is represented in an essay in how to escape and a (somewhat overlapping) chapter of political aesthetics. i'm interested in it because of its transformative effect on pop music all over the world, for its complete re-thinking of the ontology of music or the idea of the song (there would be no hip hop without it, e.g.). i am interested in it from various political angles. but i listen to it all the time because it just makes me feel chill, and you can let it be background or suddenly focus on all the coolness and badass bass lines. if i were enumerating a handful of favorite artists in the history of music, augustus pablo would be among them.

one great extension of the tubby/scientist/jammy-type nexus has been the work of the british producer adrian sherwood (my late brother adam's big hero), such as the dub syndicate things. on itunes i sort of stumbled on what i'm thinking of as the next iteration: don goliath's 'rootstep' series. (don goliath might be a skinny white kid from berlin, which is quite as it should be. once you release something like dub reggae into the world, there's no telling where it might go or what it might do.)

maybe this is how producers issue stuff now, but it strikes me as pretty bizarre: 'rootstep to the world' appears in 30 album-length collections - each almost exactly an hour long - indistinguishable from the outside except by numbers. and that is only one of a number of such series don goliath has issued. within each volume, you get four songs (if that's the right term) in four versions each: a vocal (often, or some other maybe single approach, a 'feature'), a 'melodica cut', a 'dub' and a 'riddim'. it's almost like a straight mathematization of the whole way of re-thinking the pop song invented by tubby, or it turns the way yabby you or glen brown recorded into a logical notation. but the important thing is that few have understood what makes a reggae riddim line crucially evil as clearly: the melodies are so fundamental and dangerous. also he's constantly paying tribute to various moments in the history of reggae. he has really learned how to build a classic roots riff.

i guess the 'step' part indicates in part the mechanical beat, and it does tend to get incessant. in its way, though, it is a club dance music, and at least in many contexts that does suggest that you build and build on the straight beat. (adam sartwell was a club dj in dc, and sherwood's electronic stuff did work in that context.) i also do think don goliath overuses a basic whip-crack or pistol-shot effect. one source of that is the great black uhuru/sly-and-robbie cut 'what is life?' even with the completely digital environment, though, the music is not soulless. 

 

but there is an issue. one way to see it would be on 'night and day' (x4) on volume 28 (no i haven't downloaded all 30). it's a version of the great and under-known 'melt away' by max romeo (i think lee perry at the mantrols?). killer riff, but the original plays with the rhythm: there's a little delay or lilt that makes it insanely perfect. well you can't put that into a lockstep, quite, and it gets squared up. still i am not unpleased with don goliath's version either.

 

{it's always nice to find something good on youtube with 5 hits: plausibly, a discovery!)

 

that is one of the fairly-rare direct extended quotes in the rootstep series i think.

 he may be conceiving the whip-crack as the genre ('rootstep') itself. and it's not that there are no variations, drop-outs, and so on. though it may appear that don goliath is issuing way too much stuff way too fast, the material is consistently excellent. and the beat just becomes your body.

 

tell it slant

i've taken to skipping states of the union - which i know is not unusual overall, but which might be an unusual for a news junkie.  it's the pageantry of state that annoys me: the state is everyone's little religion - just chock full of superstitious mumbo-jumbo and immune to rationality - and i am an atheist. but say you think the non-stop assertion of conservatives that the msm is leftist is ridiculous. how about nytimes headlines this morning: 'obama defiantly pushes his agenda', 'a bold call to action'. in the washpost: 'obama offers a helping hand to families', 'the remarkable confidence of barack obama', 'obama barrels into final act of presidency unbowed', etc. these are not opinion pieces, but news and analysis.

were we to survive the state for awhile, which seems unlikely, this period will be remembered as the dark ages: dominated utterly by an institutionalized irrational indefensible ideology seemingly accepted by everyone. everyone shares the same quasi-sane assumptions, which articulate our forms of universal oppression. i doubt we'll ever emerge, but so did all those poor secret atheists in 1120, so you never know. but, like us looking back on the medievals, future historians - if any - will find it hard to believe people actually believed this sort of stuff; they'll have difficulty reconstructing it as a possible human belief system, or penetrating its clotted or contentless rhetoric and the arbitrary or bizarre conclusions that people of this period used it to reach. they will know, as we know about the year 1120, that everyone just wanted a hierarchy of the most extreme variety, and would believe anything - anything - that would keep it in place. some wanted to subordinate others, some wanted to be subordinated by others - but nobody even sort of wanted people to be free or to think.

that everyone thought that some form of the semi-comprehensible theology just had to be right and that there were no decent or rational possibilities outside it does not mean that the stuff was sensible, or that any given person at any given moment couldn't have realized that and hopped off, at least in their heads. that everyone thought, or said, that it was self-evident that they should subordinate their bodies and minds to the catholic church did not make it self-evident. to what i think of as the right sort of person, those things just made it obvious, all day every day in your face, that the crap made no sense at all.

like medieval peasants, we're supposed to be bewildered by the costumes, the insignia, the architecture, the dead language, into thinking that these people are better and smarter than us, and that everyone should do what they say. (in this case, it should be obvious to the most superficial reflection that the people who attend the state of the union are no better and no smarter than the average peasant or felon. have you watched these people work? really, it was the same with the medieval papacy: corrupt, venal, in it for the sex and booze. but, like north korean generals, they had huge funky hats. i propose that we can assess the intelligence of these people by noting that on each side they just say all the same sentences over and over. they haven't had an idea in a half century. their intelligence, such as it is, is mechanical and their only ethic is manipulation.) in that stuff - the frippery, we might say - lurks the state's only actual legitmacy. it's what they have in place of any sort of moral justification for the sheer coercion on which their power in fact rests.

francis bacon: "if men went all mad after the same fashion, they might agree with one another well enough."

 

malcolm and martin: the eternal yin yang

a bit more selma. as you may know, i have been reading about and writing about malcolm x for many years, for example, long chapters of act like you know and extreme virtue. reading the autobiography in 7th grade was a real revelation to me, as i went to a mostly-black school in chocolate city; it transformed my understanding of the racial situation in the world and in my life, and it set me on a road to political radicalism. in my own view, it taught me something important about trying to speak the truth as i experienced it, as he did: the truth about the world, about oppression and liberation, about my own life. now, in selma, it's pointed out that malcolm called martin an 'uncle tom' (his favorite, though, was 'house negro'). i would say even in selma, king is doing stuff that might make someone construe him sort of like that (i am not asserting that these were ultimately fair characterizations at all). but the relationship with johnson is what works in this sort of direction. many people, including maureen dowd today are for giving johnson much more credit for the whole thing, and joe califano has asserted that selma was johnson's idea. (i can only say that that appears ridiculous to me.) 

but at any rate, johnson is pictured as using king to try to prevent people like malcolm x or later militants from leading the civil rights movement. king is in and out of johnson's office, maybe also conjuring the spectre of malcolm x (the, um, 'field negro' on his own account, who wants to see massa's big white house burn). now this, even in the movie a bit (king does more or less stand there and take johnson's patronizing attitude), but surely, surely in the accounts of califano, dowd, etc, really would tend to substantiate malcolm's basic reading, and it would tend - in my opinion, at any rate - to discredit king. if califano's account is right, then i'm actually pretty comfortable with malcolm's characterizations of king, though for a white person like me to call any black person, much less king, an uncle tom, would be excruciating or insane. but if you are intent on hagiography - and everyone is, where king is concerned - i would suggest not playing this up too much. at least the movie portrays king as using johnson in a way, bringing ever-greater and finally irresistible pressure. i think this makes king much more admirable than the alternative (that johnson was using king, or telling him what to do), and i also think it is a more plausible account overall, though i have not listened to all the relevant johnson tapes or something, and though of course if we are doing history we ought to say whatever's true. 

j. edgar hoover was surveilling king in order to destroy him. bobby kennedy authorized that, but it would surprise me if johnson opposed this approach, and it would surprise me if he didn't try to make use of it to run king. but i don't think that he was running king, and i think that's obvious from what king was doing, including in selma. i think he decided to go on despite the blackmail, which is how the film portrays it. but surely this whole thing makes the portrait of johnson as king's champion or whatever implausible. i guess the claim is that hoover was running johnson; i don't necessarily buy that, and any sort of decent pres would have shut that shit down with extreme prejudice, especially if, as these folks are claiming, he was on king's side. in my view johnson was attacking king's life and family, and trying to put him under his thumb. and in my opinion that did not succeed. johnson was capable of almost any strategem to get what he wanted, and i think blackmail was central to his amazing effectiveness as a senate leader.

and though johnson, whatever his reasons, did do a lot for civil rights, it is worth recalling his monstrousness in other dimensions: he was killing hundreds of thousands of vietnamese people for reasons that were simply incomprehensible, in a war that was unwinnable, and he invented the incident that led to the congressional authorization for extreme 'escalation'. he lied about vietnam all day every day, and he got everyone else in the american state lying about it too. i remember lyndon baines johnson, baby, and i felt the emanation of murderous evil and soul- and democracy-destroying lies, lies, lies.

i did think that the most human, and maybe the most (and even only) surprising moment in selma was the moment martin accused coretta of being 'enamored' with malcolm. but perhaps my response reflects my fascination - a little difficult for me fully to explain, maybe - with the profound contrast and connection between malcolm and martin. in my head, they embody two ways to resist vicious power, and even two ways of being in the world. for whatever reason, it seemed and seems like an existential choice to me, and i still just feel malcolm in the way a lot of people feel king: i was a little white boy who wanted to be malcolm x, and now i'm a 55-year-old white man who, left to me own immediate emotional responses, still feels that way. i think if one took the approach of attacking my right to make any judgments on this, or even to feel these connections in any authentic way, one would have a point. on the other hand it runs deep, and i can't really stop, and i guess i think that even if i am horribly wrong to be this way, i am not doing a great deal of harm to anyone. 

 

animatronic lessons

i just saw selma, and i'm going to express a negative assessment. but first, the production design is excellent; it really gives that feel of the deep south in the '60s. and it is a great and inspiring story, though a bit compromised in its inspiration by the slow or non-pace of racial justice in the decades since.

but there is perhaps too much reverence for king to make a realistic movie about him. it is hard to escape the impression that the actors were cast as look-alikes, and that in itself might make you a little suspicious; they were perhaps not chosen for the excellence of their acting. but it's hard to tell, really, because the script and direction and even make-up makes them like wax figures of king, andrew young, john lewis (that actor was a cut above, though, even if he was partly cast on the basis of the size of his nostrils), coretta scott king, hosea williams, and so on.

there are a few half-hearted attempts at humanization, but they are...insincere, i think. perfunctory. everyone talks in extremely written complete sentences: they simply emit inspiring speeches at one another all day, which does not actually constitute dialogue. they don't talk like human beings. when a tear flows down the face of a character, it's like a miraculous but hieratic crying icon of mary or something. this turns the whole movie into quite the didactic little history lesson rather than a real human drama. honestly, it's also a lesson that is taught incessantly to everyone already in every school in america, a million television shows, etc etc, a lesson you cannot have avoided on a thousand previous occasions. and i don't think that david oyelowo as king quite brings off the electrifying preaching, admittedly an extraordinarily difficult task. but truly, there is no reason to pay money to see david oyelowo deliver king's speeches, because there are recordings of the real ones.

on the other hand, i also don't think, as some have asserted, that johnson is portrayed too negatively. i'm glad they included a little malcolm x, but lord i wish they'd shown a bit of his speech in selma: they just showed other people talking about it. anyway, i wouldn't have nominated it for any academy awards except in set design, art direction, and such. 

oprah produced the thing and cast herself as annie lee cooper. she is repeatedly beaten. now, watching civil rights protesters getting beaten fills me with rage. but watching stupefyingly banal self-esteem entrepreneurs/billionaires get beaten, which was quite how i experienced those scenes: well, i don't actually straight condone it, but i wouldn't say i take absolutely no pleasure in it either. go back to inspiring us by your yoyo diets or whatever, sweetie.

here's another little problem. basically, a film about king is above criticism, expecially if you're a white person. that is a formula for making and selling bad movies. but the thing is a mega-million cash franchise produced by oprah winfrey, for god's sake. nothing anything like that can be above criticism. you can't be required to give academy awards on the grounds that someone played king or whatever it may be. just because your gigantic movie is about king doesn't mean, for example, that it couldn't have been better in many filmic or human dimensions. i sort of think a lot of people are pretending to think selma is a good movie to avoid being racists.

voices

the gender differentiation in pop country these days is sort of bizarre. the two are stylistically distinct. bro country is about the most cliched, repetitive, and formulaic moment in the whole history of the music. amazingly, maddie and tae's 'girl in a country song', attacking the whole thing, itself went to #1, and got played a million times between two of the songs it was ridiculing. meanwhile, the queen of country miranda lambert is working in a pretty traditional vein, with great songs and singing, and there's a wave: ashley monroe, kacey musgraves, brandy clark, and a number of others whose work is personal, original, and traditional all at once. believe it or not i think one of the reasons that country has been dominated for the last year or so by the bros is just that a lot of these female people were between records: just a kind of coincidence.

on the other hand, bro country has made me a bit desperate for something listenable. so i'd like to draw your attention to three fairly-veteran performers whose work is too trad for the formula, but who also have had some commercial moments and could have more in the inevitable traditionalist retrenchment to come.

one of these is josh turner. he's been around awhile, and charted some singles. he's got a great, very low, country voice that is the opposite of, you know, david nail or deircks bentley, calling to mind randy travis (and in general, the way i think about these guys is as revivalists of the late-80s/early 90s revival). also he's fundamentally wholesome: he likes to sing about monogamy instead of jack daniel's and ass. maybe you think that's doofy, but i am mightily tired of substance abuse and random sex. sometimes it's hard to tell the fun from the degradation and death.

 

 

[that one's for jane irish.]

remarkably, a few years ago, turner charted with a straight-up gospel song, 'long black train'.

alright let's try dean brody, a guy from canada who had a bit of a nashville run, and then got extruded, possibly as insufficiently bro. what a lovely singer and songwriter, though. at another moment, his work would be extremely commercial. but his last couple of canadian albums aren't even on itunes.

 

 

my actual favorite in this little group, though, is billy yates. he has an absolutely classic country voice (keith whitley is the reference). he is a magnificent songwriter (remember george jones' 'choices'?). his career arc is a little ridiculous: some hits as a writer, and 'big in europe'. he ought to be an opry star and an aesthetic spearhead and a beloved american icon.

he's got a great new album (these old walls), and i'd like to embed the title cut and 'just a scratch', but they're not even up on youtube.

 

 

The crashing sound of indifference and nostalgia

Kim Foley

Lets all drink to the death of a clown...

Sad news -- Kim Fowley passed away. Now he was old, and had been fighting cancer for about three years but he was still doing his show on the Underground Garage and making appearances and such as well as running a producers workshop down in LA until the end. The guy who brought us "They're Coming to Take US Away" and managed the Runaways and supposedly invented the holding up lighters at concerts crap while working with the Plastic Ono Band was an interesting guy. I don't think he really meant any harm, and he did produce some very interesting stuff.

Of course, at his drug addled worst, he was a raging, self-centered asshole, I suppose. He also appears to have been a nice guy who when sober admitted to having been a less than stellar human being. He made peace with people he'd hurt -- and in fairness, had hurt him back -- got married a couple of months ago to his much beloved girlfriend, and was funny as hell as well as a perceptive commentator on Steven Van Zandt's station on Sirrius XM. He didn't take himself too seriously, and didn't take rock and roll too seriously, while at the same time taking the position that it did change lives and culture in ways that no one expected.

It changed mine. And, he made me laugh...and think. Laughing and wincing and shaking my head simultaneously.

 

an ahistory of aniconism

here's a pretty good example of the pc approach to history, where whatever would serve your argument or have (according to you) positive social results is asserted as true, no matter how obviously false it may be. the piece asserts that images of muhammad were not banned until 2001, when the taliban banned them. then it describes various islamic regions and moments in which the prophet was depicted. but then he really does have to deal with the fact that there are few if any known images from the arabian peninsula, certainly the origin and center of the islamic world. his explanation is that they had the arabic language. now i think actually you have to grapple with the whole history of restrictions and prohibitions on images in the monotheistic religions: start with the golden calf story in hebrew bible. the general association of images of divine or saintly figures with idolatry runs very strongly - though of course not uniformly - through judaism, islam, and protestant christianity. really it sounds like there has been no or little censorship or destruction of images in the history of islam. um. and the language thing is the worst argument i ever heard: just the sort of thing you try not to examine because if true it would help your case. let's see: americans and french people and chinese people and hindu people and ancient greek people have had both extremely rich languages and a non-stop barrage of images. often these work in concert, and so on. 

back at it

history is not a narrative of progress. really i think very many people believe that it is: 'progressives', in short, still working on that 19th-century hegelian-type model. anyway, think about what a believer in progress - setting out the alleged direction of history in 1850, or 1900, or 1950 - would make of a sort of worldwide religious war, unfolding in the 2000s. islam is as much an issue now as in the 13th century. but this is not the 13th century, and occasionally people express their outrage by saying that islamists or whatever it may be want to take us back to some earlier period. all of that is complete confusion, for there is no going forward or backward, for history is not progressive.

it is true that the current outbreak of islamist terrorism and militarism is not exclusivly due to religious factors. it is bound up with world economic structures, the still-unspooling history of colonialism, immigration patterns, and so on. but i take seriously the account of the people performing the murders of journalists or schoolchildren, their own statements about their motivations. i try to do that with everyone, really: take them seriously as giving an account of their own experience. they believe themselves to be doing what their religion demands. 

before people even say anything else, they say that only a small aberrant minority of muslims take the truly depraved approach that we are seeing right now in many parts of the world - oh, setting off girlbombs, e.g. ok. right. and yet it is not just a few dozen people in al qaeda cells, is it? there is territorial expansion: syria and iraq, of course, but similar and possibly-allied forces control significant geographical areas in libya, yemen, and nigeria. some groups sport air forces, oil fields, ministries of information, banking systems. sooooo, we might want to worry a little less about the narrative and how people's sensitivities are being affected and a little more about the actual situations on the ground, which really can unfold or are unfolding from spree killings into genocides.

as to any very simple answer to the question of whether islam endorses violence: it is too simple by far. right now the fad is to point out that the koran imposes no penalty for blashpemy, or even for prophet-mocking cartoons. but a religion isn't just a single text or scripture, is it? it's a history of teachings, institutions, actions. if you wanted to describe 'the teachings of the christian religion', you'd have to talk about scripture, but also, say, augustine, aquinas, luther, calvin, etc: christianity here and there as interpreted in that or that cultural context, this or that theological tendency; this strand or that strand and so on. so, it is and it is not a violent religion. certainly, its history is not absolutely pacifist in all cases. what is the history of censorship and prohibition on images and its enforcement in islam, for example? i'm sorry, but a verse from the koran is only a start; there is such a history.

How to kill an afternoon when you really don't want to...

Most of my writing appears over on Conspiracys are US.com, and I occasionally feel badly about that. When I recently read a bit about how the Je Suis Charlie thing was really a Mosad false flag operation to punish France for voting for Palestinian statehood in the General Assembly, I felt like sending the managing editor some new and improved tinfoil. However, I didn't. I like writing for and with nutcases; it appeals to my sense of the right of free expression. And, my bizarre background and sense of humor, of course. 

But sometimes thing just overload you. We spend so much time in today's world being bitchslapped by reality and media and what the fuck is that, that we end up confused, and disoriented, So, when I had nothing better to do, except read the comics on line which I have still to get to, I wrote this and out it up over at Veterans Today where the editorix will toss it up later; and over at the Defeatists. 

And in thanks to Crispin for letting me share a better class of wingnuts, here's some British Blues by someone who looks a lot better than Jeff Beck or John Mayall, Joanne Shaw Taylor. 

 

american masters

dan dennett may be better on free will, but i'm better on country music, so it's a wash. here's something. i think that the best of the generation of country artists that emerged in the late 80s and early 90s are getting to be, and should be, venerated as among the greatest artists that the music has produced, and they are living treasures, american masters, comparable to george jones, johnny cash, loretta lynn, dolly parton, merle haggard. i might mention patty loveless, vince gill, alan jackson, randy travis, clint black, lorrie morgan, doug stone, pam tillis, dwight yoakam.

 

 

 

 

 

speaking of free will, here is the freedom chunk of entanglements, half or so of the ethics chapter of my magnum opusy thing. it does show the range of tones, or good portion of it, in the book, from a phenomenological and first-person account  to riffing about louis armstrong to a fairly precise analytic-style argument that free will is not necessary for moral responsibility (an analogue in ethics to my view, also re-argued in entanglements, that justification is not necessary for knowledge). i wouldn't say i try to squarely solve the problem of whether we have free will; i'm trying to re-enrich it. i think an beautifully replete question has been nibbled away to nothing by analytic philosophers.