cheese it, the cops!

willy wonka's proof that there are objects external to the mind

 

From G.E. Moore's 'Proof of an External World':

Consider any kind of thing, such that anything of that kind, if there is anything of it, must be 'to be met with in space': e.g. consider the kind 'soap-bubble.' If I say of anything which I am perceiving, 'That is a soap-bubble', I am, it seems to me, certainly implying that there would be no contradiction in asserting that it existed before I perceived it and that it will continue to exist, even if I cease to perceive it. This seems to me to be part of what is meant by saying that it is a real soap-bubble, as distinguished, for instance, from an hallucination of a soap-bubble. Of course, it by no means follows, that if it really is a soap-bubble, it did in fact exist before I perceived it or will continue to exist after I perceive it: soap-bubbles are an example of a kind of 'physical object' and 'thing to be met with in space,' in the case of which it is notorious that particular specimens of the kind often do exist only so long as they are perceived by a particular person. But a thing which I perceive would not be a soap-bubble unless its existence at any given time were logically independent of my perception of it at that time; unless, that is to say, from the proposition, with regard to a particular time, that it existed at that time, it never follows that I perceived it at that time. . . . That is to say, from the proposition with regard to anything which I am perceiving that it is a soap-bubble, there follows the proposition that it is external to my mind. But if, when I say that anything which I perceive is a soap-bubble, I am implying that it is external to my mind, I am, I think, certainly also implying that it is also external to all other minds. . . . I think, therefore, that from any proposition of the form "There's a soap-bubble!' there really does follow the proposition 'There's an external object!' 'There's an object external to all our minds!' (144-45)

A sociopath in the White House can ruin your whole day -- Krugman

When the opportunity arises to link Donald Trump with Macus Antoninus, Damian Lewis, Tom Morello, Ani de Franco, Woodie Guthrie and Shakespeare, how can you expect me to resist?
And, you get to see another shoot of Big Donnie's Doppelganger, Dickie Small Hands. How could anyone resist?

I don't really understand why we haven't heard in detail what he intends to do about it when elected?

spliced: perhaps the nightmare of race in america is just getting started. or: this is how the civil rights movement failed.

new dimensions of political theory

i do think that my best book (well, until entanglements) is political aesthetics. here are a couple of reviews:

t.j. diffey in *mind*

paul voice in the *journal of aesthetics*

trapped

donald isn't the best spokesman for the view but american liberalism, the welfare/incarceration state, and the total domination of the black electorate by the democratic party have been disastrous for black people. also it is driven by racism in a particular form: racism that denies of itself that it exists at all. well and truly trapped this time around, but really always.

Could someone disagree with you and not be stupid, sick, manipulated, ignorant, or bribed?

i'm up on splice today, arguing that the only reason people seem to engage in political debate these days is to enhance their own self-esteem. 

meanwhile i'm blowing up twitter @CrispinSartwell with my series of underappreciated stones songs. 

 

the golden age of hip hop

 

I'm a feminist

I'm also a misogynist

spit like an arsonist

think like a novelist

and I promise if you ever hear me contradict myself

it's not a sign of the apocalypse

 

in my view hip hop had two great phases: early-to-mid '90s and early-to-mid 2000s. the genre reached its maximum commercial potency - at least in one sense - in the former period, and also its mature production styles. so, you know, dre, snoop, tupac on the west coast, the wu and rza and biggie on the east. (the reason i say 'in one sense' is that though you hear less pure hip hop now, you hear it as an element in virtually all pop music all over the world, from nashville to the cote d'ivoire.)

but when i talk about 2000-2010 as a golden age as well, you may be puzzled. i don't mean commercial hip hop, though there were also some relatively interesting artists there, like eminem or lil wayne: i mean 'underground' hip hop. that people understood hip hop to have 'sold out' and (for one thing) become totally apolitical in that period, actually helped create a whole world of non- or anti-commercial artists. they were often extremely radical politically, but also many of them had amazing flow and good-to-great production (production got a lot cheaper in that period).

so, i might mention dead prez, jedi mind tricks, 7l and esoteric, brother ali, j-live, aceyalone, anti-pop consortium, bahamadia, aesop rock, demigodz. but there were many others, and there still are. i do rate immortal technique as the best mc, ever. (eminem is his only rival to my way of thinking.) one of the great artists of the period was atmosphere (minneapolis; mc = slug; dj = ant). "scapegoat" and "god loves ugly" are two of the best songs in hip hop history, i believe. 

 

no wonder you're in love with your therapist. go to sleep my little time bomb.

and look that was not that long ago, and a lot of these people were quite young, and many are still recording, along with a couple of cohorts that they influenced. i want to point out that atmosphere sounds as good or better than ever on fishing blues. slug was never a verbal gymnast like wayne or tech; he was always a killer writer with a cool and accessible voice. he's writing great right now.

i think a number of these artists should have the status of american masters at this point, and atmosphere is just as good and relevant now as they were a decade ago. i also think the beats have steadily improved, and the underlying tracks are actually pretty various; i'm crediting ant with a lot of the excellence of fishing blues. "won't look back" actually sounds like a pop hit, but there are many cool elements and styles throughout.

 

one good thing you have to live with: hip hop was a completely inter or multi-racial genre by 00s, like jazz in the 30s and 40s, or blues in the 60s and 70s. call it cultural appropriation if you like; i call it music.

 

who will keep us unsafe?

this renews my faith in humanity. before you go around authorizing people to keep everyone else under surveillance, drone-strike people, and so on, you'd better keep in mind that you are trusting this to idiots, really. the security state likes to portray itself as implacable, efficient, and so on. seems like folks like that wouldn't be able to convince you after twenty colossal blunders a week, but people want to believe i guess. 

you don't want your government creating cyber-weapons, for one thing, any more than you want them creating new plagues (which no doubt they've been working on for decades), because they and you may end up being the victims. 

more melody maker

after the inxs piece, i was rummaging around in my old clips. i can't seem to find the review of the inxs show, but i found a buttload of other stuff, including the interview with cyndi lauper. the album by her great baby-band blue angel (1980) - which i obsessively praised when i was talking to her, thus getting on her good side - is finally up on itunes etc. i say this album represents one of the greatest vocal performances in pop music history. no one ever sang like that.

 

actually as far as i can tell, cyndi only has a good side.

this is my review from the old washington evening star:

the star gave me my first shot as a music critic; i was working there as a copy boy. my daddy was a reporter there back in the '50s and early '60s. also i delivered the thing for what seemed like many years; i still remember my stack of papers floating away down nevada ave in hurricane agnes. the star died just a few months after this piece appeared.

 

this is my boy vince, recently relocated to brooklyn, on production.

 

 

spliced

partying inxs: paris, 1984

 

me in a bedsit in chiswick, 1983. shirt by the dc blues band the nighthawks.

 

 

 

 

Inspired by Crispin

 

I continue to blame Crispin for my writing just about anywhere. He invited me to share this space occasionally, and while we disagree about a lot of stuff, we're kind of brothers in some ways. This morning his very brief piece on the probable disintegration of the Republican party and the coming realignment of politics into something a lot more coherent than what we've had since the Southern Strategy took over the Rs and then the Democrats became less elitist and more mainstream while losing a lot of the mainstream Democrats. 

I've been thinking and playing around with writing about class in America as a determining factor for a while. Reagan's big tent has turned into a bunch of conflicting smaller tents all having a revival at the same time. So, over at my new home on Veterans News Now, I wrote this. 

I hope to hear soon that Crispin's exile of conscience has ended and he's back at Dickinson or maybe even someplace a lot better and more welcoming to him. He seems to be dealing with whatever the hell he's doing -- car theft, card sharking, publishing -- quite well. An actual job with a pay check can really fuck up your life. 

 

Related articles

still doing time

it doesn't actually bother me that trump yaps the way he does, though i've seen plenty at this point. but i do think the russia connection might should prove fatal. it needs a hook in trump, but the whole thing is disturbing.

things fall athwart

obviously, i am enthusiastic about the disintegration of the republican party, unless it leads to one-party socialist state. but the 'conservative' coalition or 'the right' never made any sense at all. is 'conservatism' isolationist or interventionist, for example, laissez-faire or evangelical christian? watch these parties vilify each other all day, but how far apart were obama and romney policywise by november 2012? so i think if there are massive 'mainstream' and security state republican defections to hillary, that is ideologically sensible, even as a permanent realignnment. meanwhille you have tea-party nationalists (that's really trump's crowd), and libertarian or 'constitutional' types, like paul or cruz on their good days. they should just split off permanently in different directions. but then the lindsey graham/hillary clinton party is going to have take a bunch of defections to the left, i would think, unless all lefties are going to vote for war and oligarchy.

quartz range

collected in the latimore creek. about 8" lefft to right, 4" deep, 3" tall.

waterway

our reversed meritocracy

 this is just pathetic, but it's also characteristic of a whole demographic's response to trump. watch brooks really really struggle to formulate anything, then offer a 'diagnosis' in an deeply serious way: 'it's a condition.' what is the condition? it's following from one concept to another, or something. these people are showing themselves to be incredibly, literally stupid: they can't follow sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, or any sort of verbal play. they have no hermeneutic ability: they can't interpret words. they are our 'elite': they've been linguistically trained and anything that isn't a mechanical repetition of cliches and catch-phrases seems literally insane. tone of voice and triple entendres are not standardized-testable, hence they do not exist. our elites are unbelievably dull, and i think we live in an upside-down meritocracy.

 

going wild

the guardian, among others, is insisting on interpreting trump's banter as a threat of assassination. but meanwhile this is a hell of a story: assange hints that murdered dnc staffer was the source of the leaks. if so, obviously the murder is an issue, though who knows? and also, if he was the leaker, what was all this crap about the russians? definitely taking on that scandal/house of cards flavor. the first thing one would wonder is whether seth rich was a sanders supporter: that would be motivation for the leak. obviously, all is speculation at this point, but it does have that might-blow-sky-high smell right now. this could be the wildest presidential campaign in us history.

binge-read why they suck

handcrafted and curated for you, using inorganic ingredients sourced exclusively from local bile producers. warning: not cruelty-free.

The methodological treatise, or Tractatus Sucko-Philosophicus: The Science of Suckology.

Why They Suck: Picasso

 

 

 

sugar mountain

 

 

massive quartz peak with h2o system and caverns. 8 inches wide. collected in latimore township, pa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

terrain stone 2

 

collected at seneca lake, ny. this is some version of suiseki.

campaign consultant

were i advising donald trump, i wouldn't be hitting him on 'message discipline,' etc. what i'd say is: show the famous charmer, the benevolent patriarch, and keep the funny. it's gotten too dark moodwise. like go all universal love all of a sudden: i love all god's children! black white and brown, gay straight male female and other, etc. i want a country and a world that works for us all. (and yes, we will build an incredible wall.) i love crooked hillary clinton, i really do! a beautiful person; she's literally an incredible person. i am praying for her immortal soul, and especially for bill's. then smirk. but then smile. invite hillary to dinner.

for real?

say you are a recovering bernista who has tumbled into the tub of goo known as clinton. how do you feel about the fact that all former cia directors agree on hillary? or perhaps you have a clash shirt and read chomsky or something. really, seriously, you're thinking about voting for hillary clinton? oops iraq war, patriot act, drones, bomb libya, wall street, no child's behind left, mass incarceration?

caitlyn smith and crystal yates

there are definitely some excellent young female country singers emerging. last year i praised people like maren morris, cam, hailey witters, and caroline spence. caitlyn smith's ep 'starfire' is more or less in the same vein. of them all, she might be the singiest: pretty stunning range and power. she reminds me of someone who i think of as one of the all-time female pop vocalists: cyndi lauper. it's kind of in a contemporary soul vein, not that far from morris. both, as also the very fine witters, have this love-gospel thing going, which is more or less the origin of soul music in the first place.

 

i definitely like the bluesiness of these artists. my only criticism of 'starfire' would be that the instrumental tracks are a bit inert; i would have given her a somewhat more stripped-down frame. but she sounds great. here she is from a few years back:

 

 

 

another excellent recent ep is crystal yates's 'the other side.' it's darker in tone: very dark indeed. but the smoky, swampy vibe is compelling.

 

 

 

yin-yang on splice today

the complement to my piece on hillary and gender: trump the dickhead. 

We haven't seen a man cockstrut like that on the national political stage since women got the vote, or since Teddy Roosevelt hunted big game and waved around his big stick.

my stuff on hillary clinton and gender is a piece on splice today.

unanimous

the response to trump on the khans is universal condemnation. and it takes this form: you can't say that! you can't say that. you can't say that. what people don't understand is that for let's say a third of the country the fact that someone says what 'can't' be said according to all schoolmarms, left and right, is itself a qualification. the pall of boring repetitiveness, universally agreed-on formulae; the ban on a million locutions and ideas, the prohibition on talking like a human being in public, is an actual problem.

now each thing that trump does along these lines is a 'turning point,' the moment it went too far. not yet, i think! the ny times columnar staff is working itself up into a unanimous tizzy, day after day; it will prove hard to sustain.  but the russia connection could end up being fatal. on the other hand, i think a fund-raising scandal could vitiate clinton at any time; i would look to come through terry mcauliffe, to take one angle.