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One of the projects Crispin and I have been putting off until he's in the witness protection program here in California is our own musical-poetical-satirical-philosophical unified field theory. Fuck Einstein, our's will work. Here's my latest stab at it from over at Veterans News Now or where ever they're putting my stuff...
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/09/28/more-mid-week-blues/
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sorry for slow blogging. it's partly because i'm writing quite a bit for splice today and have finally acclimated to twitter (@crispinsartwell). so, i should have a debate piece tomorrow morning in splice, and i may tweet it some live as well.
twitter highlights: i am concerned about my likability numbers. and i don't think that colin powell's use of 'dicking' to mean 'fucking' or 'balling' is idiomatic. it's symptomatic of the terrible decline in our public discourse.
common wisdom has it that trump has closed in the polls because he's shown more 'message discipline.' that's false in multiple dimensions, and yet they keep saying it.
i live in south-central pa; it would be incomprehensible for someone to be for clinton out here; it's just assumed as a bottom-line obvious shared conversational assumption that you hatehate hillary. there ain't a clinton sign for twenty miles in any direction. a couple little gary johnson things have bloomed, though.
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New Vets News Network Today Post. -- Lots of music ranging from a Ani di Franco Cover of Woodie Guthrie to Steve Earle and Dukes and Duchesses doing Hillbilly Highway to Gary Allan's remaster Juarez...to the horns of Hattin and the palisade at the Alamo...
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spliced, urging us all to let trump yap. also, i don't see anything particularly wrong with jr's skittle remark. also that was surprising how trump reacted to the shooting in tulsa. p.s., this is what it's come to; charles blow in an 'op-ed column': "This election is quite literally about the future, all of our and our children’s and their children’s futures." let me be clear: the future quite literally hasn't happened yet
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truly, this campaign is kind of horrible. instantly, both candidates implicitly blame the other for the nyc bombs. hillary: "his rhetoric is lending aid and comfort to our opponents": the language of treason. constantly, clinton herself is calling trump a crazy racist demagogue. meanwhile he calls her a criminal and says that her weakness is responsible for more attacks, etc. we've never reached this level of vituperation, and in some dimensions the clinton campaign has opened it beyond trump's fairly casual insults. while really working her people toward hysteria, clinton is trying to portray herself as the voice of reason? i think it actually makes for a bit of an explosive atmosphere; i'd be a bit worried about some violence coming from either direction.
there's too long still to go, for one thing. i don't think the rhetoric can sustain this high a pitch. it's like something's gotta give.
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Congratulations Crispin. Truth, justice and the American way triumph...understand you can say whatever you want to now about whatever you want to say, so long as it is in classic Greek with stones in your mouth. Way to go...
I'm not sure if I'm channeling Louis Ferdinand Celine or Lewis Black in this latest post for Veterans News Service, but I'm providing it for your consideration. Warning, it contains inappropriate juxtaposition of Yeats and Donald Trump.
As Guy Clark wrote in The South Coast of Texas, “Living on the edge of the waters of the world calls for the dignity of whooping cranes and the likes of Gilbert Roland.” Instead, we’re offered the mortgage broker who lost his license and runs Hispanics for Trump and his concerns about Taco Trucks, and pigeons. (I feel compelled to state almost unequivocally, that there is no truth to the assertion that the meat in Trump Towers Chicken Taco Salad is a mix of pigeon and sea gull, any more than the beef taco is rat.)
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well yes, i am returning to dickinson college, having reached an amicable agreement with the institution. i'm on sabbatical for the small semester, teaching in the spring. for people who supported me in various ways through this hard time, i so much appreciate it. it's how i got through.
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We've always been a nation of barkers, self-promoters, embezzlers, yappers, scandal-ridden celebrities, Ponzi schemers, flamboyant junkies, throat-slitters, preachers of the prosperity gospel, liars, absconders, and bloated corpses. Finally, we have a politics worthy of our aspirations as a people.
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one thing i would credit to prince buster: invention of the human beat box.
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i'm up on splice, arguing again that compulsory education is unconscionable. indeed, in my view 'compulsory eduction' is a contradictio in adjecto. if pressed i will half-assedly unfold the voluntaristic alternative. really i think families and children need to band together to educate one another and themselves: we've got to stop conscripting children into authoritarian institutions. if your response to this is now to picture ghetto black folks or rural trailer trash and their dysfunctional cultures, which you propose to ameliorate via removing the children from these homes: then you are what i'm attacking. and just first off: we've been at it a hundred years, and has the effect been to ameliorate these cultures by your own standards or has it not been? and second: you know neither what people do know nor what they need to know. any second now there'll be universal pre-k.
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honestly i have been in a bit of an election hiatus in my head; a man can take only so much. back now.
morning joe essentially did three hours of hyper-redundant trump-bashing this morning. it's hard to stay hysterical for months on end, and the new york times and washpost opinion pages etc are going to have to regain their composure (actually the times has backed off the last few days a bit). continuous outrage, expressed over and over in the same sentences, is boring, which is the problem with it as television or newspapering. one particularly idiotic chunk of tizzy: that pertaining to generals being 'reduced to rubble.' nice turn of phrase, actually. uninterpretable by television hosts. it's just non-stop arbitrary or meaningless speech prohibitions and their violation. now anything that is not automatism is insane or incomprehensible.
on the other hand this russia thing is getting awfully strange. but it makes sense for trump to praise putin: not as a prince among men but as a strong-ass nationalist leader, almost a role model, though that's not to say ally. well, that's not good either. but the idea is almost that it takes a putin to stand up to a putin. it's above all the bureaucratic-safe responses of public figures that trump despises, and indeed hillary bureaucratese/technocracy is incompatible with any sort of leadership. one thing he does is feed this into the gender machine: obama is weak and effeminate in comparison with...putin.
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If Hume awakened Kant from his doctrinal slumbers, perhaps this can rescue country western music from it lyrical and musical doldrums.
Miranda Lambert is an artist who sits on the cusp of my consciousness -- I listen to her stuff but don't stockpile it. May have to change my approach...This is about as bleak as beauty can be. The video conception is amazing, and the beginning and the climax are parallel. Part cinema noir, part medieval morality play, but fascinating musically and lyrically. She seems to break down the walls of country music's current lyrical malaise in a way that reminds me of Marianne Faithful's comeback...except she still has that marvelous voice where Marianne had in effect re-invented herself as an artist. I have no idea why she has yet to be cast in a Coen Brothers film, in a True Detective or Fargo...
From the opening lyrics, it caught me up...
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i'm hanging out in extremely underrated southern illinois, with musicians and philosophers. staying with the astonishing intellect/bass player randy auxier, who meanwhile is blogging pretty damn profoundly about six names of beauty.
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