cheese it, the cops!

the astonishing henry thoreau, from 'a plea for captain john brown':

This event [the raid at Harper's Ferry] advertises me that there is such a fact as death,--the possibility of a man's dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to die you must first have lived. I don't believe in the hearses, and palls, and funerals that they have had. There was no death in the case, because there had been no life; they merely rotted or sloughed off, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along. No temple's veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere. Let the dead bury their dead. The best of them fairly ran down like a clock. Franklin,--Washington,--they were let off without dying; they were merely missing one day. I hear a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got life enough in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began. Do you think that you are going to die, sir? No! there's no hope of you. You haven't got your lesson yet. You've got to stay after school. We make a needless ado about capital punishment,--taking lives, when there is no life to take. Memento mori! We don't understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. We've interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense; we've wholly forgotten how to die.

But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when to end.

deep deep shit

Seriously, I'd like to know who likes Bruce Nauman's work and why, or who actually gets something out of it and what. He's the latest inductee in the suckme Hall of Fame! joining the likes of John Ashbery, Stephen Hawking, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and David Bowie.

my man brad paisley

no one who listens to country music can have missed brad paisley, but i'm afraid i didn't focus adequately. i'm just now listening through the whole body of work: ten albums or so, of remarkably consistent excellence. what a fine singer and what a great songwriter: he has added wonderful and hilarious and traditional and moving songs to the permanent country repertoire, if you ask me. i swear if you were making your list - hank, george, johnny, conway, alan jackson, randy travis, etc - and you fetched up on paisley (going on to stapleton, maybe), that would be perfectly sensible. and you can believe me or not, but he is one of the most wildly excellent guitar players who has ever played in any genre. almost uniquely among actual country stars, he did an album of instrumentals ("play," 2008). he can play anything, and even on a hit country song he might roll through some jazz riffs, or hit the blues nice and hard and juicy, as it were. right he can play unbelievably fast, but it's always coherent, smart as shit too. i mean try a low-key apparent throwaway like this:

 

 

on the other hand try this tribute to dick dale:

 

here are a couple of favorites, drawn from this great big songbag.

 

this is from his fine recent album love and war.

 

there are really very many classic original traditional country songs.

 

then there's this. he's definitely a performer and a charmer, and very hilarious on gender ("you need a man around here"). enjoy that, but don't let it distract you from the surpassing musical excellence.

 

Field of Skulls...think this outlaw bit has done got out of hand?

 

New piece posted over at Veterans News Now. Looking at some of the recent local attacks and nightmares spread by basic idiocy.   

As usual, some music, although this illustration sums up well the way I'm feeling about the whole mess...Did start with something by Moby, this time. 

This ain't Moby, bro....

inappropriation

 

after my stint in re-education camp - for which i am really grateful to my jailers - i have come to realize that cultural appropriation is worse than evil: it is inappropriate. now i see that my cornrows were straight-up racial violence, like a hail of bullets or a thorough batoning. my forced, televised confession was completely sincere, and i have made an important resolution. from now on, everything i do will be pure white, white as a diaper, caucasian as a motherfucker (wait did i get that from hip hop)? because of my anti-racism, and from right now until my impending decline into dementia, it's going to be all white all the time: white clothes, white slang, white gestures, white hairstyle, white values, white neighborhood, white music, white walk (i am so so sorry about the pimpstrut), and so on. man, it is going to be all calvin klein, golf, lawrence welk, and dick-cheney-style politics from now on. i will not permit anything even vaguely black, brown, yellow, red, or chartreuse to enter into my behavioral repertoire or my geographical area in any way whatever, because that is what is really hurting black folks. if you will join with us in our collective program for white purity, together we will overcome this nightmare of racial oppression.

truth and power

here's what people mean when they start howling that we're in a post-truth era, reality is melting, etc. people like us (='the elites') have lost epistemic control over the peasants' minds. well they never had it, really, but they definitely believe that they should have control over what you believe. why it's a crisis now is because some of the people whose minds they've lost control of are now exercising political power. it's your little academic/bureaucratic/technocratic world, extreme in its self-love. the question of how to fix it, stop the conspiracy theories, quiet kellyanne down, etc is the same question as the question of how we can can reassert control over your beliefs and hence your behavior. well, it's going to be all 'gatekeepers': censorship, silencing of views divergent to whatever we seem to believe at the moment. 'what can we do about post-truth?' = 'how can we silence our opponents?' one of the most breathtaking things about the whole approach is that, though nothing could be more obvious than what they're doing and why, they have no idea about themselves that they are the sort of people who want to silence and disqualify people. 

my philosophy is finished!?

the video series on entanglements: a system of philosophy is complete at 9 installments.

here's the new/last one, on political philosophy.

 

oaxaca in a wyeth

I'm in the Wall Street Journal today, writing again about immigration in rural PA.

[that's my house]

here is a really good piece on immigration in this area from the voice of america.

 

entangled 8: aesthetics

i got rained out at the end.

 

 

this week's splice: are you sure you're not being radicalized by 'social media'? 

necessity and spontaneity: entanglements 7

 

 

the nature of value (entanglements 6)