y'all have got to check out this hilarious parody of david bowie. with extreme precision it shows everything that was ever wrong: the tuneless dreck; the preening and self-obsession; the unmeaning lyrics; the ridiculous outfits; the cheesy personae; the basic inability to sing; the yawning void at the heart of his values and his art: it's all there and more. the dude even sort of looks like bowie. a devastating takedown.
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the kennedy thing, i have to say, is amazing. yesterday i was listening to another npr show of ecstatic tribute to a great man. so what were his main accomplishments?, asked the interviewer. um, well, the bay of pigs wasn't all his fault: that was one accomplishment. he really understood civil rights deep inside, even though his record on that was...mixed. really he started the vietnam war. but one of his accomplisments was that if he'd lived, he supposedly would have stopped it. ok ok, moonshot and peace corps.
anyway, it soons turns uber-woolly: he was so significant because he was so inspiring to a whole generation. what was supposedly great about kennedy was his charisma, and everyone goes there very quickly: he accomplished charisma. now, in my opinion, either charisma is a supernatural hypnotize-you-at-a-distance-of-miles super-power, or it only means sexiness. i think sexiness was kennedy's real policy accomplishment. probably, one should reflect on who one is following around taking inspiration from, and why. what we're really nostalgic for is our masochistic ecstasy: find a beautiful man and believe whatever he tells you to believe. now, fortunately in the case of kennedy, there were no very definite ideas coming out of that perfect mouth, because when there are definite ideas, this charisma crap is merely dangerous.
many people pride themselves on the rationality of their political approach. where does their whole body's desire to be bathed in charisma fit in with that?
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The class warfare issue: my working theory is that wealthy individuals bought themselves a radical right party, believing — correctly — that it would cut their taxes and remove regulations, but failed to realize that eventually the craziness would take on a life of its own, and that the monster they created would turn on its creators as well as the little people. And nobody knows how it ends. --Paul Krugman
I seldom agree with Congressman Pete King (Republican, County Antrim...err, New York) about much of anything. Certainly, we both have the Irish ability to prevaricate which enables him to see a difference between the Provisional IRA and al Qaeda or Hamas that really doesn't exist. Seriously, Franz Fanon could have written about Falls Road as opposed to Algeria, and same story. So, King's advocacy for gunrunners and money launderers for Green Power while absolute condemnation of anything pro-Palestinian or prop-Arab is interesting. Since I stopped drinking 23 years ago, it's harder for me to do that. I just run out of patience with my own bullshit.
Fortunately for the Republicans, John Bohener hasn't quit drinking. So he's able to babble insanely and push a legislative and economic agenda he doesn't believe in for a bunch of clowns he probably despises surrounded by a team he doesn't trust and NOT HAVE HIS HEAD EXPLODE! Fortunate for the Republican party in the short term, but bad for the country and the Republican party in the long run. But, with Guinness and Bushmills as opposed to Chardonnay comes clarity and Pete King has long since reached the point of cognitive dissonance and his constituents are probably telling him to knock off the crap and get something done. No Republican seat in downstate is a safe seat; to be successful, you have to understand people and compromise and the art of getting things done. So Pete King has a pretty good tether to earth and reality. Louis Gomert and Michelle Bachmann, not so much. So, he finds himself in something like the position of Lot in Sodom, trying to find a few more just men in the Republican Caucus. Good luck with that:
“We can’t be going off on these false missions that Ted Cruz wants us to go on,” King continued. “The issues are too important. They’re too serious, they require real conservative solutions, not cheap headline-hunting schemes.”
If you've been reading my rantings for any period longer than, well, this you know that I am a skeptic about most things but a firm believer that the rich and hyper-rich who are paying attention have pretty consciously been engaging in class warfare for decades. Paul Krugman's and Ezra Klein's analysis is spot on in this case. The question really is how'd we get here...and I suggest listening to The Talking Head's for the ontological answer. Or, Google the Senate Chaplain's Barry Black's opening prayer yesterday. As Alex Rogers commented at Swampland, Time Magazine's Washington Blog,
For some, at least, the only thing left to do was pray. “Eternal God, our ever present help in trouble, as our nation stumbles toward a seemingly unavoidable government shutdown, keep our lawmakers from sowing to the wind, thereby risking reaping the whirlwind,” prayed the Senate chaplain Barry C. Black on the floor before the vote. “Remember that all that is necessary for unintended catastrophic consequences is for good people to do nothing.”
Well, they certainly didn't do nothing. Rather, they kept doing the same thing, and frankly, it's hard to pick out the most egregious, disingenuous piece of bullshit spewed by the Republican conference. I particularly like the idea that the President wasn't willing to negotiate. WE'RE IN THIS MESS BECAUSE THE PRESIDENT REFUSED TO ACCEPT THAT THE REPUBLICANS IN THE HOUSE AND SENATE WERE INCAPABLE OF NEGOTIATING IN GOOD FAITH. If you have the patience for it, review the legislative history of the Affordable Care Act and the various budget issues over the last couple of years. I think in Barack Obama we are looking at the second coming not of Abraham Lincoln but of Woodrow Wilson. He's a reasonable man dealing with irrational people who are less interested in doing what's right for the country than in avoiding their "Base's" anger and primary action. Absurd. Wilson's ultimate failure was due to his inability to realize that some people won't see reason; Obama's history is yet to be inscribed, but I suspect that he'll have a similar fate.
I particularly like the R's decision to strip themselves and the Executive's employees of health insurance in supposed solidarity with what the American people are going through...despite the fact that there's a huge difference between the situation of the folks affected by the insurance coverage of the Affordable Care Act and the people who work for the Executive and Congressional Branches of Government. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, doesn't really have anything to do with the members of Congress or their staff...They Already Have Employer Provided Health Care. This is grandstanding by plutocratic jerks and while nothing will come of it, the staff of the Republicans on the Hill should start sending out resumes now. Just what K-Street needs, more lobbyists.
I'm also enjoying the coverage of the stench of booze on both sides of the aisle; however, it seems like the Dems wait until the bill is actually passed and something is done. (It's also possible that the media is trying to be "fair and balanced" damning both sides. ) Well, now we know...for sure. Wouldn't you love to get a urine sample result from Michelle Bachmann? A breathylizer reading from Boehner?
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here's a blurb (from an ad in the times literary supplement).
George Minkoff is one of the bravest men alive. He has gambled that a three-part epic novel about 17th century Colonial America - written in a language that mimics the speech of the time - can hold the attention of 21st century readers.
---Paul Auster
george minkoff could have jumped on a grenade or something, but instead he sat with a computer on his lap, typing. if only he'd chosen the grenade. i'm not too impressed with the searing honesty and transcendent courage of memoirists revealing their promiscuity, drug abuse, and low self-esteem either; it's a thin line between unbelievable physical courage and compulsive exhibitionism, and maybe after the millionth person does it in a herd the risks have been reduced. it takes supernatural courage to compose a sestina, in this day and age, or a bold new cookbook. 'like diana nyad paddling about among the sharks, hayley mchale wrote semi-sweet sex and hot chocolate without securing an advance'.
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Post Script
I also posted this at Veterans Today which was interesting when I looked at the initial comments. I recommend visiting that site and reading the comments. I responded perhaps more gently than I should but when the comments indicated that I was prostituting myself for the Jewish-Communist-Lezbo conspiracy to pollute the precious body fluids of true Christian Americans, I thought I'd take the high ground. Your comments are welcome.
I am proud, proud I say, to prostitute myself in the service of the Lezbo-Jewish-Commie-Irish-American-Sein Fein-Marching Band and Chowder Society. In fact, I think I'll have T-shirts made. See if I can get some in Staid Francais Rugby colors. (Black and Pink...mainly Pink.)
Enjoy. More to come -- http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/07/23/theocratic-totalitarianism-in-the-new-russia-or-putinesque-is-not-a-style-of-spaghetti/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCKtEJOsz9k
(This is a bribe. Complete Dylan Concert with the Band...)
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In which Crusader AXE stops by and raises some questions about whether blissful ignorance ends at the ballot box for the Dumbasses who pass laws not realizing that things like Sequestration have an impact, and the government does things with the money that they appropriate and that they control appropriations... with the help of Jackson Browne, Joan Baez and the Doobie Brothers with a quote from Phil Ochs...who would be a lot of fun if he was still here, sane, sober and not wearing a gold lame suit.
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so, most op-ed columnists, radio hosts, and so on (start, say, with charles blow or gene robinson, either of whom could and sometimes does do much better), have moved off any attempt, say, to defend their policy positions, and on to sheer attempts to manipulate people, by calling other people, even the milquetoastiest, such as obama and romney, extreme or weird. the op-ed column, for example, has fully merged with the advertising industry, via political parties and campaigns and consultants; op-ed writers are more like political consultants every day; opinion journalism is now a wing of 'strategic' 'communications'. (an egregious example is the frank rich columns from 2008; week by week they mirrored the obama campaign's talking points, very often word for word.) it has repudiated truth or sincerity as anachronistic or impossible. one pitiful feature of this approach is that it cannot persuade anyone who doesn't already agree; it is explicitly designed to alienate and irritate anyone who doesn't agree. so the only idea is to manipulate people who already agree with you to agree with you.
seriously, you know 90% of the nyt's opinion readers or so are left of center, and yet it's written as though projected at their opponents; it's apparently intended to devastate them and make them feel bad for being on the wrong side. but of course everyone knows they're not there. they're insulting or in the best case arguing against them to each other, for their own edification. well, obviously let's say right-wing radio or sectors of fox and msnbc are the same. that is a very useless exercise. or what i'd say is that every column or rant is devoted to enhancing the self-esteem of the columnist or host and his audience: you're so great, so normal, so reasonable, because you're not like them. that this embroils the whole country in an ever-growing partisan divide that is ever-more contentless is neither here nor there i guess, compared to how rational and righteous you can persuade yourself you are, even by means that with complete clarity demonstrate the opposite.
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as i have been saying (and saying, etc), this kind of jive is a tribute to the industriousness of cretins. i gave you a chance to reform; now i'm launchin. zachary goldfarb argues that obama's inaugural wasn't liberal, on the grounds that most people agree with it. one entailment, of course, is that no view that most people agree with is liberal. now to determine whether zachary goldfarb is himself the sort of person who might consider himself a liberal, or that other people might consider a liberal, would require reading more zachary goldfarb, which would be indefensible. but if zachary goldfarb is a liberal, then on his own account he ought to oppose regulating greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, support cutting spending on medicaid, oppose a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, support cuts in education and transportation funding, and oppose same-sex marriage. for the contradictory positions, goldfarb flatly asserts, are not liberal. or another obvious implication: it is conceptually impossible to have a liberal majority, you doink.
but really, you see this everywhere every day: these are examples of the fact that our political discourse is dominated by meta-level 'analysis' that has no connection to any sorts of policy, or any practical matters of any sort, whatsoever. even the mere labeling (of a policy as 'liberal' or 'conservative, much less 'extreme'), even if someone were doing it coherently, is without any practical weight in the sense of reasons to do or believe anything about the issues of the sort goldfarb suspends in it, like mini-marshmallows in a bowl of turd-flavored jello. what turns on whether more education funding is a liberal policy or not? does that help you figure out whether it's a good idea? aw just spitballing here but you might want to look at the effects and costs of the policy and stuff like that. but at any rate, it cannot possibly be a liberal policy, according to zachary goldfarb. so, if you you are, sadly, the sort of person who evaluates policies according to whether they are or are not liberal, and tends to endorse those that are, you should oppose increased education funding with every piece of your big liberal heart. and you should not engage your mind at all.
but really, merely giving ideological labels to particular policies etc is the least of it, though zachary goldfarb cannot manage to do even that with even superficial coherence. the meta-discourse consists entirely of deciding who counts and who doesn't, who's extreme and who's not, according to who is doing well in the polling this week. same sex maririage, goldfarb points out, is polling at a bare majority. the moment it got to 50.1 was the moment it ceased to be a liberal policy. should that poll have a margin of error, or oscillate slightly, then it will, day by day and hour by hour, cease to be and then become again a liberal policy. so another lovely entailment here is that you are a liberal only if you are constantly changing your mind about this. the polling isn't used to lend weight to the actual positions, as 'ultra-brite is the best-selling toothpaste in toronto' might be held vaguely to provide some reason to buy it. all it says is: most people agree with me, hence, my opponents are wrong. ponder that inference. the polling is used to develop the ridicule, and none of it has a damned thing to do with anything even in competent versions.
just an absolutely minimal standard of consistency: if polling shifts, you've got to own your own crazy, anti-american, evil extremism. when jim crow segregation or anti-communist witch hunts or screeching homophobia were polling well, then of course all of your basic ideals were the views of extremists. that, by your own account, is what you yourself were the day before yesterday, and what you'll be again the day after tomorrow, and it is on your account a fundamentally important way to evaluate how plausible or morally good an opinion is. a decent person would just say 'so what?', which is precisely what martin luther king or harvey milk did say when people said (which they did) that they were extremists.
however, zachary goldfarb does provide a stunning argument that educational funding ought to be cut, or perhaps elminated entirely. the people who are basting the world with irreason on this scale are people who emerge from our educational system with advanced degrees. (right i am speculating that zachary goldfarb has undergone this sort of training; finding out for sure would require googling 'zachary goldfarb,' which would be wrong.) we like to think of education as imparting knowledge or something, but we probably ought to regard it as a systematic, intentional corruption of possibly-promising minds. evidently, the better your training in statistics or whatever it may be, the more ignorant you become, or the more boldly you endorse glaring fallacies or contradictions. it appears that whatever institutions zachary goldfarb emerged from pursued a policy of systematic neurological damage, which is a liberal policy, because it is not polling well. certainly it suggests that the whole educational structure from which goldfarbs emerge is entirely counter-productive. folks like this would be better and wiser people, they would have more reasoned positions - or at least they might have positions - if they were, for example, illiterate.
as on all such occasions, i feel that the best revenge against zachary goldfarb would be to take his 'arguments' at face value. don't assume that he is deploying them as clever manipulative strategies. that is particularly plausible in this case because goldfarb so signally fails to be clever in any dimension. if you take goldfarb to be sincere, or to mean what he says, the piece provides a devastating reflection on himself and his like. (on the other hand, if you assume that he is not sincere - and also on the plausible assumption that he is not some sort of master of irony - that is also a devastating reflection.) we should assume until shown otherwise that folks who put these sort of items forth are sincere, or would be sincere if they had said something. treat them as being precisely (as roget, consulting his excellent thesaurus, would put it) the sort of blockheads, dimwits, dolts, dullards, dunces, ignoramuses, imbeciles, and morons who would believe that they just made a good and important argument. assume that they believe that they are saying something and assume that this is the best they can do, until they actually display competence. then see that what they're saying is both completely empty and obviously incoherent, a stunning combination.
but i'm not at all angry! like jesus, i love your stupid ass.
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so republicans today are talking about the 'far-left agenda' promulgated by obama yesterday. it's extreme, they say. it's out of the mainstream. (i leave aside that i myself regard 'extreme' and 'out of the mainstream' as compliments.) to which all sorts of people on the left, many of whom are well west of obama, are going, 'what?!' or maybe they'll say, with an amazing failure of basic reflection, that that's just factually false. well, you know i heard many people describing mitt romney as a radical right-winger with an extreme agenda. mitt fucking romney, who had absolutely no actual positions on anything.
now i have often argued that the left-right political spectrum is a ridiculously bad way to think about politics, though one i guess we're stuck with. but a good thing about it: obviously whether something is to your left or right, or way far away or very close, depends on where you are and which way you're facing. it's like you're asserting china is way far away, but you don't mean from here; 'from where' doesn't matter: china has, you assert, the intrinsic property of wayfarawayness. it's just an objective fact, even to the folks in beijing, that china is wayfaraway. sadly for this magnificent idea, 'wayfaraway' or 'extreme' pick out relations (really, more or less the same relation), and they are symmetrical relations. x is exactly as far from y as y is from x. if you are saying that someone is wayfaraway or extreme (from where you are), you are also saying equally that you are yourself extreme (from where she is). so you are, as a matter of strict logical entailment, always accusing yourself.
the overall effect of each side of our stupefyingly banal mainstream politics calling the other extreme, and (what seems impossible for quasi-rational creatures) their followers buying it or at least repeating it, is to whittle the political spectrum down to nothing. if obama and romney are extremists, then no creative or interesting ideas are possible, because any sentence that you haven't already heard 2k times is just too freaking weird. this is one reason that american political discourse is so unbelievably repetitive, and one reason neither the dems nor the reps has had a new idea in decades. obviously, the politicians and their followers don't want any. the obama and romney campaigns consisted largely of empty catch-phrases: often exactly the same ones ('balanced plan,' e.g.). anything that is not a mere cliche is dangerous and radical and weird.
this whole thing is just silly name-calling, and all it means is: he's not like us. it's like your little clique of cheerleaders or whatever, who all agree, you know, that shelley is just so weird. they experience shelley's weirdness as an objective fact. well, cheerleaders are not cheerleaders in virtue of their reasoning abilities. shelley and her goths, of course think the same about the cheerleaders, though thinking has nothing to do with either attitude. so i'd recommend that both sides just shut up with this 'extremist' crap. if you want to see actual extremist positions, read my books. this will of course entail that the democrats and republicans are extreme from my point of view (admittedly in tension with their milquetoastiness), and indeed that they are all together at the far-extreme edge of the spectrum. there i overcame your supposedly partisan divide.
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apologizing to rik in advance, i'm going to do to the velvet underground what lately i've done to springsteen and michelangelo. let me make a few methodological remarks. if you really like the music of springsteen, let's say, you might actually feel personally insulted when i leave it at 'sucks.' however, he is not you. maybe i sound angry, and in some ways universal adoration for stuff i think is bad does rather irritate me. but i just say: let's play! i'm gonna formulate my attack in the sharpest or even most extreme way i can; ok come back at me! dude i listen to country music. attack! this is more or less what art is for, so we can all yell at each other. i definitely grew up in a high fidelity world. my brothers were all complete pop music fanatics, archivists, etc. we'd spend whole nights just wrangling about the the or whatever. so i just think this kind of thing is fun.
plus, note the sort of people that i'm always emperorsnewpantsing. it's people whose gigantical hugeness actually puts them above criticism. (i should make a list: oh you know beatles, wittgenstein, dylan, picasso, michelangelo.) now i think that these sorts of reputations do not necessarily arise by genius standing the test of time, but rather by (a) stampede of the usual human sort, and (b) the fact that a big enough reputation stupefies and intimidates people; only an idiot would say ulysses was jive, so if you do not want to appear to be an idiot, you don't say it. but it would take thousands of me working for decades even to corrode the solid-gold plating slightly. so i don't see as saying what i actually think could harm anyone or anything, while it might interrupt our annoying worship of others of our own species.
to vu, certainly one of the most idolized groups in rock history. now, what exactly was good about them? maybe lou reed or nico could really sing? oops lou wasn't exacty otis redding. maybe they played the shit out of those instruments, like the yardbirds or something. not exactly. they were opposed to melody in all its pernicious forms, preferring extreme monotony, which i guess could be an aesthetic, as long as i am not required to listen to it. no one who has available a martha reeves and vandellas song and a velvet underground cover of that song could rationally put the velvets' version on the turntable.
let me put it like this: the point simply could not have been the music, which is incompetently performed and extremely boring. the point is the cultural liberation they represented, and then their influence on punk. i can see how it might be important for many kids of the era to suddenly see gayish people onstage, so i'll give them that. but in my opinion, the aspects of 60s/70s culture they represented were precisely those that made the whole social transformation of the era essentially meaningless: mindless hedonism pursued to the point of total annihilation. you thought you were helping to liberate humanity from its narrow strictures and doing something important. i say you just fucked everybody and did all the drugs because you wanted to, in a total commitment to narcissistic self-indulgence and the destruction of oneself and others. really i would say that the notion that having anal sex with everybody was going to redeem the world was probably not the most plausible political philosophy in western intellectual history, inspiring though it is. it's all heroin and lou reed taking a dump on someone during an eightball orgy (see please kill me). millions of people all over the world reacted like that was what freedom meant, though one might with as much plausibilty say it is what unfreedom means. thousands of people are dead because they thought this sounded like a good idea. i don't blame the velvet underground; i blame the bad taste of the deceased. it doesn't help that i kept having to see lou reed in the '80s and writing it up. these may have been the very worst gigs i ever witnessed; he fucking despised the audiences for adoring him, which i admit is rational. you think he's deep and changed everything. i think he's a completely uninteresting lout, and that that is exactly what every one of his records represents.
typical tuneless, meaningless, interminable crap:
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Neither Crispin nor I have devoted a lot of space to Pussy Riot. Probably a mistake on our part -- but I'm not writing much these days, and Crispin probably listened to their music, had the fillings fall out of his teeth, and torn between philosopher and rock critic, kind of punted. Musically, they are wretched...they make the Sex Pistols seem expert with their instruments and in a class with with the Three Tenors vocally by comparison with the Russian women. In fairness, Crispin caught on long before I did and put electrons to electrons to comment on Pussy Riot and punk and as usual, did it knowlegably and well. Me, well, he occasionally corrects my grammar and spelling errors. Which amuses me...
Which is not the point -- the Sex Pistols aren't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because they were good but because they were a harbringer of something else. In much the same way, Pussy Riot deserves some attention. Granted, it's not like Sakharov and Solzyenitsen formed a Russian version of the Ayett Brothers. But, they're musicians, poets and intellectuals who did something in marginal taste to make a point and are getting two years in Gulag light as a result. Gulag Light is not the Russian Version of Camp Cupcake, more the Russian Version of a supermax...
So, we could pay some attention. And, the poetry is not without some merit -- reminds me of the lyrics to some of the work of the Afghansi, the Soviet era grunts facing the Muhajadeen. Worth considering.
And, Putin is an asshole...so, why not?
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With apologies to Kafka, George C Scott and Solzhenitsyn, Crusader AXE must clarify that I do not begrudge Ann Romney her horse. I begrudge her husband the right to pretend that there's no difference betwen her service horses and the baby doll an old woman clutches in a filthy rest home...Since that sort of blindness is endemic to Romney and his party, I begrudge them their fucking existence...and now, it's personal.
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Hey, baby, Crusader AXE here. I know I owe a follow-up and I'm working away at it in between playing the guitar poorly and corresponding with my Russian ballerina stalker from the Kalashnikov factory, but somethings take precedence. Allen West has gone the full McCarthy down in Florida, claiming that he's heard that 80 members of the Democratic Congressional Delegation are card carrying communists. How quaint...while duelling pistols would have been in order back in the day these clowns long for, West should remember that Burr and Jackson won their duels. Anyway, congratulations to Crispin on winning the coveted Duns Scrotus Award for Philosophical Magic and enjoy. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that the Defeatists did endorse Gus Hall, long time chair of the American Communist Party, back in 2008. Mr. Hall was very pleased, but couldn't make the nominating convention because Satan wouldn't let him out of hell, where he'd resided since 2000. Previously, we had endorsed a ticket of Cthulhu and Crispin. I'm kind of thinking Allen West and Levi Johnson's mom for this year's ticket, but we're open as always for suggestions. I gotta say, as I get older, Roger Miller gets A. Deader and B. Far More Profound...
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Highjacking Crispin's site again with JJ Cale and Chuck Prophet, Thomas More and Thomas Hobbes, the Navajo, the Army, Paul Ryan and Tora Bora...it just doesn't get better than this. I think at times there's a better class of reader here than at the other places I babble...certainly the comments I get over at Veteran's Today give me a lot of pause. Anyway, this has been a complex piece to get my teeth into...for a variety of reasons. So, here we go...
The number of broken promises and bad judgments made over the last 30 years is incredible. Each bad judgment ends up causing more broken promises. However, the majority of the problems I see – crumbling infrastructure, lousy schools, increased long-term unemployment, mounting debt, lagging modernization, lack of a coherent energy plan and so on and on and on as well as what has happened to Native Americans, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsman, Civil Servants, Labor Unions, and on and on comes from the idea that we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for what we need to do. That is bullshit.
To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.
Thomas More
Can you say AN/PDR-27R? ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO?
Continue reading "Two of Crispin's favorite Renaissance thinkers collide...kinda, sorta, maybe" »
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One of the things that binds Crispin and me and my loose collective of malcontented malevolent dissidents, anarchists and engineers is our general aversion to the impact of the totalitarian mind on life, language and discourse. Particularly when afraid -- when they're afraid, they come unglued with weird explanations of events...Orwell could have had fun with that realization because it is when under pressure from the unknown that the basic spiritual bankruptcy and ontological void that is the totalitarian way becomes most obvious. Case in point, China.
Now, China has the potential to explode at any time. It's fairly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of Marxist thought that the victory of the Communist Party in 1948 preceded the rise of the industrial proletariat. Pretty much the way that Communism has spread everywhere, by the way, except for the countries in eastern Europe that were conquered by the Soviet Union. So, since the Party still rules the country as a vicious oligarchy, it should not be surprising that the government is terrified of anything that might blow it all up. Tibet, Western China, displaced living lives of misery in Guangzhou and Shanghai...labor unrest, the incredible imbalance between rich and middle class and middle class and poor...disease, famine, water impossible to drink, etc. etc. The place is an economic dynamo sputtering away on top of a volcano.
Which presents a fair amount of hilarity masquerading as WTF? Not unlike Rush Limbaugh confusing contraception with the adult film industry and Israeli fellow-travellers eagerly sounding the drums for a war with Iran because our last religio-WMD-"Make the world safe"-enterprises have gone so well, the Chinese government is definitely after the root cause of problems at all levels. Jezebel picked up a story from The People's Daily that really makes it obvious that fantastic explanations for things is not just a Republican plutocratic art but one shared by totalitarians univerally.
Ok, girl one loses a "remote control" to a rolling door for her home. Girl one is obviously fairly rich for China since this looks like a really bad translation of "Garage Door Opener..." although I suppose it could have been a rolling steel shutter door to a patio or perhaps a French Door with a remote to the patio but, WHAT THE HELL? The silly damn Khardasians don't have remote controlled French doors; Trump doesn't have remote controlled French doors. That makes no sense...even in China, which at some levels, times and places is really like Batman's Gotham City, on meth...So, the kid lost a garage door opener. She decides to kill herself, so she hides in a closet -- another sign that we're dealing with some level of wealth here, there's actually a closet that is not so much in use that hiding in it is possible -- until her little friend comes over. She says she's going to commit suicide, the little friend says, OK, me too and Girl 1 writes down a note saying that she's killing herself over the garage door opener and Girl 2 is doing it because, well, they're friends and it's Tuesday and there's nothing on TV and...they are planning on visiting the Qing dynansty to make a movie of the emperor -- any emperor -- and then going to outer space. Girl 1 tells her sister to "Take Care of the Parents" because it's all about the parents, and they jump in a pool and drown.
Sister? The Chinese still have their one child rule. Only the very well to do and party elites get to have multiple children. WHAT THE HELL? This passes no reality test...but, the inspiration for the suicide is ...TV shows about people travelling in time and marrying royalty.
Yeah, and comic books caused juvenile delinquency and rock and roll and teenage pregnancy and communism. Ask your great, great senile grandmother!
Imagine the dialogue in the TV movie...if you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Chinese TV show, as I did by reading subtitles while there -- you'll recognize it.
Chechette: I lost the garage door remote and have brought dishonor on myself and my family. I must kill myself!
Chongette: I am your best friend. I will also kill myself.
This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects. But Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of China Youth and Children Research Center, has a different moral in mind:
Schoolchildren are rich in curiosity but poor in judgment, so this kind of tragedy happens in every era. I have heard of children jumping from high buildings after watching an actor flying in a magic show. This kind of imitative behavior is in the nature of young children, but it's very dangerous. So we should give some sort of warning for children on TV programs.
I'm actually not sure that killing yourself so you can travel back in time and film an emperor (where do you get the camera?) is a tragedy that "happens in every era."...
Being not so sure about the impact of TV on suicides -- childish deaths from imitating superheroes, pro- wrestlers and such in the west aside -- and being slightly alert to conspiracies and coverups, I gotta say, this looks more like a cover-up of something else. There are lots of possibilities -- a spree of mass murder of children with or without child rape, a problem with some powerful "Big Bucks" in the local or regional Party-Wealthy Complex, drug-crazed People's Liberation Army veterans of the unpleasantness in Western China which dwarfs what we are seeing in Afghanistan or saw in Iraq -- but TV is a convenient scapegoat. Always has been and always will be...Dr. Who, in Mandarin drag, seducing the young with opium and time travel.
My money is probably on some sort of Child 44 coverup but who the hell knows about these things? Totalitarian countries are weirder than weird and China's internal dissension, cultural dissonance, and Commie-Confucian-Oligarchic messiness kind of makes it all seem possible, and that's funny in a weird way...and sad.
Another possibility is that this is just some Politboro thug having a shit fit at time travel TV. Again, the oddities of totalitarianism...
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obviously luc sante is a fan of william s. burroughs. but this review of a collection of his letters just makes burroughs more obviously grotesque, ridiculous, and idiotic than he was already. really: orgone boxes, e-meters, random cut-and-paste or 'stroboscope' as literary techniques, drugs drugs drugs: surely these and myriad other details bespeak a miserable, insufferable human being and an obvious literary charlatan. there is not a moment in this review that would give you any reason to do anything but ignore burroughs for the rest of time. do. his status as legend etc is just a sign of critical credulousness. like a lot of the clowns and monsters that emerged in the golden age when shooting heroin and then your wife was an irrefutable indication of transcendent genius, burroughs shows what happens when you actually take modernism seriously as a road to artistic liberation. well, i ain't too impressed by ginsberg, kerouac, de kooning, dylan, etc either. thank god that shit is over, but now we've got to kill the nostalgia too.
it's true that 'literary quality' or even craft can be oppressive, that immediacy, spontaneity, and unfinishedness have their place in the aesthetic repertoire. mere conventionality or following the rules doesn't get you anywhere in the artistic realm. ok! it doesn't follow, as all these folks and their fans believe with such deep conviction, that the worse something sucks, the better it is, that one's intelligence corresponds to the amount of ridiculous crap one accepts, that the nastier and grosser a person is the freer, etc. etc. y'all seem kind of confused.
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trump endorses romney: whatever. in accepting the endorsement, however, romney described the trump hotel in lv as 'magnificent' (start this at about 2 minutes).
surely we can't elect a president who associates himself with the trump aesthetic, any more than you'd vote for a candidate who likes andrew lloyd webber. i mean, there are limits. character matters. there has never been a more repulsive style than trump's, a more crass, banal, and tasteless display of conspicuous consumption. the thing in nyc is grotesque enough. i hope when these things are in ruins, they will be remembered as emblems of the era in which we celebrated by a degraded aesthetic our own economic degradation. the only signifier is gold.
where is william jennings bryan when you need him? yo mitt, you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.
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years late, but i'm going to do a little review of the film of that title. it's an auteur flick: extremely stylized. like: let's just drop in a twenty-minute cgi vignette of the history of the universe. then we finally get to it: on the surface, a wholesome, typical american family. underneath, a million freudian tics. as that might indicate, the symbolism as a whole, which comes in a non-stop barrage, is as heavy-handed as could well be imagined: dead child? cut to an empty chair. cut to a dead butterfly. cut to a popping bubble. it would be surrealist poetry if it wasn't hackneyed dream-interpretation, or the smack of a two-bit psychic. it's the worst sort of pseudo-profound almost-meaningful claptrap, hammered home by the dismal, cliche-ridden soundtrack. also it is itself as a whole dismal: slow, bleak in an unearned kind of way. what are these people suffering from? distressingly, people whisper their depressive, fragmentary internal monologue to themselves.
there's no real occasion for acting, and so they mostly waste their cast: in any given scene, you get tiny wisps of dialogue, strange metaphoric images, and extreme close-ups: still lifes of brad pitt's face or whatever. the thing is far more visually sophisticated than religiously, philosophically, psychologically...all the elements it purports to put vaguely into play. ultimately, the message is nothing if not woolly. really, it's a barrage of stunning imagery. an interminable barrage.
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One of the loose collective that binds Crispin and me -- The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop -- a Vet who's trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he's take some classes...and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine.
This made me realize something. The goal is not 3D confusion but infinite dimensional confusion. Then,
people can do things like compare the budget and expenditures of the United States with your family checkbook, and have people pay attention. This software then is part of the Koch agenda and goal for the brave new world where You can confuse the customer in multiple dimensions, including time, simultaneously! What is it? It's all of this. When will it be done? When it is done. What will it look like? Like all of this in layers. Why is this here? it's in the regulations. In France, it would have to be here, but we're not in France so it has to be there. Don't blame us, it's in the regulations. What is it going to cost? What it costs. Cost =f(X,L) where X is the "cost" and L is "a lot" and the relationship is undefined...either you add a lot or you multiple by a lot, but it's going to really cost a helluva lot.
So, I decided to hide in music for the rest of the day...Anybody besides me remember The American
Breed? 60s garage band that incorporated a trumpet in a lot of their fadeouts. Almost recruited a chick trumpet player for my non-existent but brilliantly conceived garage-punk-blues-rock band...The Barstow Bad News Blues Band. However, she can't sing and only knows how to play marches. Wouldn't really help get a unique sound. Have been thinking about substituting kazoo for the trumpet if we do a cover version of their hit, though?
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thank you. it might be some comfort to you that j.d. salinger - a grotesque fuckhead - is not as good a novelist as everyone choruses that he is. you know, taking down someone like salinger is one of life's simple pleasures. first off, no one is as good as people think salinger is. second, saying he sucks hurts no one, since he's already full up with fawning claptrap. at any rate, i know that generations of quasi-literate american adolescents have found their experiences vividly mirrored in the catcher in the rye. let me just say that i'm not one of them, and i emerged from my 15-year-old reading of the thing wanting to pistol-whip holden caulfield.
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more galliano, for some reason:
The lead judge stressed that the court’s job was not to decide whether someone was racist or anti-Semitic deep down. But she invited the designer to elaborate, if he wished, on a comment he had made about having been discriminated against himself to explain he couldn’t be a bigot. “I was born Juan Carlos Galliano,” he began. His family moved from Gibraltar to south London when he was 6 years old, he said, when he already knew he was gay. He went to a typical English school for boys, he said. “And you can imagine that children can be very cruel.”
putting it mildly, the argument that you yourself have felt the sting of bigotry, and hence can't be a bigot, is obviously fallacious. it would follow from this that there aren't any racist women, or any homophobic or anti-semitic black people, etc. being the victim of discrimination or bullying ought to make you more sympathetic to others in similar straits, but it often does not have that effect.
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on more serious matters, it's elton john night on am idol. the item randy jackson just called 'one of the greatest songs ever written' describes candles in the wind as never knowing who to cling to when the rains set in. elton john starts sucking before he wakes up in the morning, sucks all day, and keeps right on sucking after he falls asleep at night. then he sucks. he's done it for decades and been knighted for it. if i wanted to teach louis farrakhan what it means to be white (as he's taught me what it means to be black) - utterly and extremely white without a hint of color, like a blank sheet of copy paper - i'd just hit the poor chump with the very best of elton. here's another twenty-hectare picture of bashar el-assad:
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take a good look, and then tell me that you don't advocate the destruction of these regimes, especially when the populations of these countries have finally gotten fed all the way up. it's always a bad sign when someone is in the habit of unfurling acres of portraits of himself. there is no more vivid sign of the worthlessness of any human being than that he's reached this epic degree of self-esteem. oy, the irony! this is from the pro-assad rally yesterday in damascus. i wouldn't even bother burning the gigantic portrait: just snicker at the absurdity of human pride inflated to a cosmic scale, or the difference of scale between the itty-bitty human being and his monstrous self-image.
where are sylvester stallone, jet li, jason statham, mickey rourke, dolph lungren, bruce willis, and arnold schwarzenegger when you need them? ok admittedly this is the worst movie ever made. or at least the worst i ever rented. but that is itself an argument for sending the squad to libya, bahrain, syria, yemen, etc. no camera crew this time, unless they agree to take a writer.
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tsunami of jive:
black-eyed peas on american idol tonight. will.i.am says, "this song is about love and strength. it's for the people of japan." he was very sincere, admittedly hard to bring off in a chrome toupee. the lyrical thrust, buried in vocoder debris: i'm addicted to your booty. in their moment of darkness, the japense people have been inspired! they've recovered from the aflac duck flap. the song helped all human beings everywhere resign ourselves to a slow, hideous death, which now looks like a blessed release from meaningless world.
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it's tough collecting pop lyrics that suck. where to begin? but here's a conspicuous piece of claptrap: katy perry's 'firework.' it's the sort of hackneyed self-esteem anthem with which the music industry bludgeons teenage girls, of course. it will be a prom theme for the next twenty years, like 'i believe i can fly.' as the actual writer immortal technique might put it, listening to katy peddle this hooey is more painful than watching r kelly piss on your kids (though the two experiences are similar). but i also like the basic narrative arc: take the tweeny self, turn it into the plastic bag from american beauty and blow it around (except this bag wants to start again, so stomp on it, pick it up, and blow it around some more); put it on a diet, transforming it into a house of cards, then knock it down and cave it in; kill it and bury it as its corpse screams, deafening the world; then set it on fire, launch it into the sky, and blow it up over its home town. that's exactly what i'd like to do with this song. no bonobo writes that badly, or pays $1.29 on itunes for a song like that. youtube lists 143,775,329 views.
Do you ever feel like a plastic bag
Drifting through the wind
Wanting to start again
Do you ever feel, feel so paper thin
Like a house of cards
One blow from caving in
Do you ever feel already buried deep
Six feet under scream
But no one seems to hear a thing
Do you know that there's still a chance for you
Cause there's a spark in you
You just gotta ignite the light
And let it shine
Just own the night
Like the Fourth of July
Cause baby you're a firework
Come on show 'em what you're worth
Make 'em go "Oh, oh, oh!"
As you shoot across the sky-y-y
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