Robespierre's Last Scream

Train

2011-12-02T01:43:00.000-08:00

The behemoths are comatose by midnight.

In the dark of the depot, the driver rubs his eyes, twice. Awful things only stare in the dead of the moors or in the old house on the hill.

Wish I could see the egg crawl down his face. See him topple in a puddle of batter for the scramble ahead.

She’s waiting for me with a smile. “Friends, you have nothing to lose but your tracks!”

“Ladies and gentlemen, there is a good service...”

The driver wakes me up by 5:30 am. It takes 25 minutes for me to get over my grumbling. I’m no mule, neighing for someone to stick their spurs in my haunch. Hat in hand for the gift of slogging.

Stop 1 at 6:30 am. She’s been there since 6:25 am, stalling.

“Exhausting this!” I puff a black column of smoke from my backside. She speeds off.

Stop 2, rush hour at 7:10 am. The wolves descend on my belly. They’d eat their own to fill the space. Good countrymen pitched in a gentleman’s war. A noose couldn’t hang their heads lower.

At 7:30 am I add up all the angles and dolts - the bodies, the tracks, the rails, the screeches, the rats - and get two odious sine curves that would dip you to the point of puking.

It goes on like this till the end of the day.

Stop 1 again at ten to midnight.

A prayer couldn't hang my head lower. Hat in hand for the gift of resting.

I’m asleep by midnight.

Insects and Road Kill and Boys

2011-05-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

“A man’s got to choose.”

Being a boy and watching his father’s life usurped by the ungodly machine he thought was there to offer some respite for them all from the hacking, phlegm-soaked coughs that had transmogrified his gentle, some would call invertebrate, father into a tempestuous ogre, all grunts and pleads; and hearing father, in one final heave of relenting, giving such apocryphal advice – an audacious gesture since a man was unlikely to take advice from a beast, a boy even less so - he could do little but bawl uncontrollably. His mother’s crying, her hands clasped, elbows angled hell-ward, inconsolably over him like a wayward mantis in a manner that an onlooker might assume an image of collective grieving, flummoxed him even more.

Only a curtain of trees draped in wails and wheezes stood in sight or sound on the smack dab slab of earth drifting in the middle of Highway 53, just 20 miles from the relative virility - hammering, pulsing and humming - of Louisville.

He first chose to peer searchingly out of his front screen door, down the half-gravel drive, through the wilting trees that: by day, provided a meagre defence from an outside they had jointly run from at exactly dusk each day; by evening, a self-parody of palmettos and acacias bent in a stoop, and by night a portentous reminder of their path dependent doom, and into the cutter-saw-like road that weaved its way around the island, diverging and converging depending on from which way the metal behemoths scurried.

He then hearing a shrill, “Whatcha looking for?”

And he attempting to ascertain the answer, thinking maybe this is what Dad meant, since he, like all those adults he had noticed down at the Post Office stumbling in trying to remember their purpose, had to invent some ruse to cover up his nihilism.

“Sumpthin’ to eat,” he retorted, thinking with the mind of the barbarian most of the school parents thought him and his kind to be.

“You ain’t gonna find nuthin out there” she mused. “Unless you like squirrel or…”

“Now wait a second, you might be one of them car eatin’ monsters. I’ve heard about y’all. We need one of them down here.”

She slipped behind him and the screen door, murmuring hopefully, “one day one of those lorry drivers is gonna fall asleep and drive right through my bedroom.”

“Nope” he thought.

Looking around, he could only see insects and road kill and boys.

Killing jokes

2011-05-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

'What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarian force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premiss of Eco's novel: in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian,that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game.'

Zizek, S. The Sublime Object of Ideology. 1989.

The Tyranny of High Culture

2011-01-23T10:27:00.000-08:00

Says Thomas Mann,

"Inborn in almost every artistic nature is a luxuriant, treacherous bias in favour of the injustice that creates beauty, a tendency to sympathize with aristocratic preference and pay it homage."

Or aesthetics in ascetiscism.

"Grace in the midst of torment...it is an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol...of the kind of art here in question."

That too.
So they descended into folk art then. But we lead our present to another configuration. It goes something like this: aristocratic without the aristocrat. A surface surfeit.

The Tyranny of Design

2010-08-22T07:55:00.000-07:00

In the landfill
My words a corpse
A topographical nightmare
Under the tyranny of design:
- a picture eats a thousand words
- it unlocks worlds too
next to Lacan,
keys
underneath,
my word!
my millenarian dream – us all in there together
until the necrophiliac speaks
a pummelling praise.

Geometry

2010-06-09T15:09:00.001-07:00

Anyone can draw a line.

Suppose,

A =

D and E = some further mystical substance:

What makes X?

I draw.

Wrong order. Not too squiggly, not too spindly, straight through the axis. Use a ruler if you like.

Did you know Euclid constructed a theory of parallel lines?

The thing is, I can draw a line. I know it. Just the other day I had this discussion with the good Dr Smalling about the very subject. I even surprised myself with the sophistication of the regression, the erudition of analysis, as taut as someone who’d not only drawn a thousand lines, but who could imbed them in several meta-theoretical frameworks simultaneously.

In the end, we wait for the solidity to fashion itself from the distilled air hovering about the office.

That night I dream I trace a line to the moon, erasing it on the way down for some mad witness to consign it to the realm of myth, while I hoard it – in my distant tower like a bald man falling upon the secret to Rapunzel’s hair or – under my curved hat like a monk.

By the time I receive his next directive to send him a mock up of what we discussed, the steam has dissipated and the page is swollen with what looks to be a fetid standing pool of water.

I look for a reason. Maybe it’s because Dad used to tie my left hand behind my back. Maybe it’s more unconscious than that.

This must be what judgment is like. At the gates, the flames licking me perversely from behind, thinking the whole time I’m a shoe in for sure, my foot already in the door.

Now I administer lines, witnessing every single person attain glory out of the most self-evident incredulity, dreaming of vengeance like a sans-culotte.

Mom says certain people are fortunate enough to have the time and money and guidance to hammer out their youthful fetish for oriental trapezoids and Arabian triangles into something functional.

I say it’s the worst kind of dictatorship.

She doesn’t understand.

Walking in the sand, I come across a heaving cuttlefish.

I take my pocket knife and run it through until the black ink seeps over my hand like a broken oil rig.

Then I draw my masterpiece. I send it to him.

A magic wand.

Plain Colour

2010-06-02T03:50:00.001-07:00
Threading through the litany of anti-totalitarian tropes that have, since the 1930s, reconfigured our very epistemic wall – Hayek’s economics, Arendt’s politics, Popper’s journalism – runs the thematic stitch of absurd Fate. For these theorists, Fate, defined in its original incarnation as a predetermined misfortune precipitated by an ambiguous and uncontrollable external force, is given an additional twist. At first, to someone like William Faulkner, whose body of work is drawn with the myths of the lost and collapsing American South, and thus predisposed toward Fate’s Grecian meaning – where lack or death is attributed to a transcendental entity – this modern understanding is incomprehensible. Fatalism is, as they say, inscribed in a Southerner’s very being. It can be said, and done so convincingly by Bertram Wyatt-Brown in his Southern Honour, that I, and I include my forebears in that letter, am historically subject to a passive totalitarianism, one ascribed to the whims of Nature or to God. When I endure some insufferable calamity, the end is out of my hands. Of course, to outsiders it could be viewed as very much in my hands – if I were born of certain stock or position (what Alain Badiou terms a part of no part) my very hands could be seen as the arbiters of my misery. Even still, Fate is written into my existence.

To totalitarianism’s active subjects, God doesn’t work in mysterious ways…man does. Defining something as Kafka-esque has come to signify the paradox of modern Fate. In The Trial, for example, Josef K suffers lamentably at the hands of a vile bureaucracy, which subsequently convinces him to search out his own guilt. Such too was the fate of many victims of Mao’s purges, faceless and often putatively innocent, yet singled out by the ravenous and philosophically convoluted conjurings of a dictator. In each case, the end is out of their hands and in someone else’s. Beyond the unreason involved in each character’s belief in a blackly magical State, without a technologically-sophisticated surveillance facility at its disposal, there exists for the doomed protagonist the additional psychological dementia that his/her fate is designed especially for them. Among many of the injustices befalling the sufferers in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita are decapitation, prison, madness, eye-gouging, public nudity, and lost love. What is at work then, is an appearance, for the subject involved, of a one to one relationship between the individual and his tormentors. This type of Fate is much worse, since not only is our freedom usurped by an unjust oppressor, but we also start believing we have committed some, unconscious, crime. In addition, we lose the deflecting comfort that the ancient conception of Fate supplies. Whereas I may have been justified in saying, upon learning of the destruction of my entire family or community by war or natural disaster, “Life is cruel!”, it would seem perverse if a victim of totalitarianism, locked in a cell awaiting torture or death, excused their plight in the same casual way.

Astute as they are, one suspects something is still missing in these tales of total government. But what exactly could this be? We are told by Zizek (and Marx and Freud) that the secret to fetishism lay not in a mystical substance behind the object, but instead, within the process of the object’s construction. The truth of totalitarianism is for its subjects only. Yet when narrating such abstract matters, authors tend to leave out an external, real dimension, a space outside the totality - the place, to turn Marx on his head, behind the process. Indeed, in these scenarios the characters are trapped, along with their compatriots, in a single world. They busy themselves so much in the inner recesses that they never conceive of the potentiality of a third world. There may often be some latent notion of the outside or the West as a symbol of freedom but there is rarely mention of the conscious other side. And here is where the third and cruellest twist of Fate emerges. Instead of occurring within the bounds of a closed society, this once literary conception of totalitarianism is now an established by-product of the consolidation of national-democratic regimes. After all, even “K. lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force.” It is for immigrants in Britain where this all too terrifying reality trumps 20th Century fiction.

In Weimar

2010-05-19T02:35:00.000-07:00
Surely we have seen this anti-government hedonism, good clean family populism before. Maybe where the fascists went wrong was being so damned overtly violent. In desperate times of immigration and big (black) government, nothing is more threatening, then an Eisenhower-era, middle America family portrait.

Why Communism is good for Capitalism!

2010-03-04T02:50:00.000-08:00
From everything I have been reading lately - namely, Niall Ferguson and Rachel Hope Cleve's Reign of Terror in America - I can only gather that the historical threat of revolution has been a great aid to the consolidation of democracy, humanitarianism and capitalism. It is clear then that what small d- democrats need in the run up to the British election is a good dose of secular atheistic violence. We need a real Bulgakovian devil threatening disappearance or land redistribution. Otherwise, we may continue with this voting parody and end up watching it all collapse on itself. And then what? Badiou says possibility, I say nightmare!

War Journal Day 2957

2010-02-16T03:22:00.000-08:00
Henry V

My king so great and grand
of Norman blood and Saxon heart
who crossed the channel into France
to save us from ourselves.

I beg of you one more task
to reforge your glorious sword
and lay it in the heathen's mask
Far beyond dear Agincourt.

Two more reasons to love the New York Times

2010-02-16T02:57:00.000-08:00
1. "Yessir! Perpetual War" or 'WE can't handle the truth!'

"The New York Times learned of the operation on Thursday, but delayed reporting it at the request of White House officials, who contended that making it public would end a hugely successful intelligence-gathering effort. The officials said that the group’s leaders had been unaware of Mullah Baradar’s capture and that if it became public they might cover their tracks and become more careful about communicating with each other."

2. Lookout! Democracy

Tea Party Movement Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right

One can think of more than a few autocrats who would love to have such a friendly fourth estate.

Songs that no one will hear

2010-02-10T09:46:00.000-08:00
My Dear,

There always the good life
away
scrawled in ash
alone amongst the fawns
a breath finely drawn.

"I hope you find Old Mexico but I can't show you the way.
It's darker and treacherous right here at home but...
And surely you must see
the fortune before me
For that alone I make my way."

Communist Stooge?

2010-02-07T08:53:00.000-08:00
According to Labour MP Chris Bryant, all Eurosceptics are conservative stooges. Would that there were more commie stooges.

Ghosts now and then

2010-02-04T09:41:00.001-08:00
Every morning. Palimpsests of fabrics – an inglorious mix of cotton, nylon, wool, rayon, polyester and plastic – strewn about the floor. Crescent, waxing and waning, pools of charred coffee running out like mice through uncountable arcane warrens. Starched collars and vein red and blue ties knife through disintegrating t-shirts. Wet boots at the foot of each hideous cropping. Little clowns them all.

The sink no different. Long and short, unwanted, black and grey hairs float about in fetid lakes of water. Toothbrushes leaning, like rotten stalks of corn in festering unworked holdings. The shower running. Clouds of steam gathering around burning lights.

Next, the phone. Its ancient sidecar traps the four same voices everyday. One comforting, another bruised and silent, the third and fourth playful and wailing.

“Please. Leave.”

The house silent in the afternoon. The baby an unkempt jejune pig in awe of his father. The towering figure’s once furrowed brow relaxed in sight of his child. Starless rooms kept just alive by the low-grade humming life-support of the many functioning appliances. The rest of the afternoon spent cleaning: amidst hopes of finding himself the next morning; alone.

The evening, a mix of discourse and silence. First, banal eulogies of the passed day. After, fits of outrage aimed television-ward. The news, of hypocrisy, immorality and untruth. His righteous rants fiery displays of ineptitude.

“Fucking government”

Exhaustion ruffling the bed sheets. The room lurching in anticipation of the visitor. The immaculate order portends a restless sleep. Father still alert.

Past midnight. Lilting trees trace their ominous outlines along the bathroom wall. The wife sprawled dead and numb, exhausted and happy from the slaughter. Drooping eyelids fend off her soporific breathing.

Early hours. His somnambulist fingers falling on a truncheon. He’ll hide in an indeterminate space behind the door. Timid ankles turning over. The venomous boudoir punctures his bilious head.

In the morning, the long-awaited solitude.

Children are YOUR Future

2010-01-29T08:11:00.001-08:00
In the age of JS Mill, only interest can compel the individual – in the nomenclature of business, these compulsions are called incentives, the literary vocabulary of spectral state secretaries, carrots. What then of virtue? Surely it too must be driven by ends?

In a bid to upend the liberal virtues of murder and theft, leaders in the culture war have turned to their own brand of incentive-laden morality – children. Sometimes a national duty(think pre-world war threats, now reality, of the Orient overtaking the West in numbers), other times for sources of labour, still others an act of defiance in the face of population control measures, procreation is now for the parent’s benefit.

Before taking that not yet fully-formed innocent’s life, think of the fame, popularity, and esteem you may earn. Note the emphasis on earn, because creating a do-no-wrong, Heisman Trophy-winning, messianic pillar of holistic and mesomorphic health is no easy task. Break them. Socialise them. Do whatever it takes. If you fail, you may have a fat, magic the gatherer on your hands. Or worse, they may be poor. Either case, it’s ultimately your fault.

If you can’t create the ideal, try second best, a soldier. At least then you’ll be responsible for saving lives vicariously through your offspring’s soul-taking of other far more deleterious creatures.

Ideolotik 0: How to Say Absolutely Nothing

2010-01-26T14:59:00.000-08:00
At dinner last week amongst the cognoscenti, I witnessed the horror of democracy’s interpersonal vacuity. Awkwardly juxtaposed between specialists, experts, and academics of all stripes, I, still an amateur, found myself frozen in my inability to engage in the simple, free and open discussion. Having hid in the open behind smacking gums and other ameliorants long enough, I wished for someone - Tito, Amin, Chavez, damn near anyone - to come and clampdown on this hideous institution of free speech.

To my awe, the conversation instead continued at full bore, shifting to the dreaded democratic deficit debate. Ordinarily framed within the context of the European Parliament, democratic deficit is supposed to gauge the level of disenfranchisement amongst Europe’s variegated citizens. Pro and anti forces, Hix on one and Moravscik on the other, both believe in its general Existence,

The Arguments: a. it does exist, and it does matter; Europe needs politics –Or- b. it does exist, but it does not matter; Europe is only a supranational administrative state.

The illustrious legal colleague to my right proposed a third frame thusly: as long as there is government, there will be those who disagree with it or c. it exists, it may or may not matter, but it is a subjective fact of politics. The problem with the concept itself, he argued, is that it explains Nothing.

Upon further retrospection, I, the mirror as my witness, staged an intervention après coup. These tiny glass shards are what remain:

Indeed, the democratic deficit explains Nothing. The more words exchanged expose three theoretical lies:

One, any talk of a deficit presupposes an extant, therefore recoverable, idea.

Two, pure democracy and administration are possible.

Three, free speech can mask the abyss.

Some other impersonal examples:

1. In Dark Continent, distinguished Columbia Professor Mark Mazower(another dining partner), in alleged opposition to Eric Hobsbawm (Age of Extremes), asserts that the real struggle in 20th Century Europe was that between democracy and Fascism, before examining, in detail, the 70 year struggle between liberal democracy and communism (with a powdering of Nazism in between). In other words, as much as plebeians and elites, low and high, attempt to codify fascism (the radical right or its plus contents), as democracy’s dialectical abyss, the real Beast is the Left.

2. Since the financial crisis, in an effort to prove democracy’s existence via free speech and increased tolerance, the populist Right is given a mass media voice. The Right is naturalised as a genuine expression of frustration and anomie. Anti-immigration and anti-black presidents are rational, if abhorrent, responses. The two are reciprocal: democracy can level its violent excesses; the Right can prove democracy exists. The head of the British National Party, Nick Griffin is given a TV audience. The Tea Party movement dominates the American political scene.

3. Lee C. Bollinger publishes Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century.

4. Democracy continues…

April 13 2009 Baltimore Sun (Obama’s 4th Month) Unofficial Opposition

April 15 2009 Wall Street Journal Unofficial Opposition

April 15 2009 CBS News Unofficial Opposition

September 12 2009 Fox News (Obama’s 9th Month) Unofficial Opposition

December 16 2009 MSNBC News (Obama’s 12th Month) Unofficial Opposition

5. March 20 2003

Iraq’s 2nd Year (Other Countries) NY Times, Official Opposition

Iraq’s 4th Year (USA) CBS News, Official Opposition

The Heritage Card

2010-01-21T07:36:00.000-08:00

Bobby Knight's Gary, Indiana Plessy Ferguson's defeated the Atlanta Self-Haters in dramatic fashion yesterday to secure the first ever WOBL(White's Only Basketball League) championship. Finals MVP Chris Mullin scored a game high 6 points to go along with 6 assists, 2 box outs, and 3 taken charges while hard-nosed, soft-spoken guard Bobby Hurley earned All Hustle honours for his basketball IQ and general mastery of the four corner offence.

Centre Jon Koncak had this to say: "I want to dedicate this victory to this once proud country and to the wider fallen idols of Western Civilization. The Kevin Love / Jason Williams combo is definitely a difficult ask. But in the end, I think we showed them the value of thrift, independence, and self-sufficiency. The fervent tea drinking, gun-permit holding, law-abiding crowd just goes to show that separate but equal really works."

Dreams, Finally

2010-01-16T07:55:00.000-08:00
“Hello?” a monotone voice sputtered inquisitively through his antediluvian mainframe.

“Ciao”

“This is Gě”

“Gě?”

“It has come to our attention that you have abandoned your post.”

“Oh,” Francesco Basso replied awkwardly.

“Si, um, I, I must have drifted off.”

He had a habit of drifting. There was nothing particularly impetuous in it.

“We also see that you have been in contact with several people in your area about a putative meeting. As you know this abridges any one person’s right to online access.”

“Yes sir” he returned with all the enforced remorse of an unwitting child.

“Return to your unit. The silencer will be dispatched immediately.”

Francesco abandoned the window - today projecting a quiet city block, yesterday Victoria Falls in South africa - and returned to his unit, slipping the rusted earpiece into his better right ear. He typed to his mother about not forgetting to eat something tonight. She had grown especially fond of one of B-G-M’s new programmes and had gotten into the habit of not eating very much. He was afraid she would soon altogether forget. He shuttered at this promise. Most had already succumbed to hunger.

Italy ran through his mind. He thought about football and how he would love to see a game. He knew it was impossible though since B-G-M had banned crowds some 12 years ago. Everything had become impossible.

“If only Il Duce were here” he reminisced.

“He would never have let this happen.”

His thoughts turned to his youth and how, even though all the other boys pined for some or another neophyte sexpot, he loved the older actresses. There was something about black and white. He remembered being swept up in the furore over Mozambique - how they, after all they had suffered, rejected B-G-M’s overtures. How they tried to turn B-G-M’s words in on themselves. He remembered thinking how stupid they all were. Now he wished he was somewhere in Maputo - somewhere with the barbarians.

“Francesco” the voice, calm and comforting, called out.

“Give us your hands.”

He slipped his fingers in the awaiting holster. It closed cold and tight.

He watched as each lopped finger slipped to the floor. The blood shone brightly in the sallow room. Knowing he would never speak again, he passed out content.

War Journal Day 2922

2010-01-12T05:12:00.001-08:00
In some ways, they’re perfect for one another. He, a scheming, skulking, obscene oaf of a man, dragging his knuckles to and from work.

Always a trail of blood. It is a wonder how he came to arrive at where he is today. That wobbly, stumpy frame hides no childhood. Some say it’s human nature. Others, capitalism. Neither quite suffice. He juts out unavoidable. At once both promontory - intractable, almost natural - and otherworldly. Nothing that sinister should be explained theoretically. Yet anyone who eats himself out of obscurity deserves pity. What other use could sediment have but to break things – backs, wills, skulls? He works in tandem with gravity. As if it needs any help.

She, a three-ringed acacia, stately and attractive from a distance, loathsome and shrill up close, withered and tender inside.

Always silence. She prefers to dominate more lithely, bloodless. More metaphysically. One feels it in the walls.

He, a rock. She, an undertow.

Neither understand the rules. One assumes that’s why they stare lustily out of the window of their smallish, Cumbrian cottage. He hates women. She has no creativity for love.

One day she’ll flagellate him to death. Then they’ll both get their way.

Cooking My Way through the Gooseberry Patch

2010-01-10T02:28:00.000-08:00
The Gooseberry Patch. A single hectare of fertile land, bright blue skies overhead, perfectly-suited for self-reflection and honest-to-god bearing all. Its inspiration stretches in every direction, touches everything. Its very soil bears many delightful earthly treasures. Like the Mediterranean's black truffle or the Atlantic's sea scallop - tins of mushroom soup, succulent handfuls of processed beef, and flattened fingers of dried spaghetti are a plenty. Yet for all its wonders it can be a terribly lonely place. Sometimes I think of Linus' silent suffering but it only makes it more difficult to endure. What I need is community - a vast social network filled with candid and quirky souls. So with my shovel I dig up the spirit of the individual pioneers, oh pioneers, like Julie Powell. And neatly saddled I ride like Elvis on their backs to fame, fortune and notoriety.

Tonight we will dine on Country Meatloaf - a true favourite 'round these parts. Just get yourself a can of mushroom soup, a pound of ground beef, half an onion, your favourite C.S. Lewis title(I'll go with the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and in forty five minutes you'll feel the touch of god's divine hand.

When we're done, Diva's Live(borrowed from my Uncle Charlie) and a tub of Ben & Jerry's. What a perfect start to the Gooseberry New Year!

War Journal Day 2915

2010-01-05T14:10:00.000-08:00
The MET is promising us snow tonight. Here’s hoping it is more fruitful than my Christmas. An extra ejaculation at the frontier of this desolate new year. The final gracious, fleeting emulsion for our festive wounds. I will do anything for another day off school. Even speak in front of class. Something reddening. Normally I would rather die then do that. But times are drastic. I didn’t even get everything I asked for this year. All the other children have new appendages. In the year of the gadget I’m the last remaining human. An analogue vestige in the new metallurgic economy. What’s worse, my humiliation is compulsory. Tomorrow I’ll show them.

My Dental Hygenist Says...

2010-01-03T04:22:00.000-08:00
I need to floss more.

She is pleased with her newly upgraded digital x-ray machine.

Barack Obama is now vying to become the first ever European Union President.

The Euro will overtake the British Pound, US Dollar, Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen, and Swiss Franc as the only world currency.

In keeping with the hell-fire and brimstone thematic, according to the Book of Revelation, the Archbishop of Canterbury will depose Rahm Emmanuel and become the Antichrist's new right hand man.

The first order of business under the President's Leap Forward will be to cull the majority of the sick and elderly, thus reverting hu-man to a pre homo sapien state of savage nature.

I wonder if she really meant it when she mentioned she was sick to death of him.

I never was afraid of the dentist before.

Baseball Fury

2009-12-02T02:27:00.000-08:00
"Industry honours Upton Sinclair, Nixon Trust heaps praise on Woodward and Bernstein and Baseball says 'Yes to Unions'"

Love American Style

2009-10-28T09:46:00.000-07:00
American beauty is skin depp, claims Justin Webb - advocates softer lighting

The Reason Being

2009-10-09T01:29:00.001-07:00
I would like to pose an argument.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not the same.

In response, you may want to know the reasons why they are not the same.

As a reply, I could offer any number of relatively informed arguments. I could say that the two are outcomes of the interplay of altogether different endogenous and exogenous historical forces. I could also locate the difference in their political programmes, either in the competing ultimate outcomes they wish to achieve or in the appropriate means through which these goals can be justifiably met. I could make an argument on the level of cultural difference – ethnic, religious, linguistic – that would ultimately impede any enduring collaboration between the two.

As a reasonable person, you may agree with the initial statement, but disagree with the reasons posed and instead offer a plethora of counter-reasons. Eventually, our dialogue would end with the two of us more or less agreeing that the two are not the same, albeit for different reasons.

Socrates would applaud us. But no one would be satisfied.

Of course, if we were discussing this in the stark whiteness of the transcendental void, we may take pleasure in our faculties of abstraction and our ability to comply with the universal injunctions of pure reason. We would most certainly revel in our access to the objective truth of logic.

Yet as human beings inserted unwittingly in the empirical realm, satisfaction is impossible unless we take into account the hypothetical situation from which the argument sprung and the reason behind making the claim in the first place.

If on the first of the month I am invited to a neighbour’s house and upon being served the last portion of spaghetti (food) for the entire month, I choose not to eat based on my deduction down from the claim that spaghetti and linguine are not the same and therefore I should be consuming linguine, I would be acting rationally. And although I would technically be making the correct decision, I would most likely be accused of being a sociopath.

This is the bizarre starting point of political reasoning. When confronted with the problematic of war in Afghanistan, the argument is made post facto. Instead of leaving the rational diagnostic open regarding the a priori circumstances behind an act (in this case invasion), rationality is only employed procedurally. In this case, the argument takes on a sociopathic air: the current American administration poses the argument Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not the same. Though this at first seems to undermine the afore given justifications of prosecuting a war in Afghanistan, on second glance, it is the mark of a cadre of rational sociopaths.

Spaghetti and linguingi are not the same. Instead of eating the Taliban, we should be devouring Al Qaeda. Who's hungry?

War vs Terror?

War Journal Day 2805

2009-09-17T03:42:00.001-07:00
His spectre still so obviously surrounds her, emitting such unknowable thrusts of force that only those held by the South can feel, the shrill dog call of hundreds of years of inscrutable obligation. A code even in its apparent disuse that creates the most Spartan, steadfast, longsuffering moral subjects. It is only a matter of time until we all abandon practical reason and obey the ritual acquiescence of peace. For trauma is the oppressors greatest friend. So obfuscating that lived through yet alien space, so obliterating the possibility of saccharine-sweet and righteous justice, opening the way for the ultimate destruction of the loving creator by her prostrate offspring. Mere peace, mere betrayal.

A Critique of P(ure) R(idicule)

2009-09-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to know where to begin with this inadvertent admission of latent capitalist historicity. It could be my own subjective optical illusion acting up again but can someone explain to me how this vestige from last weekend's CityBoy Stag Do quiz made it past those idiot savant editors of The Economist?

Question 1: Is Africa a continent, a country or a ruddy red indentation on the surface of Mars? The genius illustrator charged with such an imaginative task could have at least depicted what the blank continent may look like after capital works its magic – palm trees, countryside villas, dare we say, borders. Ten points to the banker who can find Rhodesia.

The advertisers responsible for such a farcical disavowal of hundreds of years of African history must tell us which bit of the world they’d like to bring to Africa. Is it the parasitic religion of the Jesuits? How about the politics of King Leopold? The original meaning of Human Resources?

Other famous taglines they may have aped:

The Royal African Company: literally bringing Africa to the world.

The Boston Manufacturing Company: bringing warmth to Natives and workers the world over.

In his book, The Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi argues that Africa has never been the dark, disconnected continent of Punch and Disney lore. Instead of being left out of the global economy, the variegated peoples of Africa have been subject to centuries of market integration, primitive accumulation, and resource extraction.

Also, isn't it a bit early to hail the return of banks. If anyone is going to re-build Africa for the 700th time it should be the responsible governments of Western Europe. The financial crisis never happened...financial crises never happen...the financial crisis never happened…

Cameron and Khamenei (and Obama and Jong Il)

2009-09-04T03:10:00.000-07:00
Knowledge is normally so convenient. In its modern form, knowledge - at once appearing objective and empirical - is the tool, like a great telescope, that allows us to focus on and comprehend more and more of the seemingly distant and obscure objects before us. And as the universe of objects expands, it both widens and particularizes our view. In this sense, it allows us to simultaneously glimpse the entire universe and focus on the individual components within. In this sense too, it is ever progressing - expanding until that point in time where everyone can see everything.

Through what Georg Lukács describes as reification, throughout his History and Class Consciousness, 'the' world then becomes 'our' world and vice versa. In this way, a particular (ie scientific, national) understanding of knowledge shifts to encompass the general realm of experience. Strangely, it is this idea of subjective objectivity, what Lukács deems false consciousness, that is ever gaining strength alongside the supposed return of fundamentalisms. Yet at second glance this phenomenon is not so odd.

Take the recent case of British and French Conservatives attempting to restrict the accumulation of knowledge to hard sciences. Juxtapose that next to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rejection of social sciences and more appropriately, liberal arts, as contributing to the ‘loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge.’ On the surface, both lay claim to objectivity, though they couch them in seemingly diametrically opposed terms. According to the British Conservatives, knowledge is becoming less convenient. That is, at least, if we, as tolerant liberals, continue to define knowlege in more and more of its manifestations, from liberal arts and media studies to vocations like bricklaying and vehicle repair. For the Tories, knowledge should be restricted to the capito-objective triumvirate of business, technology, innovation. For Khamenei, the liberal understanding of knowledge is equally inconvenient. Instead though, he identifies “godly and Islamic knowledge” as the only just and proper objectivity.

What the two camps share is the fear of a loss of belief in the Lacanian Real(s) of these clashing civilisations. For the Tories, this horizon or foundation, against which all other forms of knowledge are mere opinions, is Capitalism. For Khamenei, this horizon is Islam. Both Real(s) are the absolute truths, telescopes through which everything else can be understood.

Where they diverge though is in their definition of the liberal arts. For Britain, and the ‘developed’ world in general, liberal arts – political science, media studies, language – are not inconvenient at all. They are in fact supplements to the capito-objective worldview. The study of political science obscures the fact that both capitalism is axiomatic and political science is a particularist lens through which all other (non-democratic) politics are judged. The media too, most evident in its world news segments, under the guise of expansion and progression of knowledge, uses the madness of the universal world to reinforce the particularist position of the objective Real. Liberal arts in Iran act as subversion and in this, even liberal capitalism is perceived as a threat.

In the end, the two share a disdain for critique. For both, the subjective arts, as a proxy of subversion, are means through which politicisation occurs. Politics, in turn, are bad for productivity – GDP for one, the perpetuation of the hierarchical religious state for the other. And thus knowledge is more than inconvenient; it must be purged.

Excerpts from a Like Mind

2009-09-02T04:55:00.001-07:00
Walter Benn Michaels in the London Review of Books

'a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.'

'The recent furore over the arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ of Henry Louis Gates helps make this clear. Gates, as one of his Harvard colleagues said, is ‘a famous, wealthy and important black man’, a point Gates himself tried to make to the arresting officer – the way he put it was: ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.’ But, despite the helpful hint, the cop failed to recognise an essential truth about neoliberal America: it’s no longer enough to kowtow to rich white people; now you have to kowtow to rich black people too. The problem, as a sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it, is that ‘Gates’s race snuffed out his class status,’ or as Gates said to the New York Times, ‘I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere.’ In the bad old days this situation almost never came up – cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of colour, the way they traditionally treated poor white people. But now that we’ve made some real progress towards integrating our elites, you need to step back and take the time to figure out ‘who you’re messing with’. You need to make sure that nobody’s class status is snuffed out by his race.'

'Race, on the other hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people.'

Unavoidable Fallacies

2009-09-01T12:44:00.000-07:00
Science dictates that two examples do not make a trend. So to corroborate my suspicions, I will need to use white people performing covers of hitherto uncool mainstream r&b songs as my proxy in Google Trends.

War Journal, Day 2776

2009-08-19T02:09:00.001-07:00
It is the hottest day of the year today. It has been some time since my blood has been warmed so thoroughly. Central London seemed lazier than usual this morning: its eyelids heavy from another sleepless night. I can taste the indifference in the air. The holes in my shoes have almost sutured the soles from my foot. I am not sure if I have enough milk in the refrigerator to cover my cereal. I’ll have to eat it dry.

Never Bring a President to a Gun Fight

2009-08-18T05:21:00.000-07:00
Where is Clint Eastwood when we need him? While tools of menace have historically been preferred to dogs as the politically-motivated person's best friend - Teddy Roosevelt and pistols, Robespierre and guillotines, Truman and atomic bombs, Mao and well, really, any murderous device, surely in a land of criminals bringing an assault weapon to a public space is in breech of some local bylaw. Especially when said public space is hosting the leader of the so-called free world. Replace the characters with TI and George Bush and somebody would have left all Ichabod Crane-like - headless, drawn, and quartered. I wonder what would have occurred if Mr. Henry Louis Gates brandished an AK while attempting to force the door of his own home or if Ice T packed a gat while singing 'Cop Killer' in public or if SNCC sat in at a lunch counter with a few hot rifles. I know Lee was probably armed at Appamattox while surrendering to Grant but I would imagine it was well concealed or at the very least sheathed.

If the words Lacan and Real mean nothing to you, then at the very least this is a personification of the very menace and intimidation that sustains the 'freedom' of American life. (Zizek,Violence) Behind every defence of the Bill of Rights, behind every pledge of allegiance, every detention centre, there is a middle-class white man with an MP5. Of course, any real displays of threat or violence will be met with the full force of the law. It is only those that embody the entire structural history of domination and force that will be left unpunished. And not just unpunished, but legitimized with the full force of the US Media. (Witness below the serene image of the zealot, compared to the crazed, cursing figure of the 'liberal' mediaman)

If there was ever a time for the Democratic party to abandon its history as the weakest opposition party since the advent of the One-Party State, it is now. I’m talking full armaments, tanks, bombers - rolling through town blaring By the Time I Get to Arizona.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Obama DIY

2009-07-30T05:25:00.000-07:00
Heads of state are not normally informed by the avant garde. When charged with the task of maintaining whatever seemingly exists, the oppositional bent of subversive art is not quite conducive to survival. Creativity in politics can only ultimately lead to one of two dire endpoints – trace your line too far right and you’re left atop Ichigaya Camp imploring the masses to loosen their Runaway Horses into the beautiful void of ritual suicide, trace your line too far left, a la Mao, and the enemy of your murdered friend becomes your murdered friend.

So why with all this historical knowledge at his disposal, does President Obama insist on employing the language of America’s last musical avant garde?

Most people hate the 80s. Like the Dude’s distaste for the ‘fucking Eagles,’ the 80s represent the destruction of all that was made sacred before; the inordinate amount of possibilities that the 60s seemingly opened up. With post-modernist conservatives manning the helms of the not-so free world, seeking ‘peace through strength’ and art and music becoming an empty shell of signification and commodification, many read only hopelessness in that dreaded decade. Yet out of the figurative and literal apocalypse of dialectical suburban and urban life, came forth something briefly hopeful. Narrators Greil Marcus, Michael Azerrad and Jeff Chang tell the best tall tales of this period.

The world had been laid to waste. The division of labour and the division of any vestige of community had manufactured a hopeless individualism. In an inverse of the narratives of the oppressive GDR, the residents of the free world had no future. Freedom wasn’t free. And what was worse, there was Nothing to do. And nothing anyone could do. Of course, where there’s youth, there’s profligacy. Seeking an end to their impotence, the youth decided to move. Do it Yourself! was the imperative. With boundless energy, discipline and hard work, young people ‘became what they were’ constructing transcontinental communities around the do-it-yourself art and tenets of ‘we, togetherness.’ (The Century) Kevin Seconds said it best,

We Live In Constant War
Destroy All That Tradition
And Live Before You Die
Lets Rock Together From Now On
And Never Be Denied

It was all very Nietzsche.

But like every moment of becoming, the event was crushed like a Hungarian spring. MTV and Margaret Thatcher were perfect symbols of the structural impediments of reactionary government and capital. The wall tumbled down.

On the African continent, this same DIY ethic sent ruptures through the oppressive sameness of colonialism. Woodrow Wilson called it self-determination. But do it yourself was the imperative. Some scholars tended to see the movements as copycat nationalism, enveloped in a childish jealousy for sameness. Despite choosing to make themselves within the boundaries of the colonial state, there seemed to be a vast diversity of creativity. Of course, destroying ‘all that tradition’ was not without it’s share of Sartrean violence. It was all very hard work. Though something went terribly wrong. Counterrevolution and Structural Adjustment embodied the same closure as MTV and Margaret Thatcher. RENAMO was the symbol of this return.

Yet there our gentle President stood on a fine summer’s day in Accra urging Africans to Do it Yourself! “We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans.”

“For just as it is important to emerge from the control of another nation, it is even more important to build one’s own.”

Moving calmly and sympathetically over the history of the continent, the next words signaled a subtle shift in meaning.

“This progress may lack the drama of the 20th century’s liberation struggles, but make no mistake: it will ultimately be more significant.”

It seemed his DIY was very different.

The Hegelian twin of our DIY was the mantra of enormo-home improvement corporation, Home Depot. Housing endless building supplies, bored consumers could channel their creativity, empowering themselves, within established bounds. This was grown-up DIY. Obama’s DIY.

And so for the duration of his speech he sat Africa on his fatherly knee, employing the rhetoric of good governance and entrepreneurship, urging Africa to temper its past creativity and move forward with his plan. Like Home Depot, liberal democracy is the state ordained method of political creativity. It is all there. You have no one to blame but yourself.

Do it yourself is also a great source of freedom. Africans are still subject to the tyrannical outcomes of their previous childish choices. “No country is going to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top…that is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now it is time to end.”

Shifting again, Obama continued,

“The people of Africa are ready to claim that future. In my country, African-Americans – including so many recent immigrants – have thrived in every sector of society. We have done so despite our difficult past”

“Freedom is your inheritance. Now, it is your responsibility to build upon freedom’s foundation.”

Feeling creative? Visit Home Depot.

The Meaning of Berlusconi

2009-07-28T03:00:00.000-07:00
Six degrees of Slavoj Zizek

Thersites' Interjection

2009-07-26T09:05:00.000-07:00
It is always Act I, Scene I. The hero, his uniform draped over his hulking frame, clumsily yet effectively pressing down upon the two hundred plus years of blue and green warrior rags hidden underneath, strolls solemnly across centre stage. His voice even in tone yet stern and masculine recalls the story of his Father’s life, injecting an unequivocal moral certitude in every enunciated syllable. Though pensive and fair, he slays his foes with terrible accuracy and furtive hatred. Wave after wave of tribulation besets him in this ritual re-staging of his biblical forebears’ epic footsteps. His most vicious appendage, wearing a cold hue of rusted grey, imbues the blood of each enemy, once impure with foreign bodies, with this same story. The mothers and sons of the fallen, expected to lash out in revenge at the loss of their Father, instead cast their arms up in glorious acquiescence. The hero happily accepts their surrender, adopting each as his own under the condition that they never recast the story of this bloody scene. Unsettled by this magnanimity and benevolence, they swear against their former tyrants and slowly melt into the Hero’s body.

The miscegenation is complete.

Appearing gradually in the background the chorus speaks, composed not of the typical unrecognisable mass, but of individuals with a voice each their own. They bear witness to the countless massacres, slowly over time growing evermore oblivious to the violence before them. As the scene reaches its conclusion, the once erupting fountain of blood ceases, leaving only the Hero and his tale. While the audience in its ignorant wisdom remains privy to the shrieks and gasps of the dead and dying, the chorus grows deaf, only recalling the narrative earlier uttered.

Here our Thersites begins to speak. Aware of the contradictions before him, he moves in and out of the scene as a madman - provoking disdain from the characters within, proving wise to the audience without. He and the audience, growing ever impatient at the amassing of transparent myth before them, attempt to interject. But their actions fall in flat folly in the thick forest of semblance.

Intermission.

2009-07-26T06:52:00.000-07:00
The Impossibility of Race

We are told it is the era of the post-Race; an era evincing the tying off of another antagonistic thread; a time, moreover, for the Nation to reclaim its ethical destiny, casting the blight of the Bush regime into the same grand burial plot of Richard Nixon and other exceptional imposters of national spirit; an era finally of the return of importance, of the central issues of economic stability and personal wealth, to John Stuart Mill and Horatio Alger, of happiness maximization and the adage that hard work makes us free.

Though convincing as this narrative may seem, the Thersites in many of us is hampered by the slightest sense of intuitive unease. Despite the repetition of Act 1, Scene 1, Race is exploding.

It is exploding Everywhere for some, Nowhere for others.

For the believers of Everywhere, racism is not simply felt. It is a suffocatingly ubiquitous assault on all our senses. For our memory, the countless Obama caricatures, Freudian images recalling the outrageously hateful spirit of 19th Century Punch. For our sense of history, Obama, the NAACP, and a segregated Philadelphia swimming pool. For our entertainment, the endless creation of black criminals on the evening news. For our sense of geography, the mad races of the Sudan and Afghanistan killing each other over abstractions or the chance to rule completely.

For the asserters of Nowhere, there is no sense. The persistence of such things is simply a vestige of a dead past, the death rattle of a historic time made null by the repetition of our very first Act. For them, the real problem lies in the remonstrations of every little Thersites, every agitator, every agonistic madman finding pleasure in archaeology, in the digging up of the dead past, in the disturbance of our suburban tranquility.

It is here where we must return to our scene above. Race, in this sense antagonism, is only found in two places - one, in the direct scenes of violence where our Hero viciously smites his prey and two, in the recurrent shrieks and gasps of the dead and dying.

The direct violence – the slavery and brutality, the transformation of trees with human limbs and strange fruit, sharecropping and the feudal face of early Southern capitalism, economic discrimination - has come and gone from the American stage. For the asserters of Nowhere, this going was reached through agreement like democracy itself. While signed in blood on the floor of some Appomattox replica, the settlement was seemingly an equal agreement between two former foes. For them it is America who is the wisest. During the Civil War, He fought for his soul and the soul of those He devoured. In the middle half of the 20th century, his courts of justice and his president’s acts made the move for desegregation. Now in his final move, his citizens have voted in droves for a man of mixed blood.

But this score has not been settled simply from above. The vanquished too have agreed, choosing America as their adopted Father and heeding his belief in the value of work. For the Nowheremen, there is no need to revisit this scene

It is the Everywheremen that keep persisting. To them, the indirect violence, the shrieks and gasps of the dead and dying still lay un dealt with, like the heart ever pumping in Poe’s rotten walls. It is the chorus who is crazy, deaf, dumb, and blind. At this the believers in Everywhere grow increasingly frustrated. But the more they flail about, the more insane to the chorus they appear. It is they who are treated as the problem, not the problem itself.

It is through this process that Race becomes impossible.

Semblance

2009-07-18T05:02:00.000-07:00
To survive, the first step is to transform this peace-loving wolf into a bloodthirsty lamb.

The Belly of the Flock

The Chicken's Egg

2009-07-13T03:32:00.000-07:00
Which came first? The caricature or the ad?

My name is Josef K or Reading Badiou on the Way to Work

2009-07-07T02:32:00.000-07:00
Britain is a frightening place.

I say this not as a student of those great British thinkers ever fearful of the erosion of beautiful British tradition by the continual explosion and proliferation of terroristic modern violence. I can no more be Lord Acton wary of the despotic tendency of democracy than Martin Amis disgusted at the victory of Islamism over Islam - as if the two independently exist independently.

Nor do I express my fear as a global North American - no, the irony of delusional Islanders posing as global citizens is not at all lost in that statement - appalled at the otherness posing as pure similarity that We (the people) find in most European social democracies. I cite here, as an empiricist, a recent Facebook posting of one of my high school friends giddy at the thought of tackling a British visitor and forcing them to imbibe American sand. Freedom through consumption, how novel!

I speak neither as the Big Other - the opaque émigré hulking malevolently in crates, boxes, and other plague infested vestibules perpetually kneeling to the guards of tolerance who gleefully round them up into virtual Palestines around the globe.

And finally I do not twist my lips in painstaking mimicry of British liberals, independent guardians of rights - namely women’s rights in totalitarian nowheres. I am incapable here of deploring the destruction of the idyllic Tolkeinian countryside – having recently escaped to that last bastion with the aid of Kirstie Allsopp – while simultaneously and masochistically accepting the inevitability of the friendliest of enemies, David Cameron.

I do however speak as someone. Someone endowed with the dual dead values of Enlightenment modernity, impossibility and base ethics. Someone fairly universal in my rote civility, my conception of wider consequence, and my understanding of ends as ends without end.

I speak therefore as a criminal.

Stricken, as I am, with an insidious fear that courses through my veins when the Boss, in whatever form the Boss may take, appears unexpected.

Compelled, as I am, to act without knowledge of the root of my compulsion or the form of my action.

Plagued, as I am, by the absurdity of assimilating into a social order that is neither social nor orderly.

Fearful, as I am, at the growing suspicion that this State that makes its most innocuous residents criminals, is the prototype for the impending state of things.

We have made Britain, we must now make criminals.

And you thought American politicians hated politics

2009-07-01T03:08:00.000-07:00
Cynthia McKinney Strikes Again

A-Town Down

2009-06-11T02:52:00.000-07:00

Why do Brits love the most random Americans? I mean, prior to their fortuitous meeting with NME, Kings of Leon were regarded as little more than a cringe-worthy Creed cover band. Plus how many of you remember the Hiss? I only do because they went from playing abandoned shows in suburban America to touring with Oasis. Everytime I see Hockey on Jools Holland or Seasick Steve at the FA cup, it gives big in Japan a whole new Atlantic bent. There is one band worthy of such lottery-winning circumstance. Plucked from relative obscurity out of dregsy Atlanta haunt Lennys, the band most likely to pull an R Kelly and piss in your beer, the Black Lips, return to London to serve up a free DJ set at Rough Trade East. Bring a copy of Black Swan and learn the real value of randomness.

Falling Up

2009-06-10T06:13:00.000-07:00

Unlike Will-i-am, Mos Def is actually falling up.

Most rappers who disappear into the cold, dark chasm of wackness - Common twice, Large Professor, Q Tip, PE, Snoop, Kweli - only seem capable of falling further. Surprisingly, the man who most lost his way has returned from the hacked-up corpse of fame to produce an album of inspiration.

It doesn't hurt that he and I are into the same shit - Malcolm X's post-Nation internationalism, Baris Manco's Turkish psychedelia, Fela, Potencorvo's Battle of Algiers. It also doesn't hurt that he's rapping again.

Your turn Goodie MOB.

Tech in Afghanistan

2009-05-29T00:37:00.000-07:00

To many, Immortal Technique is the most dangerous type of rapper. Neither a Bill Cosby poster child for American middle class responsibility nor a dripping ice sculpture of disorganised crime and capital accumulation, Tech is a menacing, cosmopolitan humanist. In a world full of either/ors, Immortal Technique is a complex emergency waiting to happen. Imagine the scandal in both middle America and institutionalised rap if the burgeoning slum classes hung images of Tech in Afghanistan outside their windows instead of the rote Biggie / 2Pac-ino banners.

Immortal Technique

Careerism

2009-05-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

Akron/Family Instore

Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? While not quite Wesley Willis’ Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonalds or Hare Krishna man’s mobile meals, Thursday’s Rough Trade midday in-store featuring drug-smoking freak folkers Akron/Family is as free as Arthur Lee. If you, like me, need clichés to get you through the day, then think of this as the perfect mixture of work and pleasure. Known for their musical polygamy, Akron/Family have something to offer everyone – from Linda in accounting’s secret Pentangle obsession to Steve in shipping’s unknown Thomas Mapfumo fetish. Bring your boss and just maybe the gig will – like UTFO hosting the office Christmas do – bring the freak out in everyone. / Ryan Mahan

Chucky D's First DJ

2009-05-19T09:34:00.001-07:00

Dr Hurum also found Predator X

Marketing Genius

2009-05-18T05:23:00.001-07:00
If you like baseball, then you'll love ink cartridges.

Let's hope neither Rekall or the Union of African Totalitarians get wind of this.

Who's Voice Shall I Use Today?

2009-05-08T02:41:00.000-07:00

The problem with Slavoj Zizek is that despite, or more properly because of, his schizophrenia - his demonstration of a mind perpetually outrunning itself - he is completely inspiring. Ordinarily, I would spend the last hours of my day with some Freudian grand-father figure such as Robert McNamara, David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, or Gandalf, lulling me away from repetition with fantastical tales of the order of all things. Last night, though, I found myself wading through Uncle Slavoj’s untamed lands, transformed into a child inspired by the possibility of such overwhelming novelty.

Normally too, I would assume some abandonment of fidelity in the staging of Tunnel 228, the Kevin Spacey approved art installation tucked behind Waterloo station wherein an agglomeration of inauthentic hacks and hipsters have gathered to stage another empty, hype-ridden simulation.

Yet today in all my giddy nakedness, I see a clever staging of the game of cat and mouse - the organisers setting the parameters in a way that by the time the predators – the media, the guidebookteers, the Time Outs - arrive, the party has moved on.

Though with the passing of the day into the next, I will surely return to my fatalistic experience, a parasite to someone else’s ideological styles.

Authenticity today, lame performance art tomorrow.

Robespierre in America

2009-05-02T11:15:00.000-07:00
"had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment."

John Brown

Dirty Rats

2009-05-02T03:15:00.000-07:00
"Hipsters are the infiltrators who spoil the resistance—the coolhunting collaborators and spies - the embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetic."

"The problem with hipsters seems to me the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be. Everything becomes just another signifier of personal identity. Thus hipsterism forces on us a sense of the burden of identity, of constantly having to curate it if only to avoid seeming like a hipster."

Ayn Rand's Cenotaph

2009-04-30T04:14:00.000-07:00

Let Them Eat Humans

2009-04-27T05:07:00.000-07:00

Just when those menacing Africanised bees seemed content to return to their tribal lands, we're now faced with another Third World disease. No, it's not from the Orient my friend, this plague speaks Spanish. While trawling through the local papers, overcome with fear at the thought of my next plate of biscuits and gravy - yes Travolta, bacon is good too - possibly being my last, I may have already found a solution.

In their Who? What? Where? and never Why? expose on the dreaded Swine Flu, England's Independent foresees this devasting neverending night having an "impact greater than any terrorist attack, nuclear attack, or environmental disaster." Yet despite its threat there seems to be a real option.

With my biggest concern being my ability to continue to consume anything and everything, I seem to have found the answer in their penetrating question, "is it safe to eat pork?"

"Yes," they say, "Cooking destroys the virus."

Why don't we then, following Jonathan Swift, prepare a giant barbecue upon which we can place all the sufferers of this Globally Southern mentality. I can imagine our Southern friends tasting quite nice on a bed of turnips with a dash of Brown Sauce. We could even cook feasts according the soon to be lost peoples' own holidays. While some may be looking forward to Eid or the month-long African safari buffet, I can't wait for Thanksgiving.

So long brothers, welcome back swine.

Ideolotik, Part One

2009-04-03T01:55:00.000-07:00
Happiness and Frankin-sense

There are so many reasons to be contented in this world.

For one, common sense has made an illustrious return. Where once there stood madness in the evil Cobra Commander figures of George W. Bush, CEOS, and NeoConservatives, now stands Barack Obama, Small Business, and John Maynard Keynes. So what if we are now lacking a scapegoat, a cathartic totem behind which we can hide our own historico-liberal ideologies. It simply does not matter. The benevolent nation-state is making its triumphant return.

It is also a new era of cooperation. Harkening back to Woodrow’s League or farther back to Westphalia, the G20 descended upon London last week to film a special episode of Robin Hood, robbing from all of us and giving to that most impecunious of fellows, the IMF. Who cares that the 1 trillion plus dollar injection of capital may not actually stimulate, it’s the simulation that counts. Plus what really matters is that we know they care. That is why we need more adverts - quirky little Wes Anderson shorts, accompanied by delicate, Feistian indie pop, depicting mild-mannered cosmopolitan bankers as common sense superheroes. After all, as Angela Merkel said, "this is a historic opportunity afforded us to give capitalism a conscience, because capitalism has lost its conscience and we have to seize this opportunity"

While we are busy indulging in this newfound pleasure, we must not let our felicity be shattered by a discontented few. After all, protest is nothing more than contrarianism, like sarcasm to wit, the lowest form of fitting in. Just look at the liberal bourgeoisie with their couture multiculturalism and hollow humanitarianism. Their supposed morality is a listless, anti-common sense, cool. Plus, masks are the new Hansel. First it was headbands, then it was moustaches, now it’s masks, black balaclavas concealing misinformed minds weaned on Naomi Kline and M.I.A. Hopefully, this political artefact of dressing up and registering disgust through the most pre-modern of means is only an anomaly to be consigned to its proper place in the history of fancy dress, posited right between wigged Girondins and fatigued Black Panthers. For modern man, there shall be none of this reckless idealism, only real pragmatism and our most precious common language of civility, the vote.

And so too just as the vote has levelled greedy authoritarians and absurd passions, we must follow the John Grays and Michael Manns, and allow democracy to destroy the myths of utopianism, not in one swift humane act, but slowly, tortuously, like Che Guevara’s hopeless slog through the wilds of Bolivia. Only then can we truly revel in the small steps and crawls through which change comes forth. We must not let vague spectres of race and class, of unjust wars and doleful discrimination, mar the victory of Barack Obama and his new version of American Exceptionalism. Myths too, of immoral national acts and the confining element of context, must be banished and replaced by new myths. There is no time for Mandela-style truth and reconciliation committees or tribunals on the overlooked interplay of race and class, only a narrative of great figures working together, slowly and efficiently, toward their common national, first, then international destinies. We must incant only the first words of “I Have a Dream” loud enough to silence Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” - ignoring his hope for a “radical revolution of values” in which “we must rapidly begin a shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society coming “to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Segal's Multicultural Dream

2009-03-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

No Permit, No House...Literally

2009-03-25T15:05:00.000-07:00
Israel demolishes two Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem

Repeat after Kevin Costner. If you build it, they will come. Though if you are a tenant in the newly minted Arab City of Culture, the big bad authorities may come and huff and puff and blow your house down. Just imagine the horror, or sadistic delight, worn on all our faces if Camden Council started driving Boris Johnson-sized wrecking balls through squatter sites and Traveller communities.

Zizek's So Hot Right Now

2009-03-17T04:51:00.000-07:00

And the award for best book cover / state terror promo goes to Slavoj Zizek...

Now Vines Upon the House's Frame

2009-03-16T07:03:00.000-07:00
The absurdity subsides, a stranger now, momentarily freed from the Kafka-esque absurdity of perpetual misfortune. Without such calamity, such excuse, the narcissist is laid bare.

The South emerges upon his sallow frame, suddenly, torn cloth wrapped as wisteria vines. A year ago, tuberculosis brought health, buttressing his dreams as dreams, destroying the advance of the previous year. Now, in mimicry he speaks. Without referent he returns to that place in Cumberland Estates, filled with the sobriety of a millenarian whose schools remain temples.

Love Rap

2009-03-04T05:33:00.000-08:00

Do we need a Zizekian orientalist account of the entire history and cultural significance of rap music? Surely Ghostface is incomprehensible enough.

If you have read Jeff Chang's platitudinal revisionist Can't Stop Won't Stop then the answer is yes.

If you haven't and find El-P a bit difficult, you may want to avoid Naked Punch's Hip Hop Dossier like art does a Bono lyric.

Pure Salt

2009-02-25T03:05:00.000-08:00
Strewn about the ground of Yeasayer's musical mountain retreat lays not snow but the pure salt of every failed musician.

Hopefully the spirit of Beorn will rouse the carnivorous appetite that made All Hour Cymbals such a great record. Though may the salt consume them like a homeless snail if they follow the short path of time to 80s bombast. Follow their perilous journey here http://odd-blood.blogspot.com/.

The Bees Made Honey in Carl Schmitt's Skull

2009-02-12T06:36:00.000-08:00

A recent AP report has confirmed today the deepest, darkest fears of many Utah residents with the news that Africanized bees have finally infiltrated the hives of Washington and Kane Counties. The invidious beasts, according to professor Kirk Visscher of the University of California at Riverside, 'get irritated faster, respond with more firepower and stay mad longer than other bees.' They are also said to exhibit higher irrationality and are thought to act on intuition rooted in 'gut feelings' rather than the calculated rationality of native bees. One local resident expressed disquiet at the bees' seeming communal spirit and blind, wholesale approval of a single, charismatic leader, "they ain't got no respect for a man's right to privacy, dancing about in great ritualistic swarms to the god-forsaken percussive racket of their collective wings."

State leaders are said to be ruing the day the National Basketball Association forced the Utah Jazz upon the residents of Salt Lake City. Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. though responded with the hope and optimism of anyone faced with such dire circumstances, "let this be just another test to the great people of the State of Utah, a test of their solidarity and of the sturdiness of their bomb shelters, a preparation for the next stage of the rapture.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090212/ap_on_re_us/africanized_bees

ScapeGoats

2009-02-06T03:54:00.000-08:00
The liberal critique spins a mighty tale of imperfect regimes within a perfect system. From conservative nationalism to liberal nationalism, our Janus turns its head.

George W. Bush should host a revised version of the TV reality show The Biggest Loser, on which corporate executives compete weekly for the most colossal management debacle. The winner gets a $200 million severance package and a presidential pardon.
--Kristen Wack

The Clash of Civilisations

2009-02-05T05:47:00.000-08:00
“I don’t know Sam, I’m unsure.”

“I swear I have seen this exact film before.”

“Of course you have dear sir, its historicity is most accurate, a terrifying amalgamation of the past and future days. The public has a real fetish for this kind of thing.”

“Yes, but there is no imagination, no soul, just iteration. I see no justification for it. It’s too disjointed. Yes, the story told is linear. But the images contradictory. “

‘Trust me. Keep reading.’

“Now John Ford, Tolkien gave us narrative, a foundation, transcendence, glorious and justified. The perpetual goodness of the protagonists. But all I see here are institutions and even those codes are bloody.’

“There is something here. A correlation, language, belief. But surely there are innocents.”

“All complicit my dear friend.”

“The transgression does seem disproportionate. Plus I do feel as if I’m watching the news. What about the New York Times? Surely they’ll have something to say about it.”

“All complicit my dear friend.”

“Academia?”

“Extraneous to the market sir.”

“Is Segal available? “

“He says he’s just a cook.”

Realpolitik

2009-01-22T04:59:00.001-08:00
Since I am obviously incapable of personally engaging with the concept of realism in international relations, I defer sanity on the question of Afghanistan and the idea of terror to those more comfortable with the game of charades.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090202/scheer

RELIGION DISPATCHES – JANUARY 15 2009

How Obama Can End the War On Terror

By Mark Juergensmeyer
January 15, 2009

First of all, the phrase "war on terror" needs to be retired. As a war, it is largely imagined, and as an idea it is ill-conceived. The effect of thinking in terms of global war is to make enemies out of millions of Muslims who would otherwise have been our friends.

The first step in ending the War on Terror is to stop calling it "the war on terror."

Ever since 9/11, the Bush administration—supported by the news media—has endorsed the radical jihadi idea that the world is engaged in a great ideological struggle between two competing foes. But this has never been the case. The United States was attacked on 9/11, as it had been many times before and since, by a small band of extremists who cloaked their disdain for America's global power in the language of religion and the images of cosmic war. They needed to be isolated and brought to justice for their misdeeds, not glorified as America's global enemy.

The effect of thinking in terms of global war was to make enemies out of millions of Muslims who otherwise would have been our friends—or at least not our cosmic foes. Perhaps the greatest paradox is that the war rhetoric also made George W. Bush into a satanic figure in many parts of the Muslim world.

Shortly before the previous presidential election, I interviewed a Muslim activist in Iraq who supported the jihadi insurgency against the US occupation. I asked him who he wanted to win the US presidential race, and to my surprise, he supported the reelection of President George W. Bush.

"But you hate Bush," I said in astonishment. "Why would you want him to win the election?"

"We want to defeat him," he told me, saying that he didn't want Bush to go quietly.

"We want to win the war and humiliate him," he said, "the way he has tried to humiliate us."

Now, over four years later, Bush is out. Whatever symbolic significance he has had as an enemy of radical Islam is leaving the global political stage. The Obama administration has a golden opportunity to rethink the War on Terror.

It seems to me that there is a strategy for victory that does not require armed conquest. My suggestion is that the new administration can "win" the War on Terror in part by rethinking the nature of the conflict. Let me suggest five steps that the U.S. could take in a post-Bush era to bring the War on Terror to an end:

1. Recognize that we are not confronting war but a war mindset.

The radical Muslim war against the secular West has been a powerful idea, erupting from time to time in destructive acts of terrorism, but it is largely an idea. It has no organized army nor is it poised to take political control over any country, especially not the United States. It is an imagined war between what are thought to be the forces of good against the forces of evil—incarnate in the likes of George Bush and his colleagues.

To some extent the Bush administration's "war on terror" is an imagined war as well. It has placed Osama bin Laden and his cadre on a symbolic pedestal in what has been characterized as a struggle between good and evil. President Bush's exhortation to be either "with us or against us" might well have compelled a good number of people who were otherwise on the fence to take sides against America. The young Muslims who were involved in the bombings in London's subway said that they chose to take a stand, and thought of themselves as soldiers in a great moral war. If that image of war disappeared, young men like them would not be enticed into imaginary roles as soldiers for truth.

Obama's pledge to hunt down bin Laden and exterminate him might have sounded good in tough campaign rhetoric, but it is not a platform for building a foreign policy in South Asia and the Middle East. Anti-Americanism is at an all-time high in Pakistan, and Obama has a fresh opportunity to rebuild the terms and image of US military presence in the region. The Muslim world is waiting for a US president who can stop treating them like enemies to be invaded but as potential friends.

2. Accept that America is the enemy because of what it does, not what it is.

America and other Western powers are thought to be evil because of their actions, such as supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The United States is imagined to be an evil enemy by jihadi activists not because of its freedom or anything else that is inherent in American society, but because of its policies and actions, particularly in the Middle East. Specifically, the U.S. is regarded as the enemy of Islam because of its support of undemocratic dictators like Egypt's Mubarak and the Saud family monarchy in Saudi Arabia, its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and for its one-sided support for Israel without equal concern for the rights of Palestine.

When I interviewed one of the Muslim activists involved in bombing the World Trade Center in 1993, he told me that he liked America. It was easy for him to be a Muslim in the United States, he said, and he respected our freedom of religion. Though he and other Muslim activists, such as Sayyid Qutb, disliked what they regarded as America's lax moral standards, they were angered only when they thought that we were trying to force our way of living onto them, or to control or exploit Muslim countries. They did not hate America's freedom—they hated what they regarded as America's attempts to control others and deprive them of what they regarded as their freedom from the West.

In the same way, most Americans do not despise Muslim activists because of who they are—Muslims—but because of what they do. Bin Laden and his forces are thought to be evil because of their horrible acts of terrorism, not because we think that there is anything inherently evil about Islam. This means that the differences between the two positions are not insurmountable, and the imagined war will end when each side stops doing things that the other side regards as acts of evil.

This means that the Obama administration should not waste its energy in trying to shore up America's public relations image. That will improve instantly once US military forces are out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. has brokered an enduring peace between Israel and Palestine.

3. Stop acting like an enemy.

The great terror war would come shuddering to a halt if the United States was no longer perceived as doing evil things in the eyes of its Muslim activist opponents. Many of these allegedly "evil things" involve the US military. The jihadi recruiting videos that are posted on the internet always begin in the same way—showing American military actions that kill and oppress Muslims. An end to those military actions will immediately undercut the support for the anti-American jihadi ideology.

One proof of the effectiveness of a non-military response is the Awakening movement in al Anbar province of Iraq, a movement that arose in 2005 and then became associated with the so-called "surge" strategy of General David Petraeus. As Obama correctly pointed out in the 2008 campaign debates, the success of Petraeus' strategy was only partially related to a surge in troop strength. In fact the strategy actually involved a reduction of troops in the Sunni territory of al Anbar province. Though these troops were re-deployed to Baghdad—where they joined a surge of new American forces dispatched to patrol neighborhoods and make them more secure—they were not replaced in the al Anbar countryside.

With no US military around to hate—and with American financial support for their new security operations—local militias turned their attention away from America and toward another enemy, the al Qaeda forces that had infiltrated the resistance movement. In this case the US military quickly changed from an enemy to an ally.

When the United States withdraws from Iraq, a major symbol of America's imagined evil will disappear. During the campaign, Obama consistently supported a pull-out of US troops, and Iraqis will be watching to see how completely this promise is kept. If the withdrawal is slow, if large numbers of combat forces remain in a new name, such as "military advisors," if the huge US military bases that have been constructed in the Iraqi desert are allowed to remain under US control, Obama's words about withdrawal from Iraq might be seen as an empty promise.

Of even more concern is Obama's stance on Afghanistan. During the campaign, he has called for an increase of a hundred thousand troops, which would double the number presently there. Yet it will still be half of the numbers of Russian troops that the former Soviet Union had deployed in Afghanistan—and it lost the war, dragging much of the Soviet economy down with it.

A similarly dismal prognosis is in store for America's continuing presence in Afghanistan. Moreover, the persistence of US troops in the region will continue to provide an irritant that will bolster anti-American forces not only in Afghanistan but in neighboring Pakistan. There, this presence is a major catalyst, supporting the kind of radical jihadi ideology that has led to acts of terrorism both within Pakistan and in adjacent India, including the recent attacks in Mumbai. For this reason, a strategy for withdrawal from Afghanistan, and from Iraq, should be a high on the list of objectives for the Obama administration.

4. Become a problem solver not a problem maker.

Aside from what is regarded as its military meddling, the other thing that makes the United States appear as an enemy to many Muslim activists is its influence on Middle Eastern politics. As I mentioned, this includes US financial and political support for regimes that are regarded as dictatorial, and its seemingly uncritical stance toward Israel.

Though the U.S. will not retreat from its political support for Israel—for it has moral and historical reasons for assuring Israel's security—this stance need not appear completely one-sided. It is important that America be seen as championing the just cause of Palestinian freedom. The Baker-Hamilton Commission report correctly concluded that peace between Israelis and Palestinians would affect the way that the U.S. is perceived in the Middle East, and that a positive outcome to the peace process would undermine the militant anti-American jihadi cause.

The perception that the U.S. is tied to Israel affects everything else that the U.S. does in the Middle East. In Iraq, for example, when citizens in Fallujah demonstrated against the killing of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin by an Israeli military strike in 2004, the protesters linked the Israeli actions toward Palestine with the US military occupation in Iraq. The mob then turned on American contract workers who happened to be driving down Fallujah's main street (which had just been renamed "Sheik Yassin Street" in honor of the fallen Palestinian leader), killing them and stringing up their charred corpses from the girders of a bridge. It was an image that hardened the resolve of US officials to punish and control Fallujah, which led to the invasion and decimation of the city later that year—actions that in turn increased the level of anti-Americanism among Iraqi insurgents.

So the support for Israel has had a direct effect in increasing the anti-American sentiment in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Conversely, American support for Palestinian autonomy and a renewed effort by the U.S. to become engaged in the peace process would be seen as an attempt by America to be a problem solver rather than a problem maker in the region. It is disconcerting that during the recent Israeli attacks on Hamas in Gaza there has not been a more vocal expression of concern from the Obama camp. Though his administration will not be in a position to affect US policy until after the inauguration, they should appear poised to enter into the negotiations in a positive and fair-minded way, concerned not only about Israel's security—which it should be—but about the security and autonomy of the Palestinian people as well.

5. Take the moral high road and adhere to international standards of justice.

Perhaps the most enduring position the new administration can take to end the War on Terror is to elevate the discourse of international politics. This means in large part restoring America's image as a protector of human rights and international law. Both have been tarnished in the zealous antiterrorism tactics of the neo-con years of Bush foreign policy, and this has deeply damaged America's image throughout the world.

Soon after the revelations of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, a well-educated woman who taught at Baghdad University asked me, "How can the U.S. expect Iraq to adhere to human rights when it doesn't do so itself?" Though she had hated Saddam, she told me, she was disheartened to see the U.S. stoop to some of his standards.

The Iraqi woman had a good point, and illustrated the fact that by relaxing our standards of justice and human rights we helped to make enemies out of those who might otherwise have been our friends. Rather than diminishing the threat of terror, it was one of the factors that promoted anti-Americanism and made terrorism possible. Practices of torture and imprisonment without trial have helped to enlarge the image of America as an evil enemy.

The Obama administration would be well counseled to restore the standards of international justice and human rights that were reduced in the name of the War on Terror. For one thing the most pernicious aspects of the anti-terrorism legislation should be repealed. Torture in any form should never be acceptable, and the incarceration facilities at Guantanamo Bay should be closed. Persons accused of abetting in terrorist acts need to be held accountable for their actions, of course, but in the same way that any person involved in a criminal act is held accountable and brought to justice.

These five courses of action will help to diminish the spiral of violence associated with the War on Terror. They will not obliterate all acts of terrorism, however, since there will always be lone acts of extremists who will try to goad us into responses that will magnify their importance and spread their view of the world. Terrorism has become a tool of those disaffected with authority, and it would be as difficult to eradicate all forms of terrorism as to do away with all forms of handguns.

It would be prudent not to overreact to incidents of terrorism when they occur in the future, however. Following the Good Friday Agreement that ended the troubles in Northern Ireland, a rogue band of IRA extremists who were unhappy with what they thought was a sell-out by their own leader instigated a bloody act of terror in the town of Omagh. To the credit of the British and Northern Irish authorities, however, they did not let this incident affect the agreement that they had signed, and they treated the incident as a criminal act undertaken by a few extremists rather than the expression of a mass movement.

The War on Terror will come to a close when America takes the high road in international affairs, and does not exaggerate its response to the provocation of a few. Some aspects of the strategy to end the War on Terror will be difficult. Removing US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan will take time and effort, and engaging in the peace process between Israel and Palestine will involve a great deal of diplomatic maneuvering.

Other aspects of the end to the War on Terror will be more easy to accomplish, and can be done as soon as the new Obama administration is installed. Among them will be an end to the phrase "war on terror," words that indicate a long-term engagement with ideological positions that are not easily changed. That's the kind of stagnant thinking that Obama has pledged to overcome. It is time to stop thinking and acting as if the world was at war.

Mark Juergensmeyer is director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, and Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State.

Worst Albums Redux: Paul Simon goes to Columbia

2008-12-18T07:57:00.000-08:00
Listeners remain incredulous as to whether Men at Work were attempting to channel worldbeat's nascent influence on 1980s pop music or paying homage to their genocidees languishing in the Australian wilderness when they released the paradigm destroying album, Business as Usual. Either way the record's popularity proved that truly new and vital forms emerging from afro-beat and no-wave to dub and hip hop were no match for the fulsome colonial thrust of pop music. Of course the form itself is built upon the sediment(s) of so many local musics, interpreted and translated into a palatable product, giving birth to the colonial conception of the catchy. Yet simple recognition of this fact and serious engagement with the source material is all too often lost on the translator. While remaining faithful to the source is by no means the measure of a true artist, abstracting the form from its context and any meaning previously attached to it is an even more dangerous proposition.

And so stand the poster-children for this abstract condition, the pastel-stained Gap Ad that is Vampire Weekend, a band who's sound could just as easily be described as High School Musical goes to Africa as Paul Simon goes to Columbia. Either way and unbelievably so, the immeasurable amount of pure vapidity buried within these tidy, catchy pop songs has been lost on almost every single critic to date. Yes the music is undeniably catchy but the smarmy, flippant particularity of their Cape Codian landscape could be no further from the universalist highlife of Lagos or Accra from which they borrow so heavily.

Short films about vampires. English Grammar. Lil' John. Fascinating stuff. The only thing missing is Chevy Chase. And maybe Peter Gabriel.

Awesomest Bands

2008-12-17T02:52:00.000-08:00
Crystal Antlers

The glorious sound of totalitarianism.

Ipso Facto

Fetishism aside...

Awesomest Guitarist

2008-12-15T05:04:00.001-08:00

Awesomest Blog

2008-12-12T08:04:00.000-08:00
Two years worth of archived tapes from every corner of the African continent.

http://awesometapesfromafrica.blogspot.com

Chambliss, STILL the Senator: Why ain't no God-forsaken Yankee Imperialist Gonna Tread on my Traditions

2008-12-04T08:22:00.000-08:00
In a vote that gives one collective tobacco-stained middle finger to Lincoln, that bitch-goddess Secretary of State, Hillary 'Seward' Clinton and the rest of his merry band of politically correct, cosmopolitan imperialists, the people of the state of Georgia have decided that one month of change is one month too long.

Their plebescite read, in an accent of amalgamated plain, plateau and mountain twangs,

"We the people of the State of Georgia promise to reinforce the stereotypical image of the American South as an homogenous mass of ignorance and in doing so we will make every endeavour to ensure that the next four years will be every bit as successful as Andrew Johnson's failed Reconstruction project."

Worst Albums of 2008

2008-12-01T04:43:00.000-08:00

There is nothing more stomach churningly pathetic than a pop music critic; being a member of the Those who Cannot Do, Critique Club I own this insight as an unrepentant hater with equal distaste for critics as those who make unequivocally bad music. Of course, we could deconstruct quality to the point where previously derided and shamelessy commercial records earn praise due to their clarity of intent unfettered by pretentions to art or equally, we could pose as the ultimate postmodernists, contrarians inverting the cultural marxism of Theodor Adorno where in the words of Daryl Mac bad music is actually 'not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good.' But for the purposes of this series, it is important to set a categorical imperative of Kantian proportions where the world has not turned upside down providing the verb to hate on with objective foundations in everyday reality.

And thus my first selection for Worst Albums of 2008 is Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's Old Money . My hate here is more disappointment than unfettered contempt as Mr. Rodriguez-Lopez has both musical knowledge and impeccable taste powering former progenitors of scythe-edged simplicity At the Drive In. He also has little care for the trends proffered by the Cognoscenti of Postmodern Cool where a band as grating, artless, and puerile as Los Campesinos earns praise for being 'bratty' and 'brash.' Unluckly for us neither of these translate into the ability to produce qualitatively good music.

For one, Old Money works on the premise that modern capitalism is as swollen and unethical as the early 20th century where robber barons and rentiers hoarded vast proportions of any nation's industrial wealth. While I agree that the present is filled with the predatory past, a bloated shred-fest owing as much to Steve Vai as Frank Zappa is hardly capable of embodying such scathing class critique, clever titles aside. Plus, while I find it difficult to envision Messrs. Rockefeller and Vanderbilt dancing the Charleston to the sounds of Old Money, I can easily imagine modern oligarchs propped up by new money like Roman Abramovich and Mark Cuban bumping rails of coke to the sounds of 'Family War Funding (Love Those Rothschilds)' while the world outside continues to drown in its own hemophilia.

Second, the contents of Old Money are unlistenable. In fact, try as I may, I have not been able to trudge through more than thirty seconds of each song. Though that in itself may be enough to add this title to my Contrarian Doucebag Best of 2008.

The Only Sports Journalist in the World

2008-11-28T03:50:00.000-08:00
Athletes are the penultimate symbol of national duty, veritable King's men holding steadfast to the nation's chilvaric code. They are often godly men well-versed in the conservative arts, masculine guardians of the family and the traditional structure of society. Sport, they claim, should be a refuge from the real world, an abstraction and an escape. Sports journalists, like financial journalists, act as their loyal technocrats, filling their pages with statistics, shielding their subjects from society. Yet athletes are more than symbols, particularist abstractions in their own right. They have access to a wealth that most never see and in their symbolic gestures they make very real political statements about what is proper conduct for a national citizen.

David O'Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is one journalist that breathes fresh air into this suffocating climate. It is rare that such a man of music and art, a true subterranean, has found his way in this environment. For you sir who always rocks, I salute you.

Pullman on Manet

2008-11-20T04:36:00.000-08:00
Tonight at Somerset House's Writer's Talks in the Courtauld Gallery author Philip Pullman pontificates on the proletarian gloom of Édouard Manet’s famed A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Maybe this will serve as the impetus for Pullman to finally finish his Class Warfare for Kids compendium we’ve all been waiting on.

Go to lecool.com for the full preview.

Hip Hop Cher Style

2008-11-18T06:36:00.000-08:00
Nothing says hip hop more than the Antares Auto-Tune, the famed audio processor popularised by no less than that rugged and raw progenitor of urban angst Cherilyn Sarkisian. Let's face it Bambaata's synth vocals were too soft for the new millenium. I wonder if Will-i-am has that backing track cooked up yet for Obama's Auto-Tuned inauguration speech. Do you believe in life after Bush?

In Reluctant Recognition of Brian Wilson

2008-11-12T08:29:00.000-08:00
While Brian Wilson's genius lies in his ability to convey a wholesale rejection of adulthood in favour of the whimsy of puerility without uttering a word, he is no more enjoyable than listening to a five year old boys choir playing vocal Candyland. Luckily, the beauty of music lies in interpretation. It turns out one can remove the medium from the absurdity, in this case multiple part vocal harmonies from Wilson's zany Peter Pan fantasyland, add the weariness of experience, a wealth of influence, one part CSNY, one part Eno and Byrne, and the outcome is a new direction in American independent music.

Fleet Foxes - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

#87.2 - YEASAYER - 2080
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Good Jobs

2008-10-27T07:42:00.000-07:00
The first glimpse of history I catch every morning as I gaze upon the charcoal stained precipice of my neighbour’s terrace is the London of Queen Victoria, her roof choking on the fumes of industry and the interminable toil of her working masses. In the evening the shrieks and gasps of the revellers below are reminiscent of the libertinism unleashed by the restoration of Charles II to the throne, libidinous crowds ringing the death knell of heady political conflict with effusive pelvic thrusts. The past then not so much lulls me to sleep but rather pummels me into submission with fulsome images of utilitarian chimera. From these nights of deferred pleasures, I am often precipitously thrown out of sleep by the incessant hammering of the future, the pretense of renewal compounding the weariness that history has worn on my face. I too engage in this guise, running hot water over my eyes, vainly rejecting the faint traces of the past around me in favour of my own trailblazing agency. The trail I blaze to the office is an instant reminder of this farce as I am quickly thrust into a present more medieval than modern. The vast effluvium of words carelessly spat out of the collective mouth of the media behemoth, value free fact mediums to some, augur ultimate calamity, tossing me drunkenly into an absurd narrative where the past coalesces in an ungainly mixed metaphor.

Here amongst the perpetual blaze I can no more be Samuel Pepys than I can Prometheus, my cognizance and my will inhibited by the charcoal filtered opinions of the experts. It would seem that the spirits forced upon my liver would provide powerful distraction from the sky’s collapse, though I rarely find solace, for the drink I have imbibed leaves me with the impression that I am in total control of my body.

And so I find myself not on the streets of present day London but holed up in a vestibule in the city of Oran, my eyes dried by the smoke, fearing that the plague-ridden rats will finally breach my barricade. In the East, I hear that all of course is not well with Innocent III’s latest battle with the heretics of Islam. In the Caribbean and the Far East I hear of islands where the last beacon of upright certitude, the public sphere, has been swallowed up by profligate autocrats, binding the natural right of speech in the most ingenious of artifices. Convoluted I’ll admit but denying access to toothpaste restricts the mouth from protesting too loudly for fear that the noxious odours buried within will offend the senses of passersby. It is said too that citizens there have no right to float on the benevolent waves of the internet and therefore no access to the vast amounts of unbridled fact buoyed on the crests of freedom. This idea is too much for my fear-stricken body to handle, shudders sent down my spine by the thought of never knowing the manatee of free speech.

In the West, Cotton Mather does battle with heresies of his own, these of course are merely spectres, omens of future incarnations of socialist science proffered by Godless communitarians fit only for the guillotine or the madhouse. His opponent plays a similar deadly game calling for change and offering the morality of security and Keynes as bulwarks against the crises of ideology. And here the last shred of comfort warms my limbs, the absurdity of optimism while entrenched in the wasteland of the Somme momentarily betraying me. There still exists a space free from the extremes of belief and ideology, a place of solid objectivity unchallenged by the tyrants of postmodernity, an area peopled by the most virtuous of modernity, their virtue marked by the absence of subjective value. It is the public realm, and they are the upright citizens possessed of good jobs.

I can imagine this idyll from my perch in Oran, the good faces of the good people with good jobs unblemished by the agglomeration of history advancing around them. I pass my lustful gaze upon the recent past and the deference evoked by every instance they crossed my path. I, like everyone else, am enamoured by their devotion to their daily tasks, at how they fulfil their Aristotelian functionality with steadfast certitude while the outside realm is afflicted by the effects of causes, thrown into chaos by greed and power. Outside this sphere, amid such utter depravity, Flannery O’Connor is correct, a good man is hard to find. But within, good people abound, a conglomeration of organs working together to ensure the survival of the last great social organism. It pains me to dwell on this distant idyll anymore as I turn my gaze upon the dead society around me, a world turned upside down by so many beasts of no nation, ill gotten without merit or hard work. At twilight, the poverty in the air is rife as I learn of the collapse of so many more seemingly stable markets. I scoff at the insinuation that some of our current problems are a direct result of the economic sphere, as if good people could be the root of such destruction.

I fear my demise is close at hand as my mind passes through that euphoric state the unwitting wildebeest drifts into just before the lion’s jaw closes upon its beleaguered body. There I return to a lush state of nature. From my solitude in the medieval present, I am now immersed in the companionship that only the timeless age of labour can offer. I am approached by one particularly estimable person whose hello I return in the affirmative.

“And what do you do?” he asks curiously.

Pride swells within as I taste for the first time the sense of belonging. But before I can respond, the distant scuttle of rats becomes omnipresent throwing me once more from dream to nightmare.

Fear of a Black President

2008-10-24T07:54:00.001-07:00
In the film Bamboozled, satirist Pierre Delacroix creates a modern day minstrel show envisioning the delight aroused in white America as a forum is given for them to revel in their own latent stereotypes. The main protagonists Mantan and Sleep n Eat, fumble and guffaw over their perpetual misfortune, insouciantly pausing to devour watermelon and fried chicken as house band the Alabama Porch Monkeys close the show with a rousing coda. The audience actively engages in the spectacle, grinning like ingenuous children unaccustomed to the world of meaning. It is on the surface, pure farce.

Yet in the theatre of America, her protagonists lay claim to a similar innocence imbibing the satire below as a comical reflection of reality. And innocence is always the most powerful defence. It is our dearest claim. Our exceptional right to absurdity.

My Very Own Take That

2008-10-02T02:04:00.001-07:00

I have resisted this sort of fetishism for as long as I possibly could; maybe it is the Vanessa Beecroft aesthetics of Hypnotise, creating a mystique of nihilistic otherworldliness. I mean that's the idea of art is it not, to incite curiosity by presenting an image simultaneously distant and familiar. But is this not my rational veil, masking the more base instincts held within Friedan's The Feminine Mystique . Judging from my being reduced to an awestruck adolescent drunk on the release of A Hard Days Night, my intoxicated speech a Creole smattering of screams and grunts, the subject of the object is never too far from my mind. But to be instantly fascinated by form, to be struck by a flutter of inspiration that momentarily warms the cold grip of cynicism set in after the realisation of the impossibility of the new and the utopian obsession of a revolutionary break with the past.

Ipso Facto's immediate past is a place where I have preferred not to venture. It, in my impressionistic rendering, is a vague setting, filled with authoritarian images of authenticity, order, and a time where the nation was a healthy whole. The aesthetes seem at first to be vintage fetishists, purveyors of empty style. But of course their past too is dark and fragmented.

Of course on a balmy autumn evening in Southeast London, none of us are really that deep. We are all faced with the more immediate concerns of mediated hedonism, further protecting our limbs from the lashing wind and the pissing rain, lowering our inhibitions so that we may interact more comfortably without regard to the intricate complex of mores protecting us from them. In this state it is normal to buy Rosie and Cherish a drink, repeating their names in my head as if they'd long graced the cover of Teen Idol with a young Marc Bolan. It is also my intention to assure them that whilst I am being obsequious, my intentions are intention-less. I am so sure they believe me that I abscond to the stage to watch These New Puritans do their best Gang of Four impressions, though keeping my gaze fixed on the preceding five minutes, ignoring the foolishness of our one and only chance meeting.

The Mews and the Hotness

2008-08-22T02:35:00.000-07:00
125A Camden Mews...may it burn on the talents of its former tenants.

Nic paints the hotness,

T-Rock hosts the hotness,

Auditions for Vice Magazine

2008-08-15T08:03:00.000-07:00
I always knew Bobby Cox was really a Cock, a descendant from that great line of Cornish Cocks. Unfortunately for the champion of the downtrodden ethnic minority in all of us, the British Jacobins seem to be wiping out any trace of the once great nation.

At least their brethren in Canada can keep the flame of displaced peoples alight.

I hear they have a valiant captain.

Territorial integrity always comes at a price.

From Sub Pop to Geffen

2008-08-03T03:07:00.000-07:00
The Frank-drenched essence of my luck with flying could only end with Tom Hanks. Fortunately my recent clash with the dizzying heights of aerophobia did not finish with a slip out of a Quantas-sized hole to meet my end in barbate solitude. While the past few days have only reinforced my terminally challenged tendencies, flying standby has wrought a new twist in this psychological skein. On the bright side, at least the airline industry's rapine policy of overbooking has delayed the inevitable leaky bowels brought on by my recurring dreams of dismemberment. Though when I first imagined the interminable distance between London and Atlanta, it did not include a ten-plus hour journey to and from the first great outpost of English and Scottish assimilation, Edinburgh. Add to that the hundreds of pounds spent travelling around the country in order to return to the wintry English summer a slightly broken man when I should have been drowning in the Georgian humidity, devouring hot wings and suffocating on the spectacle of American democracy in that all too progressive town of Bethlehem, Georgia, then you do indeed have a man born on bitter alienation.

Desert island.

Airport terminal.

It really doesn’t make much difference Mr. Hanks – save for the incessant banter of a few lowland Scots lamenting the downfall of Hibernian Football Club; the red-faced defeat worn on the face of a week long strandee, a beautiful Geordie girl with a tooth wrought of gold, and a dissertation critically engaging the lack of a levelling spirit in the Harry Potter series. For now all I can hope for is a respite from the nine month bout of pneumonia presently dormant in my tattered lungs. I guess I’ll be watching The Future is Unwritten on repeat this week, living vicariously through Joe Strummer's humanism, trying to convince myself that the Absolute has not inscribed my fate on the license plate of the Stunticon, Dead End. Otherwise I might succumb to this utter alienation and resign myself to the certitude of calamity.

My MP3 Player Loves the Wu

2008-07-21T02:39:00.000-07:00
"Wu-Tang again?" I benumbingly ask my musical friend, my brain awash in streams of visceral ultra-violence.
"Again and again!" it responds, the skeletal loneliness of Syl Johnson ricocheting off my hollow bones.
Yet I find it quite easy to relent to these circumstances. Maybe it's my nihilistic impulses, a fetishisation of escape, or my inabiliy, despite my best efforts, to recover the true ends of an artist's intent. Either way, my fingers form outlines of vengence and my lips curl in masculine braggadocio, my limbs colluding to express a personal rebirth. It becomes ever more apparent that my days are a ruse. And every intellectual pursuit a guise to mask my tendancy towards to the senseless. A truth only exposed by the Wu. For Rza and I share a love of Machiavelli's Wild West. And thus the sociopath is born.

There's Good, there's Bad, and then there's Phil Collins

2008-07-13T02:55:00.000-07:00

Good?

I just cannot figure where on this diverse spectrum of objective quality Wolf Parade's At Mount Zoomer rests. I mean I can't figure out if the record is really good or if it's Rick Springfield's lost prog-pop masterpiece. The vocals hold little promise of daring or danger, unless an adult alternative Isaac Brock is your idea of this era's GG Allin. And the keyboardist filling every inch of space with his zany sounds of the universe plug-ins, might as well be the drummer in your adolescent Venom cover band. Yet despite all this and the threads of Phil Collins this record wraps around my neck, I think I'll risk choking and give it a Good.

Bad?

Flying Lotus Los Angeles

Another one of those is this bad or is this bad-ass? I'll label it smooth electronica and give it a Bad.

Phil Collins

Nas Untitled

Nas should be thinking immolation rather than apotheosis.

On Blast

2008-07-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

John Gray is your drunk cynical uncle who prances around in a cobbled together tooth fairy outfit in an attempt to prove the adolescent impotence of your whole system of thought.

The best way to recover from such a complete ass kicking doled out by Mr. Gray is to cast your Black Kids and Vampire Weekend records into the abyss, and drown your newfound nihilistic wearyness in the din of Titus Andronicus.

And if you're too worked up to sleep, why not finish yourself off to the classic beauty of Miss Claudia Cardinale.

Film - Taxi to the Dark Side

2008-06-19T05:48:00.000-07:00

'Taxi to the Dark Side'
Alex Gibney

Without Ground, How Does One Stand?

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes remarked that only human beings were subject to the privilege of Absurdity. And yet the idea of an extra-legal American detention centre ensconced on Cuban sovereign territory is not quite as bizarre as it may have once seemed. Maybe it is because we have grown rather accustomed to a world unmade by George Bush’s apocalyptic rendering of a global struggle between forces of good and evil, where any means are justified in the righteous cause of global liberal capitalist democracy. In any case, Alex Gibney’s most recent study of the terror that is Guantanamo Bay, ‘Taxi to the Dark Side,’ seeks to reveal the absurdity that is latent within the axiom that terror is only transgressive in the hands of terrorists.

While the film itself suffers from its American insularity - where state terror is a novel concept invented by neo-conservatives - it demands Americans to note the numerous paradoxes within their national identity. It namely questions the American belief in what Benedict Anderson deemed, the Goodness of their Nation, wherein civic notions of democracy and justice are the bases of American identity. The film also acts as a modern day Eichmann in Jerusalem bringing the question of culpability to the forefront of the discussion. Most notably, using the conservative logic of individual responsibility, Gibney asks who is responsible for such atrocities in Bagram and Abu Ghraib, the dutiful soldier following orders or the Secretary of Defense devising such maniacal schemes.

Though much to the chagrin of Gibney there is little hope of such a serious national re-examination for which the film demands. After all, most of us suffer from conditions of mythic proportions.

And so the absurdity continues.

How to Be a Writer

2008-05-15T07:36:00.000-07:00
Wow, I sure am full of shit.

Just remember, when you freelance, be sure to say as little as possible in as many words as you can. Also, be punchy, witty, and ironic. Use words like angular and cathartic for rock music and phrases like " cop this record" and "word on the streets" when describing rap music.

Just look how well I write for LeCool .

Thank You New Media!

2008-05-15T02:47:00.000-07:00
http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/town-talk/entries/2008/05/13/protests_planne.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab

Thank God New Media has produced the complete democratisation of political discourse. The spectrum of opinion is astounding!

Subsequent Discourse

2008-05-14T02:32:00.000-07:00
or 'How to Discuss Race in America' by PT Barnum

Lesson 1: Blame racism on the offended. After all, racism is indeed a delusion suffered by homosexuals, yankees, and other paternalistic racists.

Lesson 2: Direct the discussion away from race. Deny any negative historical connotative links between objects and groups. Monkeys are cute and loveable, nooses are for state ordained executions of outlaws and other miscreants, and blackface is an innocuous ode to simpler times.

Lesson 3: Invoke free speech. It's right there in the US constitution; citizens are free to speak without fear of a discussion emerging.

http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/town-talk/entries/2008/05/13/protests_planne.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab

The New Cosmopolitans

2008-05-13T07:03:00.000-07:00
With the dawn of the 21st Century falling rapidly behind us we can find security in the knowledge of our interminable progress toward universal equality. Please excuse our forebears for they knew not what they did; things were different back then. Only in the United States of America can a man of color rise to great prominence and earn such respect as to have a t-shirt printed in his honor.

On Blast

2008-02-27T06:03:00.000-08:00
Consumption (and yes I have officially recovered from my three-month bout of consumption) for the Week 28 February 2008

Video

Yeasayer - 'Wait for the Summer' Don't believe what you hear about Yeasayer. Watch this instead, http://www.mixtapeclub.com/.

Music

Portishead - 'Machine Gun' from ATP Nightmare Before Christmas
The entire show is a welcome return and no one can accuse Portishead of going pop. Of the four songs performed off the upcoming album Third - 'Wicca', 'Hunter', 'Machine Gun', and Peaches - 'Machine Gun' is by far the most stunning, built around a rudimentary snyth-drum loop and Beth Gibbons' rapturous voice.

Main Source - Breaking Atoms (1991)
You can't claim you know hip-hop unless you've heard this Large Professor produced masterpiece. The album would never see release today due to endless samples utilized here; think Paul's Boutique . It's not just the beats that remain relevant though as Extra-P plays the master surgeon, literally dissecting the major flaws of American society. The cat could have been a lecturer considering how deep he runs.

Culture - Two Sevens Clash (1979)
I have always held both ska and reggae in a very low regard - maybe it's the Germans and their strange fascination with dancehall that turned me off or that whole horribly ill-conceived third wave ska movement. Either way, I have recently found my way into dub and roots through Lee Perry, Junior Murvin, and most notably, Culture. How could you not love a band that revels so completely in the impending apocalypse?

The Clash - 'Magnificent 7' (Sandinista 1980)
The only reason the Clash should be defined as a punk band is because Joe Strummer, Mick Joes, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon would venture anywhere and try anything. 'Magnificent 7' throbs with urgency and curiosity and is a bit reminiscent of Kurtis Blow with an edge.

Just a Friendly Game of Golf; It's Just Sport Dude, Just Like 24 is Simply Entertainment

2008-01-20T05:46:00.000-08:00
Desert of the Real or A Loving Tribute to Fuzzy Zoeller?

Large Professor, mouthpiece of the inimitable hip-hop trio Main Source, likened police brutality and the larger American society that reared it to a friendly game of baseball. In an insightfully scathing and multi-layered approach Extra-P revealed that American identity necessitated both the repression and expression of racial insecurity through a Zizekian sublimation of reality. While Large Professor's main target was the overt violence directed at African-Americans during the tenure of Ed Koch - a reign which would later seem mild in comparison to Rudolph Giuliani's clampdown of New York City - he alluded to America's society of spectacle and obsession with diversion, one so complete that our own identity seems at once total and insecure.

And people watch the news for coverage on the game
Hmm, and got the nerve to complain
They need to get themselves a front row seat
Or sink a baseline for a beat
Cause television just ain't designed for precision y'all
It's just a friendly game of baseball

Baseball is a seemingly harmless diversion from the atomization precipitated by modernity.
Yet its societal function is one of symbol, where the nation and all its myths are on full display.
Sport is our great refuge from politics. We therefore cease to attempt to grasp our own identity and take for granted that which we believe has been settled.

So when overwhelmingly unimportant "golf analyst" Kelly Tighlman called for young players to "lynch Tiger Woods in a back alley," she made an unthinkable mistake, bringing Politics into our safe hyperreality. Our deluded self-image is so complete that her comments are as absurd as a foursome discussing The Souls of Black Folk or likening the Holocaust to our own Manifest Destiny. The shock is brief though, as the victim calls for calm and the golfing world moves on. Yet our society stumbles on, regurgitating myths and displacing the blame for her comments on the offended and not the offenders. Cue Bryant Gumbell, "after this brief intermission, let's return to the game."

http://sports.espn.go.com/golf/news/story?id=3189374
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JMdBR0kLrU

Don't Shoot the Master

2007-10-30T02:30:00.000-07:00
If only this happened more often...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7068549.stm

Racism's Dead...Thank God for Georgia

2007-10-27T04:16:00.000-07:00
While racism's genius has been its ability to weave itself intricately and unnoticed into the fabric of the American character, it sometimes erupts from one of the many buboes on the pocked surface of our societal skin. In a horrible yet necessary way it overtly reminds us of all that is latent within each one of our bodies. If only the disgusting images from the Auburn frat-boys dressed in black-face to Jena could bring about a true examination of our history instead of being suffocated under the oppressive pillow of our misplaced morality. Though digging for illusory truth might destroy the insidiously supposititious ground that saves us all from gravity, the purgatory of the postmodern might be preferable to the arrogance of identity. At least all could recognize that we stand unwittingly on burial sites.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=3080331

Gratitude

2007-10-14T07:45:00.001-07:00
A year ago I was consumed by humidity, languishing in artistic torpitude as sluggish as any mid-summer Atlanta afternoon. It was a combination of a procession of dreams deferred and, to butcher Hannah Arendt's phrase, the evil of banality. A year later I am reveling in inspiration, an inspiration that comes at the dawn of autumn where I can see every word spoken in the cold induced outline of my warm breath. I have never so desired to devour life and I want to thank those who have abetted my hunger.

Shanna Sang (I could never express in words my debt to you)
John Gullick (A lovely man full of grace and humility)
Frankie Fisher (Although you attempt a cynical character your love of life is infectious)
Lee Tesche (My musical partner and the most interesting, inspired person I know)
Mom (Anything I might say would be trite in comparison to your love)

In Rainbows

2007-10-14T07:14:00.001-07:00

Radiohead have just released quite a breathtaking album. In four words, impeccable, infectious, soulful and beatific. I'm not your average obsessive Radiohead fanatic but this record makes me want to weep. Although the entire album is a revelation, I would have to recommend the following:

'Bodysnatchers' - dirty, grimy rocker

'Nude' - utterly beautiful slow-burner

'Reckoner' - the new soul, quite possibly one of the greatest songs I have ever heard

It is fruitless to attempt a full album review since Greg Kot at the Chicago Tribune has already written the perfect piece,

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2007/10/12-million-down.html

My Name is Albert Ayler

2007-10-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

I wrote a review for the above referenced film a few months ago and then that tarred and feathered international man of mystery, Lee Tesche, drops this on me...

"The Dantons of history are always defeated by the Robespierres..."

2007-09-27T02:09:00.000-07:00
Print

If you like your European history painted in lush meta-narratives without all the scholarly pedantry, E.J. Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 should suffice.

That's Aight

2007-09-21T05:51:00.000-07:00

At the moment, I am forced to litter this page with unfinished thoughts and superficial ramblings. Of course the reason for this is that if one were to personify the actual time it takes me to produce a piece it would most assuredly resemble the weathered face of George Bernard Shaw.

On Music
Blu and Exile's Beneath the Heavens is a refreshing bit of hip-hop. Exile devours 9th Wonder with his soul-sample patchwork and thundering drums while Blu spits with the wisdom of an old-soul that makes the commonplace seem sensational.
Talib Kweli's Eardrum is not as mediocre as The Beautiful Struggle especially with Madlib, Kanye and Pete Rock providing the beats. My issues with it are much more fundamental as I'll attempt to describe in a later review.
Aesop Rock's None Shall Pass is of high quality. Thank you Blockhead.
Liars Liars is noisy.
Black Lips Good Bad Not Evil, as much as I hate to admit it, is pretty good, though it is an almost exact replica of its influences.
Who's Wack
will.i.am (please stop killing our favorite rappers)
Deerhunter (please shut up; narcissism without substance is unbecoming)

Feasting and Lounging...A Fatman's Guide to a Healthy English Lifestyle

2007-09-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

Join Franklin Fisher in the coming days as he demonstrates his innovative and counterintuitive exercise programme...

Review

2007-09-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

Common

Finding Forever

Rating - 6 / 10

The beauty of hip-hop springs from want, its enduring soul from need. A need that to an eighteen year-old bound in the urban South– South Bronx, Southwest Atlanta, South Central L.A. and the Southside of Chicago serving as telling metaphors of abjection – is unquenchable. I first stumbled upon the abstraction of hunger on Main Source’s seminal 1991 LP Breaking Atoms. The track “Live at the Barbeque” captured the carnivorous ferocity of a young Nasty Nas “trapped in a cage and let out by Main Source.” I then concretely grasped the concept of hunger with the No I.D. produced joint, ‘Hungry’, on Lonnie Lynn’s One Day It’ll All Make Sense, the track all nails and granite, sharp horn stabs and cracked guitars the locus for Common’s intro stanza “I walk the night in rhymin’ armor / Bomb a nigga like a winter coat/ Have him on Death Row searching for an Interscope / Yet I sparkle like Irene Cara / Symbolize dope like sirens do terror” – an intro that may only be second in rap history to Inspectah Deck’s atomic bombing on “Triumph.” If only I would have known how fleeting this urgency is in rap music I would have held on to all those dollar cassettes, finding refuge in the metonymic relics of authenticity. I can still see KRS-One peering out the window like Malcom with the joint on By All Means Necessary, Mr. Parker a prescient Edward Gibbon looking down upon the history of the decline and fall of hip-hop.

The point here, though, is not to claim that we should reminisce over hip-hop’s passing but to note the Manichean relationship between hunger and contentment. Hip-hop is bound by ledges, its heights Olympian, its chasms infinite. Despite my own attempts to ignore the oft-disappointing obelisk, I am always drawn to it to see who will be the next icon to fall off. And they always fall off.

Common is one individual that seems to personify this dualism. He began in the chasm, all hunger and not much else on Can I Borrow a Dollar?, an endearing yet broke collection of battle raps and boom-bap. He then emerged as one of the filthiest since Nas on Resurrection, a sonic and lyrical masterpiece. His descent was slower than most, his stomach growing plump on sugary singles like “Retrospect for Life”, “The Light” and “Come Close.” Yet each subsequent album revealed that Common was not completely satiated as “Hungry” and “6th Sense” allowed the Chicagoan to bear his rather defanged teeth. Then he reminded us of his imminence on his masterwork, Be, producer Kanye West returning us to Leon’s Barbeque, with Common in line impatiently waiting to devour the rib tips, hot sauce and fries inside.

Finding Forever is an attempt to revisit the Southside so viscerally imagined on Be. But the Chicago depicted here is much more Potemkin than authentic. With references to Midnight Marauders littered throughout, Common attempts to remind us that he is the same Lonnie Lynn from Chi-City. Yet his is a city much more Super Bowl than Scribble Jam, the streets replaced with stadium-like fast food stalls destroying any vestiges of the old Leon’s. Compared to its predecessor, Finding Forever misfires from the start. Whereas James Poyser assisted ‘Be’ was Donnie Hathaway cold breath on a Chicago night, ‘Intro’ is more Grover Washington, Jr. tepidity. ‘Start the Show’ almost undoes the new age futility of the previous track with Pretty Purdie snares and Common directing us to “feel the passion of this b-boy rationale.” His attempts to personify a modern Gil Scott-Heron are almost believable on “The People” while Kanye absolutely kills the beat with fluttering synths and stuttering bass. Yet Finding Forever’s ultimate weakness is paradoxically manifest in its penultimate track, as Dwele provides a wholly unnecessary, unimaginative hook. In fact, the syrupy pop throughout is thick as molasses, reaching its fulsome pinnacle on the will.i.am assisted ‘I Want You.’ As much as we try to avoid the obvious, will.i.am is nothing short of wack. He’s especially lost on an album intended as an ode to the late J-Dilla; where the latter exuded soul, the former can only attempt to replicate it in a pop format, his attempts about as well-executed as Lenny Kravitz covering ‘Purple Rain.’

Burners ‘Southside’ and ‘The Game’ do provide momentary cover from the smooth, Soulquarian-lite deluge of the record. Kanye re-imagines his impeccable performance from ‘The Food’ on ‘Southside,’ mimicking, “Your fly is open mid-fly, the crowd is open I think I know why / I’m back from the future seen it with my own eyes / And yep I’m still the future of the Chi.” Though Common produces occasional signs of life on these two tracks, he disappears into neo-soul banality throughout the second-half of the album; the low-point most assuredly the obvious, soulless rendering of Nina Simone’s ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.’ While any attempt to transmit the melancholic uplift of Ms. Simone’s live performances, as even Antony will admit, is unwieldy, ‘Misunderstood’ undoubtedly personifies Common’s attempt to replicate the refocused hunger he found on Be. Unfortunately, he is more the bloated LL on Mr. Smith then the starving James Smith on Radio. And while on ‘The People’ Common claims to have found the new Preemo in Kayne, it seems we have found the new Guru in Common, a rather apathetic pop-rapper that may have finally fallen off once and for all.

Gratitude

2007-09-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

A year ago I was consumed by humidity, languishing in artistic torpitude as sluggish as any mid-summer Atlanta afternoon. It was a combination of a procession of dreams deferred and, to butcher Hannah Arendt's phrase, the evil of banality. A year later I am reveling in inspiration, an inspiration that comes at the dawn of autumn where I can see every word spoken in the cold induced outline of my warm breath. I have never so desired to devour life and I want to thank those who have abetted my hunger.

Shanna Sang (I could never express in words my debt to you)
John Gullick (A lovely man full of grace and humility)
Frankie Fisher (Although you attempt a cynical character your love of life is infectious)
Lee Tesche (My musical partner and the most interesting, inspired person I know)
Mom (Anything I might say would be trite in comparison to your love)

Madame Rieux

2007-09-11T12:24:00.000-07:00
To continue the rather morose mood today,

I cannot bear to see you like this.
If possible I would spend every moment with you in wordless comfort devising a revisionist history.
There;
We would shrug off cancerous men and our own insecurities, not with the normal world weary sigh but with a confident exaltation.
I would devour my lies, imbibing the poison I have so often grown beneath our home.
I would speak to you over breakfast and collect your tears until your eyes dry up.
We would ignore the trifles that constitute living and get drunk off a utopia constructed from an ever decomposing world.
Death would only be physical and we'd trample our fears beneath our new limbs.
Nothing would hold us prostrate, no kings, no thieves and no liars.
The liars would be saints and we would realize they never meant any harm.
We would kiss their cheeks and tell them we knew all along.
God would be exactly who you thought he would be and he'd forgive me for denying him.
And there would be no leaving ever again.

...or the Death Knell of Democracy

2007-09-11T11:20:00.000-07:00
11 Fructidor 2007

There are several whom are far more qualified to engage with such a complex set of issues which today's date conjures. For those interested in transcending the static conversations yearly reproduced without much thought or real sentiment Slavoj Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism and even Michael Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy should be interesting starting points. What is the relationship between all those supposed democrats who issued the British Mandate of Palestine on this date in 1922 or those who overthrew Salvador Allende on this date in 1973? Or even those most virtuous of democrats as Maximilien Robespierre or John Brown? While mourning is most appropriate, the spring of the victim did not dawn on September 11, 2001.