Democracy

Naturally, this is an ongoing topic.

Let me start by saying that I sometimes jokingly wonder what would happen if I were stopped by a cop for a traffic violation, and when I rolled down my window, said something like, "Hey, thanks, but I don't believe in police, so I guess thanks but no thanks. Have a nice day." This is illustrative in a couple ways: 1) that police are the last people on earth who could wrap their heads around their own irrelevance, and 2) that it is ludicrous in America to state that one is outside of the system.

Let's historicize. There has been one great challenge to American democracy: the secession of a number of states from the Union in 1861, on the grounds that: [Secession] illustrates the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established. (Jefferson Davis). Basically, the slave-owning states, when Lincoln was elected, saw that the national government was irreconcilably opposed to the core beliefs of their fucked-up white asses. So the argument of the Confederacy is, "We came into the union of our free will, and we can leave when we please." Or: "Since we are already outside of the democratic system, and the majority will be turned against us, we will make this officially the case and truly exist outside the American democratic system by seceding."

Eventually this was settled, but to my knowledge there has never since been an "outside" of the American democracy. This despite consistently pathetic voter turn-out, widespread corruption, fraud, disputed ballots, and repeated demonstrations that party politics are only nominally beholden to their constituents. So, I would say, the real success of American democracy is the shared illusion that everyone is equally represented, that there is only one legitimate government of our land, that the law is the law, that hundreds of millions of middle class or midwestern voters are capable of providing a legitimate and reconcilable counter-balance to my vote, etc. One country, one law, one government, no "outside".

Compare this to our prickly friends in Iraq. The celebration over their historic voting was short-sighted, because when people don't vote in Iraq, it has a very different meaning than when people don't vote in America. If you don't vote in America, you still acknowledge the legitimacy of the traffic ticket. If you don't vote in Iraq, you might be at war with the authority giving traffic tickets. In a way, George Bush was right when he stressed the way that ordinary Iraqi voters braved the terrorists who wanted to stop them from voting, because what is at stake in Iraq is not (as much) the specific ideological/political direction of the country, but the desperate attempt to have a consensus government-- one where even if you disagree with the specific administration, you see yourself as inside of the system and subject to the laws of the present and future governments. So, in a way, everyone who voted (and was willing to accept the result if their party lost) was on the same side. What George Bush misses is the non-incidental nature of this "outside" of "democracy".

What Democrats in America don't understand is that there is no "real" position for them, historically, as a Left party; that American democracy depends on vacillations and reversals in power, that if the entire country moved to the right, and Democrats lost in a landslide, there would 1) be no question of the ballots' legitimacy, and 2) that any political rigidity can lead easily to a one-party system which "we" hate on principle--- although ironically one-party systems can be extremely flexible (see: China).

My question, then, arises from the example of Uganda as described in Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: why can't there be a one-party democracy? (The Ugandan ruling party is "all-inclusive".)

So, a list of questions:
-- Can there be a one-party democracy?
-- What is socially/historically necessary for universal inclusion to take root?
-- Can there be (has there been) a democracy that is not universally inclusive?
-- Is there a benefit to "holding off" on democracy when the result of voting will be a non-inclusive sovereignty? (ie: if an anti-democratic or exclusionary group came to power in Iraq)
-- Is it completely meaningless to not vote in America, given that not voting is interpreted as tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of the result?

SILK NOG (not infant formula)

OH YES. THAT TIME OF YEAR.

TIME TO BUY SOME BOURBON

Hulk Hogan (democracy (post) to-come)

So a couple days ago, I was drinking coffee and watching some TV before I went to the library. There were two shows on at the same time, so I didn't really see the entirety of either episode, but I watched a good 12 minutes of "Hogan Knows Best" and probably 10 minutes of "House of Carters". (Luckily, they are re-running the Hogan episode AS I TYPE, so I am going to be able to watch the rest of it.) For those of you who don't know, "Hogan Knows Best" is a reality show about the ex-professional-wrestler Hulk Hogan and his family. His daughter, Brooke, is a monstrous 6-foot bleached-blonde (like if Christina Aguilera were on steroids instead of...uh...crazy pills?). I can only imagine grizzly bears getting in bed with this girl, and even they might still get the worse of it.

Anyways, Brooke is an aspiring pop-star, for seemingly no reason (she is hideous, can't sing, is not creative, etc), but the family somehow muscled (yes) Scott Storch, a famous producer, into signing Brooke to his label. To date, she has released a song, featuring a phoned-in rap from disgusting Houston sub-retard Paul Wall (his name itself raises the question whether he could remember his own name if it didn't rhyme), which no one on the planet could possibly have heard and enjoyed. To further her career, the family then moves to Miami, into an ultra-modern (but unfinished) house, where the new season has started.

In this episode, Hulk and his hulking wife are going around meeting the neighbors, carrying a plate of cookies. Afterwards they describe the neighbors as "very stiff...they didn't want to take our cookies." Because almost ALL their neighbors are JEWISH. But somehow, even though they are wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls, this has not occurred to them. So when they get home, they tell their kids that these people are "kosher." Prompting the following conversation:
Brooke: "Dad, Kosher means Jewish."
Hulk: "Oh, like how sausage means Italian."
Brooke: "It's so funny to say 'kosher', because we just say 'oh, that's kosher, like... that's fine.' "
Hulk: "I thought Kosher was like...pickles."

There is a really sickening moment where the mom, who is this over-bronzed, over-boobed giant, is talking to these Jews as if they were from outer space, making this weird grimace, talking really loudly, and saying things like, "My daugh-ter, Brooke, wants to be like Brit-ney," while these Jews are clearly terrified of her and waiting for her and the cameras to leave.

Nonetheless, they plan an entire party for the neighborhood, but the mom insists that they have Kosher food because "Do you know how many Jews live here?" and stressing that she invited "all" of the neighbors to the party. So, they have a discussion about where to get Kosher food, and even what means:

Mom: "There's a whole grocery store called 'Be Kosher.' "
Brooke: "Mom, that's probably just the name of the store."
Hulk: "It's like an underground society I didn't even know existed."

When Hulk Hogan finally goes to Kosher World, he asks the world's friendliest person (who just happens to be working at the counter), what Kosher is, and takes this information back home:

Hulk: "Sounds like Kosher food is probably better than what we've been eating... I'll be eating Kosher all the time. It's much better quality food than what we've got."

When explaining that the animals "don't feel pain" and are taken care of and disease free, the mom puts her hands over her ears and shouts, "Let's not even talk about that!!" and makes this grotesque squeamish face.

At the party, Brooke is going about networking, and tries to shake hands with a Rabbi, who refuses to touch her (for which, who can blame him?) and IN SUBTITLES (even though he is speaking English), tells her he is a Rabbi. She concludes, "Rabbi means 'no touch'. "

Eventually, it turns out that the Kosher food is not Kosher, that Hulk has prepared it on a grill with the non-Kosher meat that he bought, but a younger Rabbi congratulates him on making an effort to reach out to his neighbors and is jovial about the whole event. Still, the younger Rabbi asks Hulk (unironically) if the grill had been put in a mikvah (a ritual bath), which has to be the most clueless question anyone has ever asked Hulk Hogan.

******
Two concluding notes:
1) The other show I was watching at the time, "House of Carters", is a reality show about Nick Carter (formerly of the Backstreet Boys), and his family (including 'tween sensation turned awkward-teenager Aaron). They have been deserted by their parents, who are divorced, and live in a palatial beach house together, getting drunk and having emotional breakdowns non-stop while all working on horrible (truly horrible) pop albums in their respective studios. But the show is almost too heartbreaking to watch the second the dad comes on the screen, dressed in expensive summer-wear, driving a sports car, gold watch, etc.-- all bought with his children's money, and is a complete VILLAIN. He lies, he teaches horrible lessons, he guilts everyone, he demonizes his ailing ex-wife (their mother), forces displays of affection, shouts people down, won't let anyone cry. Ugh. So this is actually more profound "human drama" than the Hulk Hogan show, but is far too raw.

2) What's really noticeable about the Hulk's encounter with Jews in Miami is not (only) his complete fucking ignorance--the man is a multi-millionaire who is in his late 40s and has traveled all over the world but doesn't know what a Jew is--or his surprisingly non-chalant understanding that it is just a different, more-or-less-wacky group with more-or-less-wacky beliefs than his own and (except for one mean-spirited moment where they contemplate buying non-Kosher food and passing it all off as Kosher) presumably only a few questions away from being accommodated and welcomed.

And I was reminded that probably half of my friends in high school (in Texas) were Jews (from New York), who now have all gone on to Law school and who I really don't keep up with. But watching this episode, I was reminded how appealing Jews are (have to be?) in places like Dallas or Miami: compared to Hulk Hogan, the Jews appearing in this episode are modest, witty, charming, intelligent, self-deprecating, understanding, well-spoken, ironic, etc. I don't want to say I grew up surrounded by Hulk Hogans, but yes, in Texas, someone being ironic, witty, able to explain their difference with some compassion on your behalf, is quite rare. And so I really saw this episode from the perspective of deep-compassion with anyone who had to explain anything complex (Kosher) to Hulk Hogan (a moron), and was reminded why (and this is not sarcasm) Billy Crystal and Jerry Seinfeld were two of the most popular comedians of the 1990s, especially with middle America, whereas Hulk Hogan's "Mr. Nanny" was one of history's great bombs.

top five 90s sitcoms

1. The Simpsons (first ten seasons)
2. Seinfeld
3. Married...with Children (pre-Ted Mcginley)
4. Newsradio
5. Frasier (pre-Daphne & Niles sex)

hon mention: Everybody Loves Raymond, Just Shoot Me

Obviously these fall into two categories: the classic family sitcom and the "ensemble" sitcom.

It is hard to look back now--after Friends ruined everything for everyone, and when Sex and The City, The Office, and Arrested Development (none of which I've seen) have evidently changed sitcoms (again) forever--and see how revolutionary Seinfeld must have been. Like a few other cultural vocabularies, Seinfeld's has been completely reabsorbed into our lives, and in its wake, so many shows took after its template that it is hard to spot its innovations from its 90s-isms and conventions.

Which is to say, of course there were ensemble sitcoms before. Three's Company and The Golden Girls come to mind. What I think is secretly revolutionary about Seinfeld is that there is NO PREMISE. In Three's Company and The Golden Girls (for example--or for a family example, The Jeffersons), the premise is, "these people now have to live together, and maybe they don't want to, and their personalities will be brought into close contact." This is also 2/3rds of the logic behind Friends (Monica and Rachel live together, Joey and Chandler live together). On Seinfeld, there is no premise. George and Jerry have always been friends, Elaine is Jerry's ex-girlfriend but this is not a new development, no one lives together, there is no reason why the first episode should be the first episode and not the twelfth... Kramer is not in the first episode, but he is not "structurally" new-- he is not a premise. And, up until the last episode, Seinfeld resists premises: George's fiance dies, Jerry and George's pilot is a bust, Elaine and George are always getting new jobs, Kramer's schemes don't go anywhere, no one has a consistent romantic partner, etc. All the reasons that a show might "jump the shark" are new, usually permanent developments (Daphne & Niles having sex changes everything and is irreversible, Ted McGinley as the neighbor's new husband), and Seinfeld never makes anything permanent (Newman is kept to a minor character, for instance) while successfully spinning its own mythologies and sagas.

As far as family comedies go, The Simpsons follows a dysfunctional line from All in the Family through Mama's Family, but really is rooted in animated sitcom The Flintstones and its forebearer, The Honeymooners. In a way, The Simpsons is less interesting to talk about than Seinfeld, because it is so much more of a universe, and because, unlike Jerry Seinfeld, Matt Groening does not know when to quit (or does not care to), and the show has declined irrevocably for no reason other than the writing no longer produces winning jokes. But if Seinfeld is "situational", The Simpsons' strengths are in its immense quotability and the unrivaled nuances of its characterizations. Edmund White writes about Proust that he combines the Dickensian and Jamesian methods of characterization-- you only get one "catchy" bit at a time, but the sheer volume of these bits adds up to an extremely shaded and memorable "round" character. Has anyone read an American novel from the last 30 years with any character that could stand up in characterliness to Homer Simpson, to all of his shames, nobilities, weaknesses, memories, repressions, aims, principles, loves, and secrets?

As far as the honorable mentions, Everybody Loves Raymond is probably the best traditional sitcom since The Cosby Show, but I haven't seen more than 1/2 of its episodes, and Just Shoot Me is hon. mention for the David Spade character alone. South Park is not a sitcom, and probably Dr. Katz is not, either, although both those shows are great.

y'know, i haven't thought Nicole Kidman was attractive since I was about 12, and there was a little movie called "To Die For", but here ya go:



maybe it's that she just looks like a kind-of older hipster?, like one who would run the cool bookstore in your town and always wear cool vintage dresses

"to infantilize"

I was saying to someone earlier today that I found some aspect of school to be "infantilizing"--or someone was saying this to me--and I stopped to think how much I love this word. As a transitive verb, it just means "To reduce to an infantile state or condition" or "to condescend to as if still to a young child". What neither of these definitions capture is the long transitive form, that infantilization is not accomplished at the flick of a switch, and even more subtly, that infantilization is not a simple transitive at all. The infantilization must be taken on by the subject.

Like Foucault's sense of discipline and surveillance, where the object of knowledge learns to discipline ITSELF, infantilization is something you perform on yourself on behalf of an outside subject. So, "I abuse you" is different from "I make you feel worthless," but both of these forms of transitivity (the active v. the assumed) are captured in the splendid to infantilize. One assumes one's own infantilization.

Other verbs like this would be like, to subordinate, to convert, etc.

best records from the record fair

Necros- Conquest for Death
This has long been a favorite of mine, so I was stoked to pick up the original, since I already have two bootlegs of it (an LP and a CD). This band is perhaps most famous for the extremely rare "Sex Drive" EP (limited to 100?), which you will recall was the name of my last band. But Conquest for Death is the album I think kids should hear before the Minor Threat LP, because it is not totally mind-melting like Negative Approach, but still captures hardcore in a melodic mode without being wishy-washy.

Led Zeppelin- iii
Uh...so, I like Zeppelin's hard rock stuff, but this record is mainly devoid of that (although "Immigrant Song" has to be one of their toughest), and is totally cool bluesy folk that is played really fast, with aggressive strumming (see "Gallows Pole") and one torch-song ("Since I've Been Loving You"). I dunno, I think normally the acoustic Zeppelin songs (on side B of IV, for example) are throwaways, but maybe because they were basically writing an entire record of non-heavy songs, they still found a way to make these songs punchy and diverse because of the narrowed range.

David Bowie- Man who Sold the World
This is another totally weird record-- it is half a weird psychy-folk record like Tyrannosaurus Rex, and half a metal album-- kind of the missing link between "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and "Sad Wings of Destiny". As with all (good) Bowie, the hooks are there, but here they are spread out among weirder and weirder arrangements. The first listen, I just tried to find the hooks, but once you know when they are coming, you can sort of settle into the uneasy blend of hard-rock, prog, and strange folk that I'm sure is extremely "in" right now, but I don't know what else sounds like this. Recommendations, please!

King Diamond- Conspiracy
The fourth King Diamond record is, I believe, a sequel to "Them", and I actually like it a bit more. "Them", as far as things go, was a fairly normal King Diamond record (whatever that means), whereas the first song here is nine minutes long! The other noticeable element is an overwhelming amount of "spooky" riffs, or at times even the "riff" to the WEDDING SONG. Also, there are a few Frankenstein-ish mosh parts (just imagine Frankenstein's monster moshing and a chunky riff), and times where the vocals are completely out of control and theatrical, having no relation to any melody/rhythm and just throwing the whole thing off balance. Then there are the obligatory Euro-metal solos, and lyrics like "you'd better stop kissing her! the doctor is the devil!" sung in three different voices. This has to be up there with The Birthday Party and Rudimentary Peni in the "I hope they sought therapy" genre.

pretention/ taste arbitration

The weird thing about the word "arbitrary" is its relation to arbiter/arbitration--that is, to decision making. So that "arbitrary" actually means "subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion". Might one then say that "discretionary spending" is "arbitrary spending"? (discretionary: "regulated by one's own judgment). And then you get into the quagmire of defining spending which is discrete but not discreet, etc.

I digress.

In matters of taste, arbitration can seem arbitrary: why this trend and not another? And although in this short blog I am unable to go into matters such as snobbishness, class-determinations, a history of high and low culture, the hegemony of the bourgeois, the curious (demographically aproportional) ascendency of Jews and gays in determinations of culture (at least in New York), hipsterism, the legacy of the 1960s, and other factors that arbitrate what is cool, please consider these the background and future topics of this blog: to remove the "arbitrary" from arbitration of taste, to "expose it for what it is."

The other day in my Scholarly Writing seminar, we read James English's "Economy of Prestige". I also spilled teriyaki sauce all over the copy I was borrowing, and had to drack down the last hardcover copy in New York City so that the person who loaned it to me would not think I was the world's biggest jerk. In the class discussion, I thought my smartest comment was that, as in Borges' "The Lottery of Babylon," the lottery stops being a system of monetary prizes with clear winners, and becomes an extremely obscure, universal system resistant to ideas of winning/losing or even of an obvious outcome, until the lottery becomes indistinguishable from LIFE, so I thought that the system of prizes in English's narrative has become essentially synonymous with culture. There is no "outside".

However, something like the Criterion Collection has a prestige that is not about prizes, so I dunno... that probably also should be investigated later.

My point for today is this: the word "pretentious" should be used correctly. There is a great moment in Zizek's "Looking Awry" where he calls A River Runs Through it "pretentious". This is the precise meaning of the word. Of course, this example is doubly ironic. One, to cite a prominent philosopher to define the word "pretentious"--- secondly, that this philosopher's "slumming it" by discussing this garbage film is in its own way pretentious.

Nonetheless, I think we may use A River Runs Through it as our definition of pretension, and from there go on to discuss taste. What A River Runs Through it, or, to switch our examples, Schindler's List demonstrates, is a certain paranoia of being unable to distinguish between the "actually good" and the merely "pretentious" (that is, a paranoia which would have saved the Oscar from going to Forrest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction).

Ironically (in the sense that here taste is not discretionary but overheard--and thus arbitrary in an entirely different way), many seem to think that the only way to avoid falling into a trap of "bad taste" is to have an exaggeratedly refined set of "good taste" which ends up being altogether predictable and pretentious.

To simplify:
1) Schindler's List is a wildly successful film by an acclaimed director, about a serious subject, featuring several great performances, based on a literary novel, of an appropriately epic length, a winner of numerous awards and accolades, etc.
2) At the same time, I would be completely shocked to hear anyone (in 2006) cite Schindler's List as being anywhere near a great film, on their list of great films, a film by a great director, of anything approaching artistic relevance, or even a second look, etc.
3) In order to be cool, to have good taste in movies, one must not like Schindler's List. But, this demands a certain paranoia-- should one not like any films similar to Schindler's List? is all of Spielberg off limit? all holocaust movies? all Hollywood movies? all American movies? all 90s movies?
4) If one closed out all spielberg/hollywood/American/90s films, you would certainly weed out a lot of garbage. On the other hand, you would weed out some good stuff.
5) That "good stuff" on the other hand, probably is more popular and therefore susceptible to 'contamination' by uncool teenagers, as in the case of Rushmore, Reservoir Dogs...
6) The easy, paranoid solution, then, is to simply stick to the pretentious-- foreign, canonized, or experimental films which will never have the whiff of popularism or uncoolness. At worst, they will be slight and irrelevant. One risks nothing.

I find this to be absolutely unacceptable. Take the superior movie "Reds." Nearly all the same things (as in #1) could be said about Reds as about Schindler's List, and while Reds is probably going to have a comeback with its recent DVD release, I can imagine a good number of snobs having to wait another 10 or 20 years to realize how great this movie is, until it takes its place among (deservedly canonized) movies like "Dog Day Afternoon", "The French Connection," "Bonnie and Clyde," etc.

The point here is that being PRETENTIOUS (in avoidance of the obviously pretentious hollywood dreck and anything paranoiacally associated with it) means, not that you are avoiding all criticism ("at least i didn't accidentally like schindler's list"), but that you are infantilizing your taste, and are exposed to the critique (by me, at least) that there is actually no taste to be discerned in such an obviously defensive move.

You may also take the above as an indictment of hipsterism. Rather than being cutting-edge, in the negative sense hipsterism is a cowardly retreat behind unassailable categories of elitism, the avant garde, the imported, the sheltered. It waits around for something to be deemed "safe" (latest: doom metal, which would have been the least cool thing in the world ten years ago) while always repeating the same mistake (as with "Reds", which is totally under the radar).

This, you will notice, is the opposite of cutting-edge. It would be better termed as "waiting around". And, as an effort to esablish oneself as having "good taste", it accomplishes quite the reverse: the plainly pretentious exposes itself as having no taste at all.

Marie Antoinette

Executive Producer, pitching this movie to studio exec: What I really love about this project is that the first 50 minutes of the movie revolve around someone NOT wanting to have sex with Kirsten Dunst. It's genius.

Studio Exec: That sounds great! Here's 10 million dollars. Don't worry about a plot, either.

So, this movie is boring. There's no payoff to either of the build-ups in the film: waiting around for Kirsten Dunst to get boinked by the King, and waiting around for their heads to get chopped off. Both these things happen offscreen, so...what is this movie about? I don't know. A lot of languid arms draped over really nice furniture...a horrendous (high concept?) montage of shoes and cake while blaring "I Want Candy".

I thought Sofia Coppola was racist for not developing a single Japanese character in Lost in Translation. Now I realize that she just cannot develop character. This movie is like that movie, only without Bill Murray to hold everything up, and this time, not a single French character is developed (Marie Antoinette is Austrian).

I dunno. The whole thing should be stupid and boring, and it is, but the film only tries to be pretty and inconsequential, and at that it succeeds.

The Fugitive (no proust)

So I just wrote a presentation for my Derrida class, which anyone who knows me, knows this class has overtaken my life, has five times as much work as any of my other classes, all the kids are taking it, etc. And so I went over the same information several times: I read it. I re-read it. I wrote down what I had underline. I made an outline from that. Then I wrote a paper from that. And then I went down and wrote a summary of it in my notebook for safe-keeping. And so then I read my presentation to make sure it was under the time limit. It made no sense!!! But I had literally JUST written it.

Have you guys seen the Fugitive? The movie with Harrison Ford. (I should say, Proust's sixth volume of A la recherche... "La Fugitive" was disastroustly translated into English as "The Sweet Cheat Gone," and I really really really really really wish that the Harrison Ford/ Tommy Lee Jones film were called "The Sweet Cheat Gone"). Anyways, when I saw this movie when I was 10, I was obsessed with the TV show, which I had seen every day at 2pm when I was in bed with mono. Now, this is a great action film, probably the equal of that other 1990s juggernaut "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", and definitely better than "Time Cop", a film starring Jean Claude Van Damme which tried to combine the two (cops, time travel) with a sprinking of nudity (this is all I remember, except that someone MELTED when they ran into their time-double.) So, "Terminator 2" and "The Fugitive" were both massively difficult to understand, "Terminator 2" in an existential way, where how can you get rid of the future if you need someone to be sent back to the past to make sure that events turn out the same way, but you have gotten rid of the possibility of being able to send them back? Also: did ROBOTS invent time-travel? I think this is the claim of the film, but why would robots want to time-travel?

"The Fugitive" was impenetrable on a more "who did what and when?" level, because the one-armed man's motive was based on a covering-up of something that somehow necessitated murdering Harrison Ford's wife, but to my 5th grade mind it made sense only for like FIVE SECONDS when I somehow got all the elements in my head, thought "a-ha!" and then instantly collapsed back into a muddle when I tried to reorganize it.

This is what my Derrida paper reads like. I understood it while I was writing it, but reading it ten minutes later, (and let's be fair, it's 2 am and I'm sick), it reads like it was written in Martian. I know that I what I wrote is "true", but I'm not sure it makes any more sense than the impenetrable Derrida piece. Which is to say, next time you bash theory, or if you think my paper is boring, just remember: it's exactly like Terminator 2. That's just how exciting it is.

ny times publishes words of idiot

Yesterday in the Times was this AWFUL piece on how Starbucks is selling CDs, books, and a "lifestyle" to its millions of coffee-drinkers. What astounds me is that this works, because the logic is seemingly self-defeating: coffee shops have been playing jazz for decades, so why is Starbucks going to succeed in moving a new Herbie Hancock CD where others have failed?

Now, there is only one answer, one which this (ridiculous) article does not provide, but which I can easily give you: *not* that Starbucks has pioneered a new logic of selling culture to the educated, $90,000-a-year crowd which they were incapable of finding elsewhere, but rather that Starbucks has turned into a CONVENIENCE STORE. Like a 7-11 on route 9, where you can buy Travis Tritt's greatest hits along with a Big Gulp, Starbucks is making laziness (one might say: the opposite of even middle-brow culture) the rule of the day.

That is to say, there is a perverse irony that the "aesthetic" that Starbucks sells is, to my thinking, already that of mainstream bourgeois pretension. The Ray Charles CD was actually an inspired product, because that is something most people "know" but don't own-- having been Pepsi's image in the 90s-- but the other examples in the article are actually kind of trashy: Mitch Albom is an Oprah author (Oprah representing the pinnacle of mainstream bourgeois pretension), and "Akeelah and the Bee" was a clear take-off on the sleeper documentary hit "Spellbound". Which is to say, what Starbucks is selling people is what they already know they want: but locating it under one roof.

Another shit-move by the article is not to discuss how Starbucks GOT its cultural currency from association with Barnes and Noble bookstores. Barnes and Noble actually includes the coffee house WITHIN the logic of the bookstore-culture, so that Starbucks selling books and CDs along with coffee is already pre-determined by Barnes and Noble selling Stabucks coffee along with its books.

So, I have compared Starbucks to a one-stop, selling people what they already know they want. But what really gets me is that these "educated" customers who make "$90,000 a year on average" are SO BAD at being snooty, espresso-drinking multiculturalists. To wit, when Starbucks recently started selling the Frank Sinatra classic “In the Wee Small Hours,” sales of that CD went up twentyfold. What moron arrives at the age of 50 (say), with a huge disposable income, a suburban home, an Audi, and a lifestyle involving $5 lattes, harbors a secret desire to listen to Frank Sinatra but is unable to fulfill this wish because Frank Sinatra CDs are SO HARD TO FIND? And so, when they pop up at a Starbucks, he/she thinks "at last! I've been looking for this forever!"

Or even stupider: that someone does not even KNOW that they like Frank Sinatra (maybe the most popular pop musician of the last century) until they hear it at Starbucks. This, more sadly, is probably the case.

“If I hear a CD playing [in Starbucks], I generally like it,” Bette Gottfried, back in the Ardsley store, said. “It’s who I am — baby boomer, upper middle class, a little hippyish, rockish.”

Starbucks stores don’t carry “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles album everyone’s mother could name; they carry “Revolver,” a critical darling without the same overplayed name recognition.

Let's look at that fact that most people would probably be happy just owning a "Greatest Hits" of any particular artist. What is being (unironically) put forward here is that THE BEATLES and FRANK SINATRA are CULT ARTISTS. What is sad is that this obviously WORKS. People clearly buy a Frank Sinatra album or a Beatles album and go home feeling like they are possibly a bit slyer, more cultured than their neighbors. A bit jazzier. A bit more "critically astute".

Starbucks is so much better at selling these things to its customers than I would be, as I would adopt an ironic/meta/condescending attitude towards the buyers. The (evil) genius of Starbucks is not to say, "Oh, hey you should have this Frank Sinatra album, because you are sophisticated and it is essential to that pose." But RATHER, to say to SUV-driving, sweatpants-wearing, Robin-Williams-movie-renting middle-executive SLOBS, with total ingenuousness, "Hey, fellow coffee-drinker...yeah...this music *is* good...what is it?... oh man, Frank Sinatra...yeah, I love the old guy, "old blue eyes"... I have "Duets" and it is really great...oh, you have the CD here in the store...yeah, just throw it on the bill, b/c I'm paying with a credit card anyways...oh, it's his EARLY stuff...oh man, this is so cool."

See, being ironic and spiteful, I would try and capitalize on people's innate pretensiousness from MY perspective of what that means. Starbucks is so successful because it recognizes that, to the clueless idiot, what is really "new" and "culturally sophisticated" is just a variation that has been completely played out elsewhere for everyone but them.

ny times publishes picture of french fries

The caption is: "french fries discovered in a deep-cleaning of a Delta 767"-- which raises the question, do you need a "deep-cleaning" to find an open box of french fries in an overhead compartment?

But you know what? I would eat those french fries. They look pretty good. I bet they are soggy, since (according to the article), they may be up to 18 months old, but they aren't soaking in ketchup, and while they are undoubtedly from a restaurant in the airport, I bet it was like Bennigan's. So yeah. I think the moral is, if "deep cleaning" can unearth such delicious-looking (read: edible) fries in unexpected places, I wonder if some more close investigations of nooks and crannies in my daily routine could unearth maybe some still-edible popcorn, peanut-butter filled pretzels, or baked Lays?

recent jamz

Deadstop- "Done With You" LP
doesn't sound as much like Negative Approach (or...uh...AC/DC) as you might like... kind of has a Youth of Today meets Cro Mags (YEAH) vibe that is not as blatantly dumb as that implies. It's totally hard-as-shit, but never panders.

Dodsdomd- "Seven Deadly Sins" EP
This record came out in English and Swedish versions, I actually got the Swedish version, but I put up the English title, because I don't feel like walking four feet to read the title in whatever goofy "spooky" font they have on the cover. This is a big improvement from their LP: more memorable, no longer sounds like Sweden via USA.

Katatonia- "Dance of December Days" CD
For some reason, they changed the art on this album to look like some horrible I-don't-even-know, but suffice it to say there is a baby looking sadly at a grim reaper, and they changed the band logo. It was so much better when it was just these dudes with moustaches hanging out really close to each other, wrapped in purple smoke. Anyways, this is really over-emphatic "doom metal" before that whole style got co-opted by the Southern Lord crowd and some drone/ambient idea.

Mountain "Nantucket Sleighride" LP
Sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Songs about Moby Dick.

Stan Getz "Sweet Rain" LP
This is one of those examples of someone who is REALLY GOOD at doing a popular version of something showing that their genius in the popular format (bossa nova) is actually based on a real understanding of forms, that can be demonstrated at will. Of course, I also appreciate the converse of this, the abstract understanding being masterfully put to use in a popular form.
examples of the former (rarer): The Beatles "Abbey Road", Beckett "Waiting for Godot"
examples of the latter: Judas Priest "Point of Entry", The Cure "Head on the Door", Velvet Underground "Loaded" (albeit less successfully).

Normally, the Stan Getz move-- "look, I'm sophisticated"--- backfires, and is just pretension. "Sweet Rain" is incredible, but one need only look at the career of Metallica and see their disastrous relation to their avant-garde roots in NWOBHM, a relation they seem incapable of drawing on for inspiration, thus blacking out their entire 80s career from proper context. So when Metallica try to write "sophisticated" music now, it sounds like it comes from Mars (in a bad way).

A flyer I found in the library today

In the library today, I found this flyer about Islam, which I excerpt here:

Islam has of late been accused of being a violent religion. A quick glance at events around the world, however, leaves little doubt that Islamic violence is due largely to US and Israeli policies. The events in the following regions demonstrate this:

Kosovo: Islamic radicals burn down churches and persecute Christians.

Uganda: Muslim rebels in the north, aided by Sudan, have challenged the government.

Algeria: Islamic guerillas continue to attack a government dominated by fellow Muslims.

etc. etc. [there are a bunch of other countries, similar stories].

Do you see how the above states of violent Islamic unrest are due to US and Israeli policies? You don't?! Then you've read this correctly. They have nothing whatever to do with the US or Israel.

Whether you want to call Islam a peaceful religion or not is irrelevant. The fact is that the great majority of unrest around the world involves Muslims--- and has nothing to do with the US or Israel. It has to do with a violent people who have perpetrated some of the most heinous atrocities upon mankind, and convinced a great number of "useful idiots" (mostly on college campuses) that they have a "cause". ....this is not a "cause"-- this is evil in its purest form.
And please stopd the worthless nonsense of calling this note propaganda and racist. You're in college--- you should have the ability to research this easily verifiable truth.

The time to stop Muslim violence is now, the place is wherever you happen to be.
************************************

Obviously I am above debating this note. It begs so many questions, it dismisses in advance any criticism of it as "propaganda" or "racist", etc. There is no debate to be had here.

BUT I am going to investigate (in this extreme case) a lot of bad argumenative practices that are indulged in nearly all public, political discourse.

1) Why shouldn't this note be called "propaganda"? Because propaganda has a pejurative connotation, of course. Because it might imply that this is reductionist and one-sided? Because it considers itself a reasoned, multi-faceted, fair account? Surely this is not the conception the authors had of it, and a leaflet like this is definitively propaganda. Which is not, as the author assumes, to dismiss it. It is to give it a GENRE.

2) Why shouldn't this note be called "racist"? This is another prohibition. My first response is, they are not talking about a race, they are talking about a religion. In this way, warning off charges of racism *raises* the very question it is dismissing-- whether the assumptions about Islam have more to do with people of color (in general) than with the religion (in specific) that it is openly questioning. So, I would say, what is "racist" is perhaps invisible to the authors, and so in the sense *intended*, they are correct-- it is not racist. But in the assumptions (as I'll show) that the logic depends on, there is a definite white, Western prejudice at work.

3) The examples by region. Each of these lacks any citation, although informing me later that because I am "in college," the "truths" they demonstrate are "easily verifiable." Could be. But none of these examples gives a context, either. The violence is presented as part of an endemic violence rooted in Islam. I'll grant that Muslims have engaged in some violence in recent years, and that their outrage is at times unsettling. But in order to prove that this violence is a result of Islam's nature, it would need to be shown:
-- that this violence within Islam is a relative constant throughout history and place
-- that the violence has to do with being Muslim, and has no mitigating history
-- that the violence has to do with being Muslim, in the sense that it is not an internal violence having to do with economic conditions or by subjects who *happen* to be Muslim
-- that the current violence in Afghanistan has "nothing to do with the US". I imagine this is an impossible assertion to prove, and yet the note calls this the "correct reading".

So, this is one long fallacy. If you replace the word "Muslims" with "people over 5'11'' ", you will see how there is no substantive proof LINKING violence to the state of being over 5'11'', although that is precisely what you would be led to assume about being Muslim.

4) That a "great majority" of violence in the world "involves Muslims". As no citation is given, we are not obliged to believe this, and yet even if it were true, the United States and Israel certainly must NOW be dragged into the discussion (which this note is at every effort to prevent), in the context of the great number of examples left out where the United States and Israel have aggressively asserted their policy in the face of a (supposedly unified) "Islam".

5) That there is any relation (having to do with Islam) between Indonesia and Kosovo--- other than the Koran, about which no proof is furnished that there is any incitation to violence.

So. Please consider this an exercise in argument and proving claims, rather than an actual "clash of viewpoints" with this drivel. I think liberalism and bourgeois ideology, and any number of debates, are based upon such disastrous reasonings. As Stuart's blog repeatedly shows, the claims of the Atlantic Yards project backers are contradictory, assert solutions to problems which are never shown to exist, and present numerous false binaries and strawman arguments. This post happens to attack a particularly easy (read: dumb) target, but I think this lazy, bullying style is so widespread that it is basically the Law of the Land.

ipods

So. I don't have an iPod. I want one. But I would use my ipod as an arena in which mp3s I download would battle for my attention, for the honor of being purchased on vinyl as part of complete albums/singles. I buy music. For me, owning music is important, and not because of copyright issues. This is an increasingly outdated viewpoint, it seems, but I hope to show why I think it is the only way for someone who really enjoys music beyond background-noise.

This will seem condescending, I think. No one wants to hear that they do not "truly appreciate" music. So I hope to show the advantages TO listening of NOT downloading, which might seem counterintuitive.

1) It is easy to have "good taste" when you can download anything in the world for free.
...and yet! How rarely is this the case! Normally when I scroll through someone's ipod, it is a collection of inoffensive, friendly, unremarkable music that could be gotten with no research and less than an expansive taste. I remain unconvinced that downloading music broadens one's tastes, although it certainly has that possibility. I would say that it is because there is no risk to downloading something. Because you have not spent any money on it, you can simply send an album to the recycle bin after listening to one song. This makes for a conservative taste.

2) There is no reason to put in any time with an album/artist in mp3 format.
Separated from album art, lyrics, band photos, any sense of a discrete form, the mp3 really makes no demands on the listener to be absorbed, reckoned with, debated, "acquired" (as a taste), etc. So you end up with this completely ephemeral aesthetic, which demands instant attention and instant approval, and I would say that most tastes are acquired tastes-- songs, albums, artists, and styles which require some effort to "get into". I guess that is up for debate.

3) In an infinite space, there is no way to hierarchize one's preferences.
That sounds more boring than I really mean it to. What I mean to say is that our attachments to music are normally located around a "favorite song," or a memory, or something having to do with an experience/emotion we want to play over again and again. No one's *original* favorite song would be an abstract Eno noise-scape. It is probably a Temptations song, or something we can really latch onto-- catchy, good lyrics, easy to relate to.

So, if in point #1, I argue that downloading music makes for conservative tastes, here I am arguing that downloading music onto an infinitely capacious hard drive makes it impossible to ever have again the experience of listening to "Ain't To Proud to Beg" a million times in a row just because you just got the Big Chill soundtrack and are compelled to listen to it over and over. It is not just one spot on an infinite playlist.

4) But, Ben, don't you buy more records than you can possibly listen to very closely?
Fair enough. And I'm sure that some people listen to mp3s in ways that I would completely approve of, too. But there is something about the RECORD that is so much more endearing. It has an identity of its own, you physically interact with it, you have to take care of it, you can show it to other people, you can skip songs but you can't just get rid of them, you can play the same side over and over again, read the lyrics along with it, but mostly: you are responsible to a record. It is not abstract. If you treat it badly, it will sound bad. If you don't listen to it, you will have wasted your money. If you lose the art, it becomes contextless. And I think this is what taking music seriously is about: having some relationship *back* to the music. Knowing that "if I don't preserve this (melody, context, aesthetic), maybe no one else will."

FUCK THIS MOVIE

Oh great. What the world really needs is this constipated character study of an inbred nincompoop, rendered as a deep meditation on progress and tradition. Let's be honest: there is almost no way that Elizabeth II can even read. Her IQ is probably hovering in the low 80s. Her portrayal in the Naked Gun seems far more accurate to me:



But TONY BLAIR is the voice of radicalism in this film? Or his wife? Can someone just drag a rake over my eyes? I feel like I am on crazy pills reading the reviews of this film. Are we supposed to take seriously the ultimate artificial event of our time, the pathetic finale of Princess Diana? I'm sure this film thinks it is like Noh theater or something, and that every small reaction in the throne room is a monumental event in the world, but I almost vomited watching the trailer, and dwelling on the fucking Kings and Queens of Merry Olde England and Their Grand Furrowed Brows seems like a desperate bourgeois attempt to chastise sovereignty while at the same time lavishing affection on its "good" representation (Diana) and imagine that retrograde, drooling idiots like Queen Elizabeth II are capable of the same profound reflection as we have come to expect from President Martin Sheen.

a few more comments

Well, since it's my blog, I figure I don't need to only make comments in the "comments" section of my posts, but please see the last post for some more on that topic.

But here's more:
-- I think I can trace a genealogy of hipster lingo to jazz song titles (unlike pop song titles, don't need to "mean" anything or say anything about the song---mostly arbitrary) and dadaism. This is to draw a line between dadaism and surrealism. Magritte (a surrealist for our purposes), writes "This is not a pipe" (in french of course) underneath a picture of a pipe. Famously, this is true and false at the same time, because literally, it is not a pipe. It is only a PICTURE of a pipe. Duchamp putting a urinal in an art gallery, however, requires no caption. ("Fountain" is metonymic, it's the same thing once removed. It's not necessary.) The reference is to the viewer's expectations- it is a provocation. Magritte is not provoking you: he is telling you the TRUTH. It *is not* a pipe.

-- In a comment in the last post, I discuss the circular defense this lingo puts around itself. To quote TS Eliot, these are "fragments shored against the ruins" of an identity. It is not new; I am not impressed. I am replying to a poster who writes that to reference something outside of oneself is to admit that the self is absent, that saying "Misfits Fan" is substituting for something absent. I dunno. Surely that line has to be drawn somewhere. I would argue, with a certain amount of eye-rolling, that maybe my interests (Proust + the Misfits, to be reductive) DOES add up to something new. But it seems to me that the comment overstates identification. You don't need Freud to tell you that a lot of "becoming" takes place by processes of "identification" and "recognition." And that what is different (in the other) exists only in relation to a difference in you. So, the space between the self and what it identifies with is clearly important. That is why I wonder what has happened in hipsterism, where identitification is either missing or ironized, as if there were a fear that the space left between identification and identity wouldn't be enough.

I realize a lot of things can be reduced to unenlightening truisms or platitudes, or disposable "advice" such as, "mean what you say, and say what you mean." On the other hand, taken to heart, that is probably the most important advice you will get today (and I am giving you this bit of advice).

In class today, someone said the word "equates" when they meant "relates" or "indicates" or "reflects", etc. This is an innocent enough mistake. It is hard to think of the right words, so we rush past the exact right one, to make our larger point. As baffling as Derrida has been, this has been the lesson I (and now you) can learn from it: mean what it is that you are saying. Say what it is that you mean. There, you have one of the most terrifyingly difficult French philosophers, brutally summarized, and in a perfectly useless way. Surely this example ("equates" instead of "indicates") has not hit home with you.

This post is an attack on laziness. On linguistic laziness (now), on laziness in thought, and (finally) laziness in identity. I am not arguing for a humorless "sincerity", nor do I have my mother's professed opposition to people "being fake" (because there is no true self, DUH). But I think it is worth thinking through the difference between "equates" and "relates", if what you mean to say is the second one. Let's be rigorous. For one thing, *I* do not want to be summarized incorrectly (see a few posts back) as having "equated" something, when I only "related" something. This is a terror I have. I am a decent enough writer, I can stop and start over a sentence if it is not going well, if I realize that I am going to have to fudge a verb or a metaphor or a preposition. In a blog, in conversation, often enough I'll just leave it sloppy, so that my meaning is clear, though it comes out as badly written. This is especially true when you are setting up binaries, which is a common rhetorical approach (parallelism and contrast), but halfway through the sentence you realize this isn't a real opposition, or your metaphor is wrong, or you even chose the wrong first word ("although" when you really mean "regardless")--- this is all a sort of rhetorical autopilot.

What this leads to, in large enough quantities, is an imprecision that makes what we are saying nonsense. I think this is a) too obvious, and b) too hysterical a point to dwell on here. What I would like to talk about instead is the laziness, not of ideology or politics, but of people's self-formation. I was lecturing someone about this earlier, in the context of people's internet profiles, which are a really good and a really bad way to form opinions about someone. Good, because how people represent themselves is important. Bad, because people almost always represent themselves poorly.

What I cannot stand is people COMMITTED to ironizing, delaying, obscuring, and creating a nearly-universal language of avoidance, in these forums. I think we are all familiar with a hipster dialect of mystical animal/improbable verb to construct a record title or internet handle. This may also include adjectives like "awesome" or questionable signifiers like "AIDS".
So, "AIDS Wolf" is a band, but also "Awesome Color" and "Japanther". Presumably all of this will sound incredibly dated in a few years, just as the two words "Surrealistic" and "Pillow" now clearly reek of a precisely-dateable pretension. On the other hand, at least you know what you are getting ("surrealistic" might as well say "psychadelic").

Here, as a counter-example, I would cite my two of my own internet "names": "Misfits Fan" (my email) and "S/s", my name on myspace. The Misfits are my favorite band, and S/s (signifier determines subject) is probably the most important concept in philosophy for me, and a key part of my favorite book In Search of Lost Time. Nuff said. I mean these things. "Japanther" means nothing. And also, fair enough--it doesn't have to. We're all postmodern here, right?

My contention would be that, yes, we are all being postmodern here. There is irony in "misfits fan" (it makes me sound like a 15 year old), and in "S/s" (what the fuck does it mean?), but at the same time, these are two VERY important things to me, rendered as if they were just floating signifiers. They aren't. But I am pretending that they are, since I am using them to "name" me. So, for me, I would say, this is my huge critique of the Hipster: get a self. Stay with it. Play with it, by all means. Have fun. Use language and images and signifiers, as freely as you like. But at the end of the day, MEAN something. You don't have to "stand for something"; I am not being political here. Be a person. Consolidate your objects and your desires into something that goes beyond evasion and posturing. I have an idea of what it is like to mature and to get into new things; this doesn't have to be everyone's. I do not ask anyone to be twee and wear their hearts on their sleeves, or to be humorless, or worst of all to be ME, but more's the pity if you turn 30 and you realize you have merely been rotating your self out on a 6-month schedule.

more on the "three point turn"

here is the original post I made

and here is Frederic Jameson explaining it much more clearly (but essentially repeating me):

The old stereotype is that Hegel works according to a cut-and-dried progression from thesis, through antithesis, to synthesis. This, Zizek explains, is completely erroneous: there are no real syntheses in Hegel and the dialectical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way; a variety of examples are adduced. Still, that stupid stereotype was not altogether wrong. There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the ‘appearance’; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or ‘essence’; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was ‘true’ after all.

here's some more bullshit

There are two articles in the Times today about how religions are not subject to the law in the same way as other corporations/organizations. One is about how churches are not subject to the same regulations about land/supervision of programs that a secular body would be, and the other is about how employees have little recourse against churches if they are fired.

The obvious thing strikes me is that christians want to have their cake and eat it, too, as regards the separation of church and state. So, religious types want to put prayer in public school, keep the word "God" in the pledge of allegiance, pursue their political agenda, demand money for faith-based programs, etc. And then they demand that the government not tell them how to use their land. And as long as an overwhelming majority of congress-people are religious, this is probably just the way it will be. We live in a democracy run by Christians. If you want to let these people vote, you have to follow their rules. Deal with it.

The second thing is that I really don't care if churches fuck over their employees. The reason I think everyone (including me) gets upset about priests abusing kids is, they are KIDS. Their parents put them in this situation, and they have no good way to speak out or defend themselves or escape, and their parents drive them to church week after week to get molested. But I have no such sympathy for, say, a Nun who gets dismissed from her order because she has cancer. If some whack hospital thinks that collective bargaining and unions "defy Christ’s admonitions that behavior must be directed by individual conscience” and “is inherently disruptive” of the church’s healing mission, you know what, that is splendid. KEEP CRAZIES OUT OF THE 21st CENTURY. Churches marrying gay people, women becoming priests, unions for religious institutions, any kind of respect for human decency--- if you belong to some religion that frowns upon these things, it is your own stupid fault that you expect to enter the 21st century and get married/become a nun/have a union. Mainstream religion is not like Scientology. The Catholic Church is not a bait-and-switch. You know what you are getting into. If anything, it is *more* liberal now than it promised to be in the previous century, which is why you have Mel Gibson-style wingnuts.

The same goes for Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, as for Catholics. Bummed out that your two-thousand-year-old beliefs don't gel with your progressive attitude? GET A CLUE. I am not interested in redeeming or reforming or hearing complaints about your religion. Unless some new scroll gets unearthed, if you are Jewish, and you don't like what is in Deuteronomy, TOUGH LUCK. Unless the virgin Mary appears in an english muffin telling you to be a woman-priest, I don't care. The one real virtue of Religion is that it is UNDISGUISEDLY STUPID. Arguing about whether bread turns into bloody-flesh in your mouth, and an intelligent discussion of collective bargaining: these things need to be kept separate.