Ramblings about the near-future possibility of an American Left.

A thought that pops into my head from time to time: it seems to me that many attempts by journalists and scholars to identify why there's little to no real Left in American political life have approached the question historically, as when Eric Foner asked "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?"; culturally, in the Frankfurt School's and other traditions; economically, as in Herbert Marcuse's discussions of the post-World War II "affluent society" and recent analyses of the character of global capital offered by David Harvey, etc. And I could continue, but I won't, because I'm just setting up my -- open-ended, exploratory and probably naive -- question.

Consider that in this moment, the moral imperative facing all Americans -- sincere people of all political persuasions -- is the condemnation of and counteraction against eight years of radical Right-wing activity. A radical movement that has brought the country (and her citizens) to its knees, and that has made the world a more dangerous place for everyone. Bizarrely, any ethical and responsible political counteraction must begin with a premise that is fundamentally conservative. Not ideologically conservative, but procedurally conservative. Scaling back an out-of-control militarism, restoring the rule of law and the separation of powers, putting responsible people in charge of the public infrastructure, rather than staffing agencies with hired goons who are opposed ideologically to the very policies that these agencies were set up to pursue.

In other words, how does the Left respond in a coherent and progressive way to a Republican regime of national and global politics that has been at once unquestionably Rightist and unquestionably radical? When the Left is faced with an ethical imperative to restore the rule of law, to rebuild the system to the extent that people can have at least some patchy faith that their government is not totally corrupt, how does the Left retain its Leftness through this process of rebuilding? How does it avoid the trap of venerating a nostalgia-induced conception of the way things were before the Bushies fucked everything up? How does the Left stay in touch with its longer term commitments to a more robust democratization, a greater transparency in government, the redress of systemic and structural causes of social injustice? I've never been quite able to figure out how to think about this issue, and by all appearances the commentariat is stumbling in much the same way.

We know that our government is pursuing immoral policies; that these policies threaten to screw over any possibility of a future in which human beings can be happy, free and treated with dignity. We know that the Geneva Conventions must be respected; that the Executive branch must not overstep its authority; that wiretapping without a warrant is and should be illegal and considered unconstitutional; that the FCC should be preventing media consolidation rather than mandating it, against the will of the American people; that torture is wrong, and the fact that the United States admittedly conducts it is hemorrhaging the last of the United States's credibility and moral authority; that governing by instilling fear into the population is to violate any chance of substantive individual rights.

But what can be the Left's response to all this, other than disgust and an impassioned call to action to restore human rights, dignity and due process, to clamor for the conditions of the year 2000? Surely its response must go beyond this? I don't mean just in terms of political platforms, but in the realm of ideas and dreams, of aspiring to replace the status quo with new strategies that will prevent reiterations of the Bush administration's conduct of the past eight years? Mustn't it go beyond the critique of particular personalities and policies?

Don't misunderstand: I believe that the Left is correct to be disgusted by particular personalities, their cynical policies, their lies. And I think that it is indispensable that the Left form coalitions on the basis of the nation's widespread disgust with Bush and with the Republicans. That's why I'm a fervent supporter of Barack Obama. Among his many talents is that of consensus-building. Obama's abilities as a rhetorician alone represent our chance to wipe the slate clean of phony, professional-wrestling-style politics upon which Karl Rove's strategy capitalizes, and which secured for Bush his second term in office.

Although an attractive and charismatic personality himself, Obama's gifts paradoxically pull us away from the politics of personalities. That's because his ability to speak a language that seems to rise above the fray is structurally suited to emphasize commonalities among ostensibly disparate groups of voters. This has the effect of (1) drawing attention to the common ground upon which compromises can best be forged, and (2) therefore also -- although perhaps secondarily -- focusing political discourse upon substantive matters relating to this common ground, rather than upon himself, or, for instance, the role that his relationship with God plays in determining his foreign policy.

But allowing for the importance of these short-term coalitions and compromises -- and the indispensable role that Barack Obama can and should play in creating them -- I hope that the Left is also thinking about the future, because without a vision of the future, the Left will be reduced to a "law and order" movement. In other words: preoccupied with correcting the excesses of radical Republican policies; a Left whose ideological calling cards have to do with administrative expertise. "Law and order" aren't dirty words, mind you. Especially in wake of the Bush administration, they are meaningful and even urgent. It's the John Ashcrofts of the world who -- in the tradition of Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, etc. -- have taken those words and applied them to erosion of human liberty and the sanctioning of hate, torture and fear.

As important as it is, administrative expertise will not provide an ideological basis upon which to build a long-term strategy for the Left. And as urgent as it is that the Left criticize the hypocrisy, excess, and moral bankruptcy of the Right, at some point the Left must begin articulating a coherent set of alternatives. In practice, initially these alternatives needn't and perhaps shouldn't be earth-shattering. There's so much rebuilding to be done in the wake of eight years of incompetence and destruction.

However, in order even to start small, coherence demands that Left begin to think big. We need to think about the kind of world that we aspire to create. So, alongside the important task of restoring the rule of law, maybe we need to start thinking about how best to articulate what it is about the Bush regime that we so oppose, and what is at stake? What is it that hinges upon rectifying matters? Not just identifying Bush's crimes, but describing their destructive effect upon our country, upon the world and upon the fight for human liberty and happiness.

During Bush's eight years in office, we haven't just witnessed the Rightist regime break the letter of innumerable Constitutional mandates, laws, codes, treaties, conventions, doctrines, etc. What's even worse is that the Bush regime has done violence to the spirit of these laws. This is even more elemental, and cognizance of Bush's and Cheney's disregard and disdain for the spirit of the law is every bit as strong a basis upon which to build broad-ranging and effective political coalitions. For example: the Left should really be explaining why disregarding the US Constitution is to, in effect, spit upon the values represented in life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. I'll wager that an ethic of human neighborliness, decency and honesty in some basic form is shared among human beings everywhere. (There's your political coalition....)

There's nothing new in the failure of United States policymakers to achieve these goals. Neither is there anything novel in the government cynically pursuing unsavory and immoral goals by cloaking its actions in the rhetoric of freedom and democracy. What's new is the rapidly escalating extent to which the Right, with overwhelming Executive branch power in its employ, does not even concern itself to pretend that its actions are consistent with American constitutional values or universal values of human freedom and dignity. What's novel -- and what's the most frightening of all -- is that the Bush administration at times welcomes actively the disdain, moral opprobrium and accusations of criminality of enormous sections of the citizenry of its own nation. The administration courts this opprobrium; it wears our outrage like a merit badge. For my money, this tendency, more than any other, has submerged the United States deeper and deeper into a creeping authoritarianism.

As radical as the Right's methods have been, what it's fighting for is still the same old shit: protecting the status quo for wealthy investors; providing an unregulated worldwide climate suited to the unchecked power of huge corporations; repression of autonomy, freedom of movement, thought, and expression; the use of bullying tactics to erode the freedom of the press; the de-funding of public education; the de-skilling of teachers; interference with the ability of public officials -- especially scientists -- to communicate the conclusions to which their expertise leads them; nationalism; militarism; theocracy; secrecy; opacity; the destruction of public infrastructure generally; an active disdain for the existence of public infrastructure; interference in the affairs of formally (if not substantively) sovereign nations; disrespect for anyone/anything it doesn't understand.....

Aphorisms

• An inability to comprehend something does not imply the thing's nonexistence.
  
  
• Being convinced of something isn't the same as knowing it to be true.
  
  
• Just because you're right doesn't mean that the thing you're right about is important.

Strange Season featured in Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly, Volume 12

The Seattle-based musician Jack Shriner, leader of the band Strange Season is a singer-songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist and an exceptionally talented guitar player.

All of these qualities are on display in his contribution to the current edition of the Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly. His song "Inside Voices" -- like most music worth listening to -- is kind of difficult to describe. A track culled from Jack's eclectic second album A Tour of Brief Reunions (available through Jack's Myspace page), "Inside Voices" concerns a zigzagging bass groove that is put through its paces by the jazzbo-tribalism of Dave Flaherty's drums. Flaherty's timekeeping is precise, as close attention to his high hat and bass drum will confirm. However, his toms and snare are engaged in a fascinating dialogue with this metronomic pulse, while Jack's melodic and jerky precision bass slips in and out of the gaps between beats.

All right; enough crap metaphors. Alongside the above-described activity, an interesting ambience emerges from the interplay of 1980's plastic Yamaha synth-stringscapes, swirling piano chords, and obscenely inventive electric guitar lines.

Jack plays lots of shows these days in the pacific northwest, sometimes as a solo artist, and sometimes with his band Strange Season. In addition, his guitar playing and vocals appear on the début album by the Chicago-based band National Tryst, to be released this upcoming fall.

No surprise that journalism is dying, but this is seriously freaky.

Slate recently published a hilarious and disturbing article written by Michael Kinsley, titled A brilliant new scheme for measuring the productivity of journalists. It concerns remarks made by a guy named Randy Michaels who is apparently the "chief operating officer" of the Tribune Company, which owns The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, in addition to myriad properties unrelated to journalism (the Chicago Cubs, for instance). An excerpt:

Last week an article appear[ing] on the Web site of Editor & Publisher...reported that one Randy Michaels...intends to address the ongoing distress of the newspaper industry brought on by the Internet—distress that already has led to massive layoffs and buyouts and a major crisis of confidence if not identity at even the most prestigious and established and, one would have thought, profitable newspapers—by starting to measure the productivity of the journalists who are employed at the various tentacles of that institution.

Not such a big deal, right? Businessmen are always on the lookout for easily digestible metrics for determining "productivity," and these businessmen often convince themselves that these metrics actually mean something. Of course they don't, and they're really just ways of justifying and accounting for layoffs. But Kinsley goes on to describe the chillingly comical detail of Mr. Michaels's scheme:

Productivity will be measured by column-inches of words. In other words, the company will assume that the more words you write, the more productive you are. Or, to put it another way, if you use many, many, many words to make whatever point you may be trying to make or fact you are attempting to report, you will be considered more productive than another writer who takes pains to be concise—that is, to use fewer words rather than more words. This Michaels has apparently been sneaking around with his tape measure (or perhaps he uses an old-fashioned pica rule of the sort once favored by newspaper people during the era of the linotype machine) and has made the piquant discovery that while the average journalist at the Los Angeles Times produces 51 pages of words each year, his or her counterpart at the Hartford Courant, which is also owned by the very same Tribune Co., produces 300 pages of words each year. This is six times as many words. Or, to put it another way (and why not?), the Los Angeles Times journalist produces only one-sixth as many words as the one working in the newsroom of the Hartford Courant. Michaels is completely unabashed, in fact he seems downright proud, of this idea of measuring productivity in column-inches. He said to Editor & Publisher, "This is a new thing. Nobody ever said, 'How many column inches did someone produce?' "

For many, many years, the Los Angeles Times was known for its verbosity, or tendency to use more words than other newspapers to say roughly the same thing. More recently, this habit of writing many, many words when far fewer could make the point as well or nearly so (which is the essence of verbosity) was discouraged at the Los Angeles Times....Today's idea is that a writer should produce as many words as possible, because that means you need fewer writers to produce the same number of words.

Kinsley goes on to reveal that Michaels's plan for cost-saving also involves stripping away much of the content of his newspapers. Michaels wants to reduce the amount of space accorded to articles such that it is equivalent -- 50/50 -- to the amount of space accorded to advertising. Kinsley does Michaels one better:

This Michaels is clearly a bright man. It won't be long before he figures out that you can have an equal number of advertising and editorial pages if you have none of either and simply stop publishing the paper. That way you won't have to employ any journalists at all.

Boumediene v. Bush: The moral legitimacy & political sustainability of America (i.e.: a future for her citizens) preserved by a narrow margin.

The decision of the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush has preserved the commitment of the United States of America to the rule of law, albeit by the narrowest of margins.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion has of course provoked outraged sophistry, whiny self-righteousness and reckless hyperbole among the hired goons of the far Right. That's to be expected. Also to be fully expected is Justice Antonin Scalia's reckless, hyperbolic, whiny, self-righteous and outraged dissent. Scalia's dissent claims that Americans will certainly die as a consequence of the recognition of habeas corpus rights with respect to Guantánamo Bay detainees.

Uh. Even if Scalia's proclamation were somehow true -- which it isn't -- is Scalia asking us to accept a choice between (1) risking death as citizens of a nation that protects our civil liberties and (2) enjoying a marginally smaller risk of death as citizens of an authoritarian/totalitarian state in which our civil liberties can be brushed aside?

Scalia's not just a bully, but he's also a bully who's wrong. Moreover, he's hypocritical. For all of his rhetoric that his supposedly "originalist" jurisprudence somehow preserves political disinterestedness in Supreme Court decisions -- which he repeatedly claims to distinguish his jurisprudence from that of his colleagues -- his dissent is so brazenly political that Fox News/the Washington Times/the Weekly Standard/Rush "Pill-Popper" Limbaugh won't even need to ask their interns to "massage" the text of his incendiary remarks in order to fashion them into highly charged pieces of hard-Right propaganda. You can almost hear John Williams's fanfare-for-evil "The Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back.

Anyway, re the choice between liberty and life, I believe that we Americans were presented with a fantastic moral calculus in sixth grade history class:

Give me liberty, or give me death!

You know what? We should wake up and start addressing the real national security problem, which is that the Republican Party believes that the moral, legal and political authority of the United States can and should be bought and sold in times of national crisis or emergency.

Our future hinges on the durability of the rule of law, of civil rights. Without those things, all is lost. Fuck anyone who says otherwise. No one over the age of 50 had better dare to tell me otherwise, because this is an issue that concerns my future children. It's not about Scalia, nor is it about his children, nor is it about George W. Bush.

These people will all be dead and gone by the time the true ramifications of their negligence are felt, and most of their money will be gone with them. When the dust settles, the only thing that will matter to me, my loved ones, and to my children is whether or not I live in a nation of laws, in which civil liberties, due process and constitutional rights remain intact.

And so I take it very personally when Scalia mouths off about overriding these constitutional protections in order to preserve human life. Without our constitutional rights, we have no life, and we certainly can't in good faith expect to provide any kind of life for our children. Fuck you, Scalia: what about preserving my life? What about preserving the possibility of the lives of my children?

But, alas, Scalia's dissent isn't about me. And it isn't about you, Dear Reader. It has nothing to do with the document that protects us from totalitarianism and tyranny: U.S. Constitution. No, Scalia's dissent is about politics. More specifically: cultural politics. More specifically: the right of a small vanguard of ideological Executive Branch wackjobs to exercise unchecked power to break the law and violate the Constitution -- all of this under the cover of secrecy and without the slightest worry of ever having to be held accountable for chopping down the few remaining bulwarks that hold the tatters of our country aloft.

A succinct New York Times editorial gets it right: "Justice 5, Brutality 4." I had all but given up on the rag.

Seriously: why don't you read the opinion? Also, give a listen to the oral arguments, in which the razor-sharp questions posed by Justices Souter and Breyer will make you want to stand up and cheer.

Slavoj Žižek on authoritarian capitalism, other horrors.

In an interview, broadcast on Icelandic television (the date is unknown to me), Slavoj Žižek argues that the Left needs to take notice of the decoupling of capitalism and democracy, and--in the example of China, whose lead smaller states have begun to follow--the disturbing advance of authoritarian capitalism. Also discussed is biotechnology, the implications of which, he argues, traditional and current ethical discourses are ill-equipped to handle.

Reckless Records review of Smallwire début

Smallwire's début album Songs for Sleeping In, issued by the Japan-based Moor Works label, is now available at Chicago's Reckless Records. To hear some of the songs that feature on this album, won't you have a listen at Smallwire's Web site and Myspace page?

Here is the Reckless Records review of Songs for Sleeping In, reproduced in its entirety:

SMALLWIRE
SONGS FOR SLEEPING IN (JAPANESE IMPORT)
MOORWORKS
Chicago's SMALLWIRE caught our attention a few years back with their self-released e.p. "Death of a Snowflake." Since then, they've been slowly crafting this very strong debut album. The most striking quality of the group is the rich & ethereal vocal harmonies that recall bands such as LUSH & STEREOLAB. The arrangements are sparse & restrained with the rhythm section sometimes sitting out almost entire songs. There's a maturity to the songwriting here that bands often don't hit upon until their third or fourth release. Along with the 1900s & SCOTLAND YARD GOSPEL CHOIR, SMALLWIRE are paving the way for a new wave of orchestral pop groups in Chicago. If you like BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE, GALAXIE 500, Slumberland bands etc... then this is an album you really need to hear.

Available at: All Stores
New CD $14.99

USA as 'classless society', part ∞: education.

The assumption that American society is classless is to mainstream/bourgeois media as hydrogen is to water. But every now and again, while reading a publication such as the online magazine Slate, I'll stumble upon a manifestation of this assumption's embeddedness that I find particularly cloying. Discussions of education that ignore or reflect an author's ignorance of the profound impact of class, racial politics and other historical and current forms of social stratification tend to make me sick to my stomach.

Tell me that Anne Applebaum's recent mouth-breathing rumination All Work and No Play Still Might Not Get Jack Into Harvard doesn't induce nausea in the pit of your tummy. An excerpt:

...[T]he parents of many driven children

Gee, I hate to interrupt so soon, but if "driven children" means anything at all, it refers to children whose means of ordering and comprehending their relationship to the world around them provides for a realizable measure of mastery, competence or autonomy, however construed. Each of these children grow up with either the conviction or the guarantee that there's a piece of the pie with his or her name on it, and it is their task to learn to slice it. So already Applebaum is speaking only of children born into families with a significant social and cultural foothold, a status a child attains only through the good fortune of having been born into the right family in the right place at the right time, and that almost always coincides with preexisting economic wealth.

In other words, Applebaum's "driven children" consists of a tiny, privileged minority. Anyway, she continues, the parents of "many" of these "driven children," who apparently were

raised on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie, retain a kind of nostalgia for a pre-industrial America, one in which childhood involved breaking horses and building rafts, in which "schooling" was optional, and in which dropping out was a romantic option....

Uh, right. And the thing about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie is that they're, uh, works of fiction. They are entertainments. They're also myths -- a perfectly fine thing for them to be, by the way -- that are to a lesser or greater extent themselves constructed from the raw materials of previous myths. The pioneer families of the Great Plains. The provincial Southern Town that may have its troubles, but deep down, there's a Heart of Gold. Applebaum knows that life wasn't really like that, right?

So why is it then that she lets this small minority of privileged parents of privileged children off the hook for -- apparently -- mistaking its own privileged yet workaday childhood for a mythical one that existed only in classic fiction and shitty television series? Could it be because this group is engaged in the same act of self-delusion as Applebaum: failure to see the concept of meritocracy for the myth that it is?

It's notable, this nostalgia, because it isn't necessarily shared by other countries. Certainly not by the British, some of whose children start taking serious, life-changing exams at age 11, nor by the Koreans whose children declare they can't let themselves "waste even a second" during their 15-hours-a-day, seven-days-a week quest to get into college, preferably Harvard. In fact, any country committed to meritocracy has to impose exams on its high-school seniors. Otherwise, university admissions will necessarily depend upon wealth, access, and parental connections.

Applebaum is missing the point. University admissions already depend upon "wealth, access, and parental connections." University admissions have always depended upon these things. What changed was that the myth of the United States as a "country committed to meritocracy" gained popularity, prominence and the support of Social Darwinist intellectuals during the American Gilded Age. It's more than mere coincidence that meritocracy's rise to prominence occurred during the fucking Gilded Age. There was a brief moment in the wake of World War II, driven by public spending on social services like the G.I. Bill, during which the playing field did even out the tiniest bit, but those days are long gone, Applebaum.

More strangely, our nostalgia also clashes oddly with the other important American education narrative, the one that focuses on the 46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the "basic" level in science (only 2 percent qualify as "advanced"), the "Dumbest Generation" of semi-literates glued to their cell phones, and the enormous number of teenagers—a stunning one-third of the total—who fail to graduate from high school on time. Since 38 percent of these teenagers recently told one survey that they dropped out because "I had too much freedom and not enough rules in my life," it's no surprise that solutions to the drop-out crisis often involve the imposition of stricter school regimes, with more organized hours of teaching, more pressure, and, yes, more testing.

This is the part that just makes me want to fucking wretch. Tell me, Anne Applebaum, do you suppose that the "46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the 'basic' level in science" are on a level playing field with your precious "driven children," vying for spots at Harvard?

Thus are our kids both stupider than we were and harder working

Well, let's give Applebaum the benefit of the doubt and suppose that she's describing our shared American narrative of classlessness. She doesn't, of course, take a moment to point out that classlessness itself is the most pernicious myth of all. So, instead of calling her stupid or deluded, let's just call her evil.

—though perhaps this makes sense.

Ermmm, Anne, let's not get ahead of ourselves...

Evoking at once the myopia of a county club mom burdened with arranging schedules for her children's tennis lessons and the self-undermining pro-atomized individualism of a fat, exurban AM radio-listener, Applebaum's self-deception -- be it rhetorical or real -- that we Americans are all on a level playing field is just about the most laughable and disgusting thing I can recall having read in Slate. And considering that the magazine includes contributions from Christopher Hitchens, that's no small thing.

Illinois Entertainer on Smallwire's album Songs for Sleeping In

On April 30, 2008, the Illinois Entertainer published the following review of Songs for Sleeping In, the début album of Chicago band Smallwire. Entertainer reviewer Andy Argyrakis lavishes praise upon the fruits of Smallwire's labors.

Here's the review:

After opening for Tapes 'N Tapes, Chin Up Chin Up, and Magnolia Electric Co. (to name a few), melodic indie poppers Smallwire turned in the somber though sophisticated Songs For Sleeping In. Frontwoman Kristin Barendregt evokes Feist throughout the peppier premises of "Is It What You Thought?" and "Aftercast," while the dreamy backdrops of "Blur The Lines" and "Passing Plane" conjure production images of Brian Eno. (www.myspace.com/smallwire)

– Andy Argyrakis

Some Hates/Loves (ala Westwood & McLaren)

Sex was the name of the boutique owned and operated by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in the 1970s, located at 430 King's Road, London. McLaren, of course, became the manager of the Sex Pistols before his megalomania, incompetence and clashes of ego with John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon precipitated the band's disintegration.

Although Westwood and McLaren were in the business of selling clothes -- designed by Westwood, who appropriated period and street fashions -- the couple's real stock in trade was anti-establishmentarianism. They set out to tap into a growing and restless market of misfits; unemployed kids from the projects, as well as refugees of lower-middle-class suburbs, occupying condemned buildings in the economic and cultural wasteland of inner-city London. Westwood and McLaren attracted a clientèle whose sense of fashion was united its contempt for the hypocrisy, excess and bourgeois myopia of anything related to hippie culture.

Neither McLaren nor Westwood has ever been noted primarily for possessing business acumen. They frequently remodeled their store and changed its inventory out of boredom rather than to capitalize on sales. Initially calling their shop Let It Rock, which peddled Teddy Boy regalia, they moved on to edgier and funnier pastures with the advent of Sex, which specialized in rubber clothing, assorted accoutrements and paraphernalia, and -- most importantly -- tee-shirts emblazoned with snarky or confrontational slogans.

One such tee-shirt declared: "You’re gonna wake up one morning and know which side of the bed you’ve been lying on!" Beneath this manifesto appeared a list of pop culture and political references under the headings Hates and Loves. It is in the spirit of that pioneering tee-shirt that I shall undertake to improvise some Hates and Loves of my own. Or, rather, some Nos and Yeses. And since negation is an act of creation, let us begin with the former:

No!
audiophilia
blinders
blogs
Brooklyn
cant
ear fatigue
determinism as despair
Jim Derogatis
'expertise' as a stand-in for persuasiveness
Sasha Frere-Jones
Nancy Franklin
Jonathan Franzen
the herd
the hive
Sam Harris
Hilary
Christopher Hitchens (soused fatso, turncoat, fascist)
Peter Hitchens (bigot & mouth-breather)
Marx, mis- and shallow readings of
meritocracy, the concept of
NPR
.mp3s
'objectivists', from The Unabomber to Alan Greenspan
Peter, Bjorn and John (or whatever it's called)
scientism
Spiritualized
standardized tests (& all other forms of eugenics)
Stereolab after Sound-Dust
Sid Vicious
David Foster Wallace since 1999

Yes!
Anthony Braxton
Lester Bangs
Barack
cigarettes
cigarettes, jazz-
John Coltrane
daydreaming
eloquence
Brian Eno
Thomas Frank
good luck, not underestimating the importance of
historicism
the Hohner Pianet, model T
jazz
Mark Kozelek
Herbert Marcuse
Marx
Sean O'Hagan
Jim O'Rourke
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
The Last Metro
Lewis H. Lapham
John Lydon
Spacemen 3
thought
vinyl
.wav files
Slavoj Žižek

Fucking brilliant.

John Lydon and Keith Levene on the Tom Snyder Show in 1980.

Mediocrity.

The labors of The New York Times photo caption-writing desk:



























It just sings, doesn't it. Rolls off the tongue like spring dew.

Reminder (II)

In an interview (I can't remember the source), Bob Dylan says:

You don't have to write anything down to be a poet. Some work at gas stations, some shine shoes.

Reminder

From Karl Marx's "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," 1844.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked.

Slavoj Zizek on why debates about the legitimacy of torture are terrifying in and of themselves.

Knight of the Living Dead (NYT, 3/24/07)

This op-ed, by philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek--and amazingly, among other things, onetime presidential candidate in Slovenia, his country of origin--was published one year ago in The New York Times. Zizek's argument may be summarized as follows: 1) under our current political regime, a discourse concerning the moral legitimacy of torture has been opened, 2) this opening is irreversible structurally, and 3) the disturbing consequences will linger far beyond current political contingencies.

"In a way,” writes Zizek, “those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it.” He argues that although accepting this discourse as legitimate might leave untarnished the “individual conscience” of the enlightened, Western torture-opponent, this is at the expense of transforming irrevocably our public morality, which he locates in Hegel’s “‘objective spirit,’ the set of unwritten rules that form the background of every individual’s activity.”

Let's say you're a libertarian--in the American sense: you know, people like Alan Greenspan and the Unabomber--and you're thinking that the whole idea of public morality is for the birds. And so why should you care what this slobbering old Marxist has to say about torture? Well, then. Zizek presents a persuasive case (for the fact that you're an asshole):

For example, a clear sign of progress in Western society is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, he would appear so ridiculous as to disqualify himself from any further consideration. And the same should hold for torture.

I'm not alone in my frustration with the insufficiently critical stance of most everyone in positions of authority--particularly people who are at least vaguely left of center, who really should know better--toward the Bush Administration’s policies and conduct. (I won't bore us with the list, which includes the undermining of the rule of law and due process, lying to prosecute immoral wars, the expansion of unchecked Executive Branch powers...) In my outrage, I'm often quick to attribute this silence and complicity to mere economic standing: you know, everyone--particularly the Baby Boomers, who have all the money and votes--is too fat and happy to give a shit, etc.

It would be more productive for me to think of it this way: perhaps people--on the Left included--are used to taking stock of ‘where they stand’ on most moral issues. How might we redirect our attention to the matter of: where are these questions taking us?

"Brutal" by The Mekons

The lyrics to one of my favorite songs by The Mekons, from the band's 1991 album The Curse of the Mekons. It is maybe a blueprint for good political songwriting. If only you could hear Sally Timm's celestial deadpan wrapping itself around this song's gorgeous and spooky melody:

Brutal
The Mekons

Here comes McDrug

The english love for China tea
Brought deficit to the economy
What could we sell back?
Send in the army to deal some smack

Drugs and guns and slavery
Live together in perfect harmony
Where the poppy grew
The soil is dead

The East India Company scum
Flooding China with opium
The soil all washed away
Flooding Bangladesh today

Here comes McDrug

Drugs have long been the currency
Of the Central Intelligence Agency
U.S.A. and E.E.C.
A long dull story of corruption

Now a clown steps over the Berlin Wall
With a burning cross and pills to go
His Perestroika dependency will
Sit in your gut like a golf ball

Noiseless rocks as clear as ice
Nursed at home with loving pride
Crystal goblets of sherbet
Heaped up, flaked up, rosewater snow

Needles washed up from the sea
On a beach in Californ-i-ay
Help me get me through the day
Here comes McDrug

Needle searches for a new enemy
Locks onto targets in the big city
That was built on the profits
From the opium trade

Here comes McDrug

The duffer rests in a Fenland graveyard
On his way to Alderman Roberts
He's got the tinctures in his bag
To take away our daily hurts

Why progressives should vote for Obama

In an article that appears in the current issue of The Nation, Christopher Hayes does a pretty good job of describing why I think it should be fairly obvious to anyone who is progressive (or lefter) that Barack Obama is a candidate worth supporting. Hayes's analysis, which I'll get to in a moment, endorses implicitly what I believe to be the best response to question:

But why should I support Barack when his platform is indistinguishable from Hilary's? Just because of his rhetoric?

My answer is: yes--with one caveat--because of his rhetoric! All of the most important things that presidents do have to do with rhetoric: how to set the terms of a discussion, how to be convincing, how to establish and maintain moral authority, how to say things that people don't want to hear, how to speak to lots of different kinds of people without condescending to some and sucking up to others. And thus my caveat: the idea that the political platforms of Obama and Clinton are 'indistinguishable' carries weight only insofar as we ignore the embeddedness of rhetoric in all aspects of presidential leadership. Of course rhetoric is too small a word to encompass the qualities enacted through Obama's gifts as a communicator, through his very persona, through the fact that historical circumstances combine with very existence a moment of profound possibility.

And I must insist that descriptions of Obama as "charismatic"--as it's used in reactionary rags like The New York Times--is pretty much a term of diminution. Such a term serves to deemphasize Obama's brilliance, savvy and astonishing fitness to rise to the challenge of our troubled political moment and focus attention instead upon his mere appeal. More specifically, upon the novelty of this appeal--folded into which is the unprecedented alignment of people/interests to whom he appeals--particularly as perceived by the James Carvilles of the world. Career technicians or "experts" who have build their "expertise," relevance and livelihoods upon rhetorics, logics and configurations of voters that are now disintigrating before our eyes. In fact, it's this very disintegration that is so vexing and even scary to these professionals.

A better description of Obama would take stock of the political, moral and rhetorical realignment that constitutes this moment--a moment that I think we should all admit is Obama's moment--and that points to the ways in which he and he alone is positioned to take the reigns. "Charismatic?" That description hardly captures it. Obama is a brilliant and empathic communicator. And it helps that Obama is a brilliant and empathic communicator while also being a brilliant and empathic person.

Anyway, this paragraph from Hayes's article does a pretty good of showing how Obama's skills as a communicator apply to the context of foreign policy, and differentiate him from Hilary in all of the ways that matter most (italics mine):

[F]oreign policy is where the President's agenda is implemented more or less unfettered. It's here where distinctions in worldview matter most--and where Obama compares most favorably to Clinton. The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous to do so) spoke out against it. In this campaign, their proposals are relatively similar, but in rhetoric and posture Clinton has played hawk to Obama's dove, attacking from the right on everything from the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to negotiating with Iran's president.

Continuing on the topic of foreign policy, the rhetorical differences between the two candidates aligns with and bespeaks another important distinction between the candidacies of Obama and Clinton: namely the kinds of people each will be likely to appoint to advisory and Cabinet positions during his or her presidency (an aspect of a candidacy of which the example of George W. Bush's administration should make us all the warier):

Her hawkishness relative to Obama's is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it's a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama's circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake.

As Hayes points out: Hilary's got the ideological militarism thing going on among her likely appointees/brain trust.

The single most important reason to get off your ass and vote for Obama, one that has to do both with his skills as a communicator and his stance on Iraq is that he's the only candidate by a mile whom we can trust to restore and preserve the rule of law:

"We need to bring to a close this sad chapter in American history, and begin a chapter that passes the might of our military to the freedom of our diplomacy and the power of our alliances. And while we are at it, we can close down Guantanamo and we can restore habeas corpus and we can lead with our ideas and our values."

- Barack Obama, Richmond, Virginia, May 8

God DAMN. That's the voice of someone who's got a chance of becoming president. Let's do this, people! No excuses. Now is not the time for the lethargy that tempts you to demur; now is not the time for the masochism that compels you--like high fiber cereal--toward Clinton. The Clintons' time is done. Bill was the candidate for a certain moment. But, Barack Obama is the candidate for this moment. Fuck the assholes, and give this man your vote!!!

Flavorpill Chicago on Smallwire

In early February 2008, the Web site Flavorpill Chicago published the following piece recommending a performance by the Chicago band Smallwire:

With all the sharp-eyed journos covering Chicago's variegated music scene, it's astonishing that local indie-pop purveyors Smallwire have yet to garner the fawning blog posts and laudatory column inches they so richly deserve. In many ways, though, the outfit's unsung bedroom pop — teeming with delicate keyboard tinkles, pitch-perfect harmonies, and shimmering guitar hooks — is even sweeter to hear when you know no one else is listening. Tonight, the lithe and lovely five-piece (with additional friends on viola and cello) sets up shop at the MCA's Magical Musical Showcase to perform songs off its full-length debut, the swoon-worthy Songs for Sleeping In.

- Suzanne Niemoth

Smallwire in The Chicago Sun-Times

The February 1, 2008 edition of The Chicago Sun-Times contained the following article on the Chicago band Smallwire:

Smallwire steps into MCA music spotlight
February 1, 2008

BY ALLISON AUGUSTYN

Seeing a band play an art museum might not be your first plan on a Tuesday night. But the Museum of Contemporary Art, local music venue Schubas and Chicago band Smallwire are hoping they can convince you otherwise.

The first Tuesday of every month, the MCA hosts the "Magical Musical Showcase," a performance series highlighting local bands. A nice twist on the series is that the MCA asks Chicago venues to choose which bands will play, leaving the decisions to people who know the music well.

The Feb. 5 choice fell to the popular North Side club Schubas, which is known for putting eclectic bands on-stage, so it's no surprise it would promote a band like Smallwire.

Smallwire formed in 2005, but their first CD, "Songs for Sleeping In," will be released this April on the Japanese label Moorworks. It makes sense that it would take time for the band to craft an album. Smallwire's sound draws from art-pop sensibilities, is intricate, often delicate, layered and constantly moving in different musical directions. The songs require a few listens to dig through everything going on.

"The band is more an ensemble than the traditional singer with backup and a rhythm section," said bassist/vocalist Tom Schreiner. "We think of all of the instruments and voices as pretty much equally important, write parts that interact in ways that seem to us to be both interesting and cohesive, and try to keep the sound balanced."

To complement the ensemble, Smallwire's performance will feature additional musicians on viola and cello. The band has been working on new music for the event.
"The MCA series provides us with an environment in which to work with different textures and harmonies," Schreiner said.

So with support from a known venue like Schubas and a performance stage in a place dedicated to art, Smallwire gets a chance to appeal to an audience that differs from the traditional club crowd but may be no less involved or listening. It's an intriguing combination of concepts.

Allison Augustyn is a local free-lance writer.

Newcity Chicago on Smallwire

The following recommendation and miniature album review was published by the weekly publication Newcity Chicago on January 29, 2008. It listed Smallwire's Museum of Contemporary Art performance its #1 out of five picks for the first week of February, 2008.

Tip of the Week
Smallwire
Tom Lynch

Chicago minimalist crew Smallwire's pretty, obviously titled "Songs for Sleeping In" on Moorworks is daring in its restraint and, by its very nature, humble in its presentation. The vocals from Kristin Barendregt and Kristina Dutton reach ethereal marks only found in the best of gazers and, backed by clean, quiet guitars and effortless piano and string pieces, the harmonies speak in waves. The nearly perfect arrangements are never obtrusive on the songs' melodies—and the brief and emotional string finale to "Blur the Lines" might just be the best damn thing on the album. It sounds like a beautiful drowning. The band plays as part of Schubas's Magical Musical Showcase Series at the MCA, so the show's early in the evening. Don't miss it.

Smallwire plays February 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, at 6:30pm.

(2008-01-29)