March 2009
Kilgore Trout on Youtube?
Apparently Kilgore Trout is no longer a fictional character and he has a youtube page.
Rethinking Zizek’s “The Parallax View”
As a result of my undergraduate thesis, I’ve immersed myself in Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique. I’d already read it once about a year ago due to its prominent position in Zizek’s last big work, The Parallax View (coincidentally, this was the first Zizek book I ever read, and then I almost perfectly worked backwards chronologically through his corpus, reading The Ticklish Subject, then Looking Awry, then The Sublime Object of Ideology, and currently finishing The Indivisible Remainder), but since then I’ve taken it up successively, even incessantly. I’ve read each section probably three times, as well as all the footnotes.
This isn’t to suggest that I’ve “mastered” Karatani—many sections are still troublingly opaque to me. But out of the intense focus on even minor details in Karatani’s work, it’s become increasingly clear to me just how much it structures The Parallax View. Here’s a quote from Karatani in the opening section on Marx:
Marx left a massive amount of work. But fragmentary as it is, it is impossible to induce Marx’s philosophy or political economy or communism out of the corpus. It was Engels who, after Marx’s death, first sought to make it into a system. He constructed an edifice of Marxism in conformity with the Hegelian system: dialectical materialism (vis-a-vis logic), natural dialectics (vis-a-vis the philosophy of nature), historical materialism (vis-a-vis the philosophy of history), political economy and state theory (vis-a-vis the philosophy of right), and so on. Since then, Marxism has striven to perfect this system, including
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Tenth Anniversary of the WTO Strikes
Lenin:
Slightly less than a decade ago, I skipped London’s first anticapitalist protest to go to work…I thought it was an inspiring first glimpse of resistance to New Labour, which was already mired in sleaze, ripping up its most modest election pledges and reviving the very crackpot Tory ideas that voters had just overwhelmingly rejected. But I didn’t think it would last.
And then there was Seattle…And then Prague, and Genoa. Ten years on, the ideas of that extaordinary movement turn out to be more relevant than ever. The methods of protests and carnivalesque spectacle were never going to work on their own, but they could have - sometimes did - lead to more militant action. And that is what we’re looking for today, with the G20 protests and the amazing strike waves across Europe.
Check out Lenin’s tomb for an hour long documentary about the protests. It would be nice if Lenin were right—there’s been a fairly large wave of protests over the past year or so starting with the ones that began in Greece (up to the recent New School occupation). Plus the financial collapse and the anger it unleashed at the fraudulent bailouts and the most recently unveiled Geithner plan, which does little to alter the conditions that brought about the crisis to begin with, might certainly contribute to a larger than average protest at the upcoming G20.
But on the other hand, unlike the WTO strikes, there doesn’t seem to be a well-coordinated or well-articulated “message” on the Left. No unified movement, no unified narrative. At the very least, populist anger seems to be articulated along the lines of there being a few bad apples, but overall the system is good. On the other hand, though, one shouldn’t factor out the element of spontaneity (like with the use of mass-cellphone messaging in China), but in cynical times it’s hard not to be cynical.
The Rule Of Publishing Your Undergraduate Senior Thesis.
Mikhail Emelianov at Perverse Egalitarianism has a word of advice for people like me (I just finished writing mine yesterday!):
Don’t do it until you are famous philosopher and also dead. Hide it well and then let it be discovered. Publish it as the “laterst book by yours truly” - make some green.
One of the embarrassing moments during the writing process was when I accidentally referred to my “publishing” the thesis to my advisor. Obviously it was the wrong choice of words, but she quickly seized on the opportunity to point it out as a slip of the tongue (my thesis is on psychoanalysis).
That leads me to another point: transference and editing are oddly similar. The writer is like the analysand and the editor the analyst (objet petit a). Whenever the editor makes corrections to your work that are especially insightful, you have a tendency to hate them, but really the hatred is Imaginary—one necessarily misrecognizes their intention as purely spiteful rather than an analytic process of spotting the inconsistencies and errors in the analysand’s discourse. That is to say, the writer, like any analysand, overlooks the Symbolic structure of the transference and the way it engenders fake emotions like love and hate.
Shanty Towns
The New York Times:
Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns.
What a miserable world we live in (link goes to the article).
Managing the Economy
Adam Kotsko on the financial crisis:
At the same time, I am going to advance a radical proposition: the ultimate fault lies not with [the evil people in the big banks], but with the US government. That’s because the government lays down the ground rules. Within those rules, these businessmen sought the maximum possible short-term profit — both for their firms and for themselves personally. That is what they’re supposed to do. The government’s job is to set limits to the pursuit of profit so that they can’t act in such a way as to destroy the entire economy. The government did not do that. Therefore, it’s the government’s fault that the economy is presently in the toilet and — more importantly — the solution is not to get a few troubled firms over the hump to “go back to normal,” but to completely reconfigure the way the state shapes the economy.
I think Kotsko is basically right. I forget who said this, but behind all of the populist resentment toward the financier class always lies a little hint of anti-Semitism. This isn’t meant to exonerate the financier class, but as Marx pointed out, during periods of crisis it’s always much easier to blame them since their role is to convert money into more money (M-M’). But in reality this is the whole point of the entire capitalist economy, regardless of whether one is generating surplus-value through derivatives and speculation alone (M-M’) or the production of computers and cellphones (M-C-M’). In the case of the latter, the production of commodities just obfuscates the real intention.
More Belated Communism Conference Links
Three from infinite thøught:
- Notes from March 13-15, 2009 Part I
- Notes from March 13-15, 2009 Part II
- Alberto Toscano’s Communist Knowledge/Communist Power
I especially like this bit during a Q&A session from Part II, where Zizek responded to a question regarding the use of state power:
SZ: We should not be afraid of the state, we shall have to force state to behave in non-state way. Abolish Christmas!
Also, a great summary of the events by Mark Fisher of k-punk posted at Frieze Magazine, which I highly suggest reading!
Civil War in the United States?
An excellent and brief piece by renowned sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein:
We are getting accustomed to all sorts of breakdowns of taboos. The world press is full of discussion about whether it would be a good idea to “nationalize” banks. None other than Alan Greenspan, disciple of the superlibertarian prophet of pure market capitalism, Ayn Rand, has recently said that we have to nationalize banks once every hundred years, and this may be that moment. Conservative Republican Senator Lindsay Graham agreed with him. Left Keynesian Alan Blinder discussed the pros and cons of this idea. And while he thinks the cons are a bit bigger than the pros, he was willing to spend public intellectual energy writing about this in the New York Times.
One shouldn’t forget Wallerstein’s prescience regarding the Iraq War, not to mention all of his other short commentaries dating back to 1998 (archived here).
Marx at the Opera
The New York Times:
According to The Telegraph, the opera’s director, He Nian, told the Chinese newspaper Wen Hui Bao, “The particular performance style we choose is not important, but Marx’s theories cannot be distorted.” The opera is planned to open in Shanghai next year.
I wonder how it will compare to the great Cultural Revolution-era performance of “The East is Red”:
It gets really good at about 2:15 minutes in. (Tweeted by LeftBookClub.)
Préliminaires
Iggy Pop’s first post-Stooges move is a New Orleans jazz album and it sounds great. You can hear the track in this video, after he explains the project.
Also… he’s wearing a shirt!
House Punishes A.I.G.
The big news today is that apparently the government is responding to the public outcry regarding the A.I.G. bonuses, so the House just passed (with mostly bi-partisan support) a 90% tax on the bonuses handed out to A.I.G. executives. I also thought this detail was interesting:
Republicans were not to be outdone in expressing disgust, and they had a collective “I told you so” message for Democrats. Representative Ed Royce of California, for instance, said he would vote for the bill on the floor, but he proudly recalled that last fall he had voted against the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the bailout plan that is the source of mounting public fury.
With everyone—even the Right—joining the populist ranks to punish corporate looters and swindlers, I’m feeling increasingly skeptical and uneasy about my initial gut-reaction to the news (“let the fuckers burn!,” or something to that extent). On the one hand, what groups like A.I.G. did was objectively terrible and obviously corrupt, but on the other hand I think the broad governmental support for this kind of punitive measure signals the fact that something is wrong about it—even a number of things wrong.
It seems that the House bill will give the public a little taste of vengeance against the wealthy aristocracy without actually fixing the underlying problem. All the government has done is to eliminate the bonuses, but the executives who helped to bring about the crisis have not even been fired or imprisoned for mass-fraud or anything like that. But even if such measures were taken, it would lead us to conclude that only a few rotten apples were responsible for bringing about the crisis and that, with those few eliminated or punished, the system will be fine.
But obviously the people who committed fraud are not mere “individuals.” That’s a convenient fiction that allows us to misrecognize their their basic function as agents of capital. In other words, these people are hired solely on the basis of their expertise in generating surplus-value, just as the bureaucratic managers of industry under actually existing socialism were social agents (eliminating profits, equalizing income, etc.). In that capacity, their individual subjectivity is eclipsed by their objective social role.
So now we the public can go on sleeping, thinking we’ve awoken. We can cast our hexes and even throw our own populist show-trials against the wealthy public enemies, but this won’t change the fact that we still live in a capitalist society and that crisis will come again, if it is not already in the process of becoming through what Hegel called the “silent weaving of the Spirit.”
12:41 or 10:33 (Draft)
This is incomplete, but I’m working on developing a style derivative of Pierre Reverdy and Frank O’Hara, or at least working on writing in that form. Frankly, I’m sick of the confessionals that seem to dominate most things right now, but I’m looking for an informed optimism and spontaneity, which the New York School seems to offer in droves.
I feel I might as well post these here since they’re works in progress, hopefully that won’t get me in trouble if a journal decides to accept some of this work.
12:41 or 10:33
the fickle dreamed of a night where they could kick tin
boxes covered in orange rust while I watched in my studio
with the window like a church, I’m thinking of a town
where I could plant a lemon tree and make it bleed
out the bitter grapefruits I deserve and I’m thinking
too much about that. as a passerby, he wasn’t much
just long hair and a stuffed jacket– he had rice
in his pockets!
well, I just stand here and breathe
same as I always do, dogface and paper suit
making sure I don’t know anyone down there
wise as I was, I couldn’t pull apart bricks
but the electric company can, they send their men
and sure they know all the right plugs. they can get
in between our apartments and they do
because at…
Communism Links
So I guess the Communism Conference taking place at Birkbeck College of London just ended recently (panelists included Zizek, Badiou, Eagleton, Hardt, Negri, etc.). Steven Shaviro has an excellent commentary on Michael Hardt’s lecture, apparently the only one that dealt at all with political economy, as well as a summary of the entire event which I violently urge our readers to check out. Here’s one key passage:
Awareness of these issues, I think, prevents Zizek from articulating groundless fantasies of revolutionary agency in the way that certain other speakers did. Yet the only solution Zizek had to offer, in his talk, was an appeal to Badiou’s transcendental formulation of politics as fidelity to an event of radical rupture, and of “communism” as the name of this event or rupture. In the course of his talk, Zizek called several times for a “radical voluntarism” — though, when called on this formulation in the Q&A, he backpedaled (at least rhetorically) and said that all he meant by such a phrase was that, unlike the old Marxists of the earlier part of the past century, we could no longer believe today that the “logic of history” was on our side, or that we could trust to the objective course of events to displace capitalism and create the necessary and sufficient conditions for communism.
I agree with Zizek on this — indeed, my largest disagreement with Hardt and Negri is precisely that they seem to affirm a soft version of
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New Bob Dylan Album Interview
I almost released a teenage girl’s squeal.
Dead Weather, Third Men
Jack White has another band and they’re making interesting music. He’s not playing guitar or singing this time and they’ve put out a cover of a Gary Numan song.
It’s the first release from the newly opened Third Man Records building. The building includes a recording studio and vinyl record press. The label in a building approach seems similar to great labels like Sun and Motown.
Who wouldn’t be jealous of that?
Democracy (Spoken Word Version)
A spoken word version of “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen:
Learning to Love You More
The general public completes art assignments and submits them to this site. I like Assignment #47.
Board Game
You know which board game is terrible? Life.
You stop and partake in certain events (choosing a spouse, buying a house) that ultimately have little to do with the outcome of the game. There are a series of arbitrary paths that ultimately lead to the same place. At the end of the game if you have a lot of money you can retire to a condo and if you have less, you get to retire to the old person’s home next door to the condo. The winner is determined by who has the most money at the end of the game, but if you’ve been paying attention you already know the winner is the guy who got lucky at the begining of the game.
The game should really be called Existential Crisis, though I guess the box art for that would be a little harder to design.
Rush Limbaugh as a David Lynch Character
These are some Zizekian thoughts I had in a recent IM conversation with Mark, which I figured I would share with the rest of the Velvet Howler-reading world:
What Rush Limbaugh is to the GOP is what characters like Frank (here the drug aspect overlaps), Mr. Eddie, and Bobby Peru are to the films of David Lynch. Whenever the authority of the GOP’s “symbolic father”—generally a “realist,” “family values” Oedipal father figure type, sort of like Pat Buchanan—begins to erode, like in the beginning of Lynch’s Blue Velvet in which the protagonist’s father has a seizure while gardening, the crazy/impotent primordial father emerges: in other words, Rush Limbaugh.
This primordial undead father of the penis makes all sorts of harsh superegoic demands from his loyal minions who can never live up to his zeal and thus enjoins their guilt—as we’ve seen recently displayed in the quasi-Stalinist pageantry of CPAC and the slew of conservatives who, after criticizing Limbaugh, have pathetically retracted their statements. Even Newt Gingrich, another nostalgic figure of the days before the decline of symbolic paternal authority, is powerless in the face of him. Nonetheless, there’s ultimately something pathetic about him, which is that all of his bombastic rhetoric and empty posturing serves to cover up the wound of castration.
From News to Post-News
From the New York Times:
At least Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers. But now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all.
One of the strange and perverse outcomes of the financial crisis is that it seems to have brought about a world-historical paradox apropos news coverage. In older times, people generally had quick access to news coverage regarding whatever was going on in their local community, while national and international news sometimes took months to arrive.
Effectively, under late capitalism, we’re confronted with the possibility that something like the opposite will occur: our access to local news will be drastically diminished, while our access to international news will be rapid and up-to-the-second. One can’t help but draw a parallel between our consumption of news, now of course mass-produced and standardized by groups like the AP, and our consumption of fast food—the monstrous appearance of “McNews” sold and resold, packaged and repackaged to various third party networks, i.e., profit-maximizing mass media corporations, for whom independent journalism is costly, labor-intensive, inefficient, and, of course, ideologically suspect. This appears to be the disavowed truth of today’s “cosmopolitanism.”
One could go further and identify both trends as examples of Time-Space compression under postmodern late capitalism, a la David Harvey’s thesis in The Condition of Postmodernity.
Alex Callinicos on Slavoj Zizek
From the Socialist Worker:
In much of his interview with the Financial Times, Zizek makes plenty more good points. Thus he argues that “the financial crisis has killed off the liberal utopianism that flourished after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991” but also stresses the importance of “the ideological battle over how to interpret the financial crisis”.
Alas, where Zizek gets shifty is over the question of Stalinism. Pressed about the relationship between the idea of communism and what is sometimes called “historical Communism”, he ducks and dives. Fortunately, he doesn’t repeat some of the really silly things he has said on this subject in the past.
I’m not sure I understand the point Callinicos is making regarding the Zizek quote from The Parallax View: was forced collectivization not horrible? Maybe what Callinicos is getting at is that by focusing on Stalinism so much, Zizek is effectively betraying “the cause,” but I don’t think this really makes any sense. Stalinism was a tragedy, but why it came about after the utopian October Revolution—not unlike the Terror after the French Revolution and, of course, all of the horrible things following the Cultural Revolution—still remains largely unexplained.
And usually those who do the explaining tend to be on the Right, using the post-revolutionary terror as a means of justifying the inequalities of late capitalism. So, I’m really struggling to see how this “reflects a disengagement from political practice.” I would imagine that, as far as praxis goes, solving the riddle of why terror seems to proceed from (even be imbedded in the logic of) utopian revolution is fairly important.
(Via heraclitus.)
Life is a Pyramid Scheme: Humanity as Bernie Madoff
Another excellent post by Mike Soron:
A few months ago, I didn’t know what a Ponzi scheme was. By December, I was hearing it dozens of times a day and the scheme, and key villains like Bernie Madoff, had become essential players in the story of the collapse.
I think it’s clear that a Ponzi Scheme, which is called a pyramid scheme nearly everywhere outside of the US, is not just a villainous investment strategy. The scheme appears, rather, to express a fundamental element of contemporary human behaviour.
It’s worth reading the entire article.
Do Not Rely on Bankers
Economist Esther Duflo in Vox:
The argument heard most in favour of nationalisation of banks is financial. Their losses were so important (the time of billions is over, we are now in trillions!) that only the government is in a position to save the financial system by investing heavily in ailing banks. At the end of the Bush administration, the Paulson plan included taking stakes in state banks without voting rights. But the rights of the taxpayers must be protected; the state can not become the main shareholder of banks without taking their control.
Liberals hoping to scare the shit out of conservatives by taking seriously the option of bank nationalization should keep in mind that nationalization is not in itself radical or left-wing. Duflo does a good job of reminding people that, unless proper oversight and regulatory measures are put in place, nationalization can be just as much a boon to corporations, who will ruthlessly exploit taxpayer money when no one is looking.
This is also why liberatarians are right, at least to an extent, to point out that nationalization can be just as much a form of “corporate welfare,” ostensibly because it tampers with the Eternal Law of Competition. But it should be noted that this term is obviously problematic insofar as it derives most of its efficacy from that stupid American ideology about rugged individualism and self-reliance.
Via 3QD.
Neuroscientists Discover the Lacanian Big Other
Larval Subjects has a good explanation and critique.
Zizek in the Financial Times
The Financial Times (UK) has an interview with Zizek from a few days ago that’s worth checking out:
However, he insists, the financial crisis has killed off the liberal utopianism that flourished after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and all the grand talk about the “end of history”. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the financial meltdown have exploded the myth that the market economy and liberal democracy have all the answers to all the questions. In the short term, at least, governments will introduce more state regulation and global co-ordination strengthening the capitalist system. In this sense, he suggests that the liberal Barack Obama may one day be counted as among the best conservative presidents in US history.
But even if capitalism is temporarily repaired, Zizek says, this will do nothing to resolve its inherent contradictions. The alarming breakdown of society will lead to new forms of apartheid and emergency states. He highlights the growing militarisation of Italy, where the government has sent the army into Naples to deal with the mafia. He claims that São Paulo in Brazil is mutating into a real-life version of the film Blade Runner (1982). The city now has 70 heliports with the rich travelling on another level to the poor.
The interview happens to coincide with what appears to be a fairly interesting conference on Communism at London’s Birkbeck Institute (featuring, obviously, Slavoj Zizek, as well as a number of other important speakers). You can find out more about the conference at infinite thøught, which is also where I got this link from.
Dexy’s Midnight Runners
Rock ‘n’ Roll stockbrokers in love:
You’re Never Too Safe
The First Baptist Church congregation learned a lesson in church security that is the most difficult to teach: You can never be too safe — anywhere, an expert said Sunday.
“Every church really needs to prepare for these incidents before they happen because the mentality is that it will never happen here,” said Jeffrey Hawkins, executive director of the Christian Security Network. “The biggest obstacle we have to overcome is the ‘it can’t happen here’ mentality.”
One preacher was shot in one church. This man is identified as an expert on church security because he runs a church security company. Bias anyone?
Also, the company name “Hawkins’ Christian Security Network” sounds like a parody in a prosaic anti-establishment comic book.
On “How to Disappear Completely”
Related to the last post, this Guardian feature on depressing songs has some great music writing in it. Particularly this section on “How to Disappear Completely” by Radiohead:
Beginning with a cloud of strings, the chord sounds as if it is is built from intervals of fourths and fifths (thirds being most common), which is similar to Debussy’s intervals in pieces like The Submerged Cathedral. From here on, the arrangement is built on dislocation, the instruments seemingly ignoring each other, while the guitar and voice could be a song drifting along in their own maudlin fashion. But it is more than this: the strings wander in and out, often unrelated to the simple strummed guitar, while the bass plays the same eight notes repeatedly, oblivious to anything else. Like in a film where someone dies but the radio keeps on, or the water carries on circling down the plughole in Psycho, the insistent bass mirrors the detachment in the lyrics – “I’m not here” – until the strings build into a glissando that buries Thom. Is it depressing, though? I find it too beautiful to really be so.
Stimulus in the Form of a New Dylan Album
“I’m listening to Billy Joe Shver/And I’m reading James Joyce/Some people tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice,” Bob Dylan sings in a leathery growl, capturing the essence of his forthcoming studio album — raw-country love songs, sly wordplay and the wounded state of the nation — in “I Feel a Change Coming On,” one of the record’s 10 new originals.
To celebrate, here’s a song featured on Theme Time Radio, “Gloomy Sunday” by Billie Holiday. Also known as “the suicide song,” but don’t do it.
Wayne Coyne and Arcade Fire Fighting, Dragging Beck Along for the Ride
This whole situation is depressing. I absolutely hate it when a band’s personal bullshit gets in the way of enjoying their music. I really like Beck, The Arcade Fire and the Flaming Lips, but all this sniping (mainly from Coyne) makes it hard to focus on their work.
Edit: This however is hilarious. Hannah Montana is promising to “ruin” Radiohead for supposedly snubbing her.
Jesse Crawford
Jesse Crawford, the so-called Poet of the Organ. Known for his work in silent movies and his instrumental ballads.
The Crisis and the Consolidation of Class Power
More from David Harvey on the crisis:
Does this crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? My answer is that it depends what you mean by neo-liberalism. My interpretation is that it’s a class project, masked by a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free market. These were means, however, towards the restoration and consolidation of class power, and that neo-liberal project has been fairly successful.
My recommendation to our readers is to subscribe to the RSS feed over at his website for more infrequent but high-quality pieces like this one.
If We Are in the Death Spiral of Capitalism, Can We Start Using the “S” Word?
Excellent piece by Barbara Ehrenreich.
If you haven’t heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn’t just because there aren’t enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism—its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions.
But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of “stimulus” are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment.
Read the rest over at AlterNet! (Via Jodi Dean.)
A Problem With Poetry and Blogging
The problem with poetry and blogging is that most places won’t publish your work if a version of it has already appeared somewhere else. This would be like a radio station refusing to play a song because you sang it to a friend.
This bothers me. I have a readership here that’s equal to that of most small presses. What’s more, it’s mostly anonymous and there’s no real response or consequence to what I write. So, it really is like a small press.
I want to be published, but obviously, we need to bend the rules a little bit. I’m only putting up “draft work” from now on. My revision process is virtually nonexistent because I’m careful, but we’re going to call everything a “draft” for the sake of maintaining the poetry journal status quo.
Anyway, I’m fairly positive the only common reader in a venn diagram of the Howler and a small journal is going to be me.
Monkeys with Guns
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made 12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.
—Tom Waits
Absolutely Astounding Daily Show CNBC Montage
I watch The Daily Show every day. Last night’s episode was the Daily Show at its absolute best. The CNBC montage is at the level of an Errol Morris movie and the segment on the media’s use of the stock market as an all seeing eye was just incredible.
If you haven’t watched it in a while, be sure to check out March fourth’s episode.
Here’s what Matt Yglesias has to say:
The other is that CNBC is a lucrative and somewhat influential television network, but the whole thing is also pretty much a fraud. Fox News is just a little itty-bitty fraud. They say they’re “fair and balanced” but really they’re conservative. I don’t think anyone’s really fooled or anyone is trying especially hard to fool anyone. It is what it is—cable news with a slant. CNBC, though, very earnestly purports to be a good source of information about business and economics and even economic policy. And it just isn’t. The whole thing is a farce. It’s as if we had a 24-hour news network dedicated entirely to the pronouncements of astrologists and entrail readers.
New Rolling Stones and Beatles Photos
Forty-five years after The Beatles and The Rolling Stones first came to America, an extraordinary collection of “lost” photos of the young bands has just been discovered. The 3500 photographs — extraordinary, intimate and unpublished — were taken by Bob Bonis, their U.S. Tour manager, during their first U.S. tours (1964, 1965 and 1966) and document perhaps the most critical point in their careers: coming to America.
Something about Mick Jagger in that first photo reminds me of Max Fisher.
An Evening With Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen
Book of Longing intertwines Glass’s signature musical style with Cohen’s images and recently published poetry collection of the same name. Book of Longing is a collection of 150 poems and song lyrics written mostly on Mount Baldy near Los Angeles where the poet spent 12 years in Zen training under the guidance of Joshu Sasaki Roshi. When Cohen went down the mountain to meet with composer Philip Glass and read from the manuscript that was the basis of this new collection, Glass immediately proposed that he create an evening-length musical work based on the poetry and illustrations. Join us for an evening that explores the hearts and minds of two great contemporary artists.
There is a video on the site, and audio of the event is also available from iTunes, though I’m unsure of how to link to that.
The New Red Scare
Matt Yglesias on the Right’s use of “socialist” rhetoric:
By redirecting their rhetoric several clicks to the left, conservatives seem to me to be essentially collaborating in efforts to shift the center of public opinion to the left. Instead of a scenario in which progressive politicians had to squirm awkwardly away from the liberal label, the scary concept is now socialism. This actually makes it much easier to sell progressive policy as little more than a practical response to shifting events, but the ideological agenda it’s allegedly serving has been made so much more outlandish. At the same time, by associating socialism” with a popular president, they’re bestowing it with new legitimacy. If Obama’s policies can succeed in turning the economy around, maybe people will decide they like socialism just fine. Of course that’s a big “if” but it’s the “if” that hangs over all present-day political conversations.
Filibuster Tactics
The routine use of the filibuster as a matter of everyday politics has transformed the Senate’s legislative process from majority rule into minority tyranny. Leaving party affiliation aside, it is now possible for the senators representing the 34 million people who live in the 21 least populous states — a little more than 11 percent of the nation’s population — to nullify the wishes of the representatives of the remaining 88 percent of Americans.
Would the Times make this point if we were still under Republican rule?
Popular opinion can be effectively represented by a filibuster in the case where senators of the most populous states oppose legislation supported by a coalition of least populous states, so it is not inherently an unfair tactic.
That being said, this article’s discussion of the history of representation and the senate is worth reading.
Lynch’s Idea
Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel … You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there’s a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn’t finished till it’s finished. And one day, it’s finished.
—David Lynch