April 2009
I’m in the box!
Michael Tomansky in the Guardian:
But they can’t stop sounding insane, at least for a while yet. Because for the right in my country right now, politics isn’t an aerna for doing actual work to confront actual issues. It’s an emotive stage on which to act out greivances about everything they think is wrong with American culture. And in this mindset, persuading people outside the group isn’t the point. The point is just establishing your bona fides as part of the group. So they scream socialism because it makes them feel part of the group, which makes them feel stronger, but it makes them objectively weaker, because 65% of America thinks they’re crazy.
A Review of Encounters at the End of the World
A lucid review of Herzog’s latest documentary in The Queitus, which has quickly become my favorite music and film magazine.
The irony of the phrasing of the environmental mantra “save the earth” is that the earth will always be fine — nature doesn’t give a shit about us, what is at stake is our ability to exist on the earth.
More:
Despite the high science content, this is not the kind of IMAX science film that marvels at human progress and mastery of nature to a classical score; nor is it a Richard Dawkins-style attempt to elevate science to, ironically, religious proportions. The film instead highlights the limits of our understanding.
Zero-Growth Economy
Mike Soron makes a good point about consumption and the economy over at his blog:
At No Impact Man, Sean Sakamoto questions the media assumption that non-consumption means one is “dead weight“.
So here’s a question: if we stop consuming do we harm or stall economic recovery? Mainstream media suggests we are, that we have a responsibility to buy.
Yet, why do we feverishly pursue this so-called “economic growth”? How did it serve us? What did it serve us? So far, this growth has wreaked tremendous damage on our lives, our planet, our societies and hasn’t fulfilled its end of the bargain.
I agree, and it’s unfortunate, but obviously expected, to hear our “progressive” leaders like President Obama cheer the capitalist line about bringing back 3% annual growth (the average annual growth to sustain a capitalist economy). But what might a zero-growth economy look like? Obviously, this isn’t referring to technological innovation or increases in productivity, but rather with the amount of surplus-value that’s extracted from the world’s supply of wealth.
In an interview with Democracy Now!, David Harvey makes a similar argument for a zero-growth economy, pointing to the limits of the world’s wealth with respect to the necessary amount of value that needs to be extracted in order to achieve 3% annual growth throughout the 21st century. I’m sympathetic to this argument, but I think Harvey’s argument is a little bit naïve, if I’ve understood it right. Basically, Harvey seems to argue that capitalism won’t…
Calm or Restless Language
Robert Pinsky has written a short essay on the contrast between two styles of conveying distress in poetry for Slate.
In a comparable way, one poem might generate its emotion with eloquent plainness, the force of directness. Another poem might work by turbulent or ecstatic or violent elaboration, the force of eruption. The two classic poems for this week illustrate what I mean.
The Ideology that Dare Not Speak Its Name
A great post on the usage and evolution of the term “neoliberalism” (and variants) over at Crooked Timber. If only because Stanley Fish is an idiot.
Faith of My Fathers
I paid a visit to the district library yesterday to pick up some movies to watch (grabbed Ed Wood, which I’ve seen before, The Red Shoes, Paris, je t’aime, The Boys From Brazil, and Some Like it Hot). While combing through their selection, I came across this amazing film version of John McCain’s autobiography, Faith of My Fathers. Apparently it was a 2005 made-for-TV movie, which was released on DVD last year in time for his presidential run. I wish I could find the synopsis on the back of the DVD cover, because it’s hilarious, but this YouTube clip seems like it’s a worthy substitute:
Couldn’t be a blues
You sucked the muscle
right out of its shell
I roll a die across the street
down at this corner when the sidewalk collapses
traces of bleu bruise
their skin was so brown it couldn’t been disease
this must be a higher call
we dispense discounts based on
the hour
of day you walk out of
here
no complaints this place had no cash
I think I forgot my home number
no one wrote statutes that must have been numbered
nobody knows that name
the even day hangs on too long
you can really smell the butter
we do smell and drink our fill
she has a boyfriend, just now.
Suspense!
A handrail
suspend with brackets
four bolts no washer
suspend
lye in canvas
beneath here cement
here glass window
A pictureframe
all mill round
automatic stop plug
belt secure, book
store to body run out
A mail bomb
sit on bushes
this sweet potato
ask question
this sweet potato
push back
my low
An insulated cord
secure clip toward
breath away take
secure ground putty
upheld cup juggle
move red nail paint RAW
matching hand RAW
A Very Good Idea
Economist Simon Johnson writing in The Baseline Scenario:
In early February, James proposed that bankers’ bonuses be paid out in “toxic assets” - after all, the industry was arguing that these would definitely rebound (”it’s just a liquidity problem”) and that their “true” value was substantially above current market value. The idea was well received by our readers but not so much by the banking or insurance industry.
This is a very good idea.
Anticapital after Containerization
K-punk:
There’s an eerie sense of silence about the port that has nothing to do with actual noise levels. What’s missing are the traces of any human activity. Watching the container lorries and the ships do their work, or surveying the containers themselves, the metal boxes racked up like a materialised version of the bar charts in Gibson’s cyberspace, their names ringing with a certain transnational, blank, Ballardian poetry - Maersk Sealand, Hanjin, K-line - one never has any sense of human presence. I’m reminded instead of the mute alien efficiency of the pod distribution site in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. The contrast between the container port, in which humans are invisible connectors between automated systems, and the spectacular clamour of the London protests (and indeed of the old London docks which the port of Felixstowe effectively replaced) tells us a great deal about the shifts of capital and labour in the last forty years.
Interview with David Harvey: Exploring the Logic of Capital
Out of perhaps all of the commentators on the current financial crisis, David Harvey has been the most consistently thorough and interesting. For sure check out this interview in the April issue of the Socialist Review.
On Radical Change
While Fox News and the Radical Right—from reactionary petit bourgeoisie to proto-fascist corporations—have staged one of the most world-historically inane series of protests in the guise of a grass-roots movement, and while Obama continues to bend over backwards in order to please the Goldman Sachs financial oligarchy so that they won’t hire the artists formerly known as Blackwater (The CEO is also named Prince!) to snipe regulators from the roof-tops of their corporate offices, Evo Morales just completed a five-day hunger strike in support of electoral reforms in Bolivia. John Caruso at A Tiny Revolution remarks:
Just for a moment, imagine what it would be like to have a president who actually possessed (positive) core, non-negotiable convictions, and for whom going on a hunger strike was well within the range of sacrifices they were willing to make to fight for those convictions. While you’re at it, imagine what it would be like to have a populace that demanded this level of conviction in exchange for their support—and refused to settle for less. And finally, imagine how far short of those goals we could fall and still be light years beyond where we are today.
It’s no surprise that we’re constantly told the most we have a right to expect is tiny incremental steps toward positive change, but what’s tragic is that so many people have not only accepted that but have internalized it as though it’s some sort of immutable law of nature. They never seem to notice that those same restrictions don’t apply to negative changes—like (say) massive restructuring of the entire system of world trade, radical financial deregulation, or the repurposing of a “defensive” military organization as a weapon of U.S. foreign policy, to name just a few. They end up excusing and rationalizing the most craven compromises (and even outright betrayals) with carefully-inculcated arguments about pragmatism and political feasibility and the need to lower their expectations.
As a great philosopher once said: you get what you settle for.
Trying…to…imagine…
Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply
This is a crazy article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about essay mills and the globalization of cheating. In retrospect, I guess it’s not surprising how pervasive plagiarism is, given the average wealth and laziness of most university students, so the inference that there would be a huge quasi-legal economy for that sort of thing also makes sense. Still, though, it’s pretty shocking, and really disappointing. Maybe more students should be forced to read Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.
(H/t Perverse Egalitarianism.)
New Lars Von Trier Movie
[vimeo clip_id=”4062746”]
Lars von Trier’s Antichrist - Official Trailer from Zentropa on Vimeo.
“Nature is satan’s church.”
The Nietzsche Family Circus
The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.
Via Jezebel.
The Horror of Work
This is quite remarkable. It is, in essence, the non-didactically politicized “real life” equivalent of Hooper’s underwatched The Mangler. What we get here is the stupendous overleaping of quite real dangers in the work place (from actual hand mangling accidents to the long slow mental and physical deterioration resulting from numbing boredom and motions) to a fantasmatic Grand Guignol of how a lack of vigilance leads to… a cannister firing across the room like a warehouse bat out of hell?
Amazon Fail From a Different Angle
The #amazonfail debacle is a legitimate civil rights and censorship issue that has already been examined pretty thoroughly from those angles. Foriegn Policy’s technology blog looks at it as a case study of “anti-coporate cyberactivism”, which will hopefully become a force to be reckoned with and not just an excuse to fax photocopies of teabags.
Love Is All Need
Bob Dylan using his crooner voice on the Johnny Cash Show to look at the other side of “Love Is All You Need”: If you don’t have the only thing you need you’re lost. The same love that is supposed to ensure peace and understanding can also inspire desperation and lechery. A softer diction response to Leonard Cohen and a precursor to Nick Cave and Beck’s Sea Change.
Kraftwerk Interview
A short interview with Karl Bartos from Kraftwerk in a great new modern music magazine called “The Quietus”.
At what point did you become aware of how influential your sound was being on black electronic music in America, whether that was Chicago house, Detroit techno or New York electro?
KB: “Well it happened actually when we were in New York and we were in the street and we saw a record shop full of our records and black people stood in front of them making jokes about the covers and about how strange we were looking, but people were making loops out of ‘Metal On Metal’ and dancing to it. These loops were going on forever! Made from just these heavy metal sounds! They were breakdancing to it. Then we were aware that we had access to this culture. Then of course there was the ‘Planet Rock’ thing.”
The Kraftwerk to Planet Rock cross pollination is one of the great puzzles of current music for me. I still can’t piece together why it happened that this German electronic music band led to the creation of dance and hip-hop music. It’s good to know that Karl Bartos seems to not really understand why it happened either.
David Bowie’s America
David Bowie covering Simon and Garfunkel on an Omnichord at that big 9/11 benefit concert.
Unlikely Collaborations
Two unlikely collaborations.
The first is Lou Reed joining Sam Moore for “Soul Man”. Why does that exist? I’m not really sure, but it’s a good song.
And the Moldy Peaches sing “Two Princes” with that guy who sang “Two Princes”. I’m not really sure it’s a good song, but it’s great. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Adam Green that happy.
The Movie as a Religious Experience
I have just learned that David Byrne has a blog. After reading a few posts, I learned that his blog is interesting and thoughtfully written.
The difference, I suppose, is that of quantity, not quality. These days, altered images are ubiquitous; the fairytale world threatens to engulf our own. The illusion is more complete, too — with digital technology it’s harder to see the smoothing. Stalin would have drooled at the possibilities. Almost nothing one sees in print or advertisements hasn’t been “improved” in some way, except maybe some journalistic news photos — and even those are suspect. There’s the visual field that consists of us and our friends, and then there’s the print world — certainly more dramatic, and often more physically perfect. We live in a parallel universe, slightly more drab and definitely more pudgy.
One can’t legislate the heavenly world out of existence — people need fairytales, after all — but maybe a more constant reminder to not believe everything we see would help us to retain some tenuous connection with our pathetic reality. The thing is, we can’t help believing what we see. When I look at an impossibly sexy woman on a billboard, I can tell myself that she’s been sculpted and smoothed to death, but I’m riveted and transfixed nonetheless. Instinct triumphs over intellect.
The description of Hollywood as a heavenly world is interesting, because it speaks to a thought I’ve been brooding over in my chicken coop.
Cinema…
The Phonebank
we get big laughs from callers
in jean overalls asking for money
when we tell them we call ourselves
some nights when we get lonely
just to make a few dollars
a minute goes by a few
seconds quicker
that’s why they laugh we are witty
imagine us with our eyelashes glued
together in prongs– yes we’ve had laser
surgery– yes we wish we had waited
until technically proficient surgeons
perfected living embalmment
just a few hours later
Beyond the Spectacle of Politics
K-punk on the G-20 protests:
Time to withdraw from the feelgood simulation of politics. Time to give up the gratification of displaying wounds inflicted by the police as signs of grace, evidence that we are on the side of the Good. Time to relinquish the easy jouissance of impotent acting-out. Time to face the fact that organising marches isn’t the same as political organisation. Neoliberalism didn’t protest to achieve its hegemony; it organised and co-ordinated. This is a moment of massive oppurtunity. Neoliberalism is finished, but it survives in an undead form because its assumptions and defaults still condition the political-economic landscape. Capitalist realism is far from dead, however - and it’s surely clearly that it certainly won’t be destroyed by an ‘anti-capitalist’ spectacular hysteria (indeed this form of anti-capitalism could be seen as an integral part of the capitalist realist system). It’s time to think, not in order to finesse some grand philosophical system, but with the goal of identifying what new forms of organisation can succeed in these conditions. Time to give up on the romance of a politics of failure and plan to win.
I’m in agreement with K-punk on this. So far, the G-20 protests have been entirely undisciplined, mere “acting out” against the Master of zombified neo-liberalism: the truth of hysteria, as Lacan pointed out, as that it demands a new Master! Without theoretical and practical unity, protest becomes “infinite demanding” and action becomes purely spontaneous, i.e., “anti-capitalist.” It’s a relapse back into Proudhonism (one of the protest signs even said “property is theft”) when what is needed is a new revolutionary science and a new revolutionary subjectivity. Without this, no protest, however big, will translate into actual power.