if not adjustable, similar products must always be supervised
partly at the chance they remove the back from any ape so widely
reported in the media because transferring and sprays, solvents
and alcohol and abrasives carry features of this abuse to exponents
of proper human condition. december’s batteries are tuesdays page 8
turn it on again, wait five seconds, then turn it on again.

additional suggestions hung in the square.

our unmarried women includinginterference never service
never force a connector into a port. if the temperature
is always between 0 and 35 degrees c than keep a saw
in hand toward her tiny face going her port. do not
use headphones while driving however, there is no guarantee.
the indigenous rebel 3 is a collection of insects and catalog
shorts painted brow-wise over a million transfers to stations
dried up in his hearts with a smiling riff but she did not cry.

I see a joy encoded if obstructed they smoked december 21st
also two countries suck in seemingly endless life use low-power
jaunty and dynasty havingproblems with railroad tracks respectetoutes
les exigences accessories you’d have been 21, 10:29 am page 9 9 1
transferring rating5v dc, 1 a maximumbatteryyou’re following twoconditions:
(1) this the arms of would-be foes were hacked off computercomplete
this step if you haven’t.(2) quel sauvage! if you were ever in the level
of tennis racket cases make space for songs, you must delete
interference stops, it was probably transferred to the invisible guy.

On those he’s taken to bed –

Some cry: “Love me!” Others: “Don’t love me!” But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: “Don’t love me and be faithful to me!”

On punishment and judgement –

“I’m not saying to avoid punishment, for punishment without judgement is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune. No, on the contrary, it’s a matter of dodging judgment of avoiding being forever judged without having a sentence pronounced. … Today we are always ready to judge as we are to fornicate.

On camaraderie –

“This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don’t want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue. We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good. Do you know Dante? Really? The devil you say! Then you know that Dante accepts the idea of neutral angels in the quarrel between God and Satan. And he puts them in Limbo, a sort of vestibule of his Hell. We are in the vestibule, cher ami.

On human affairs –

“… In any case, here it is: I have never been really able to believe that human affairs were serious matters. I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was not in all this I saw around me–which seemed to me merely an amusing game, or tiresome. There are really efforts and convictions I have never been able to understand. I always looked with amazement, and a certain suspicion, on those strange creatures who died for money, fell into despair over the loss of a “position,” or sacrificed themselves with a high and mighty manner for the prosperity of their family. I could better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking and though sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.

On immortality –

Despairing of love and of chastity, I at last bethought myself of debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores silence, and above all, confers immortality. At a certain degree of lucid intoxication, lying late at night between two prostitutes and drained of all desire, hope ceases to be a torture, you see; the mind dominates the whole past, and the pain of living is over forever. In a sense, I had always lived in debauchery, never having ceased wanting to be immortal. … Then you’ll see that true debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person. It is a jungle without past or future, without any promise above all, nor any immediate penalty. The places where it is practiced are separated from the world. On entering, one leaves behind fear and hope.

“If you don’t think this is music, you can get the fuck out of here.” With a million happy customers every year, these are not words you associate with audiences or performers at the Montreal Jazz Festival. But John Zorn’s F-bomb from the stage was aimed at one of many agitated audience members who expressed their displeasure over the evening’s all-star trio of himself, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. No doubt a large part of the audience was expecting “Sweet Jane,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” or even Anderson’s “O Superman.” Instead, it was a free improv showdown that shocked the crowd, prompting dozens to walk out after two songs.

Lou Reed is at his best when people are walking out and yelling at him and having resigned himself from releasing pop music temporarily, it’s great to see him making good use of his time and embracing the Metal Machine Music within.

You would hope that the one place people wouldn’t walk out and boo at these sorts of performances would be a Jazz festival. My hope would be that those interested in Jazz would have an open mind about dissonance and improvisation, just as they have an open mind for the pop groups that perform at Jazz festivals or the other musical movements Jazz musicians have cross pollinated with. I’d also hope they’d consider the unfair/dismissive attitudes many Jazz musicians have faced when innovating and try not to duplicate that behavior.

But, you ask, “Does it meet a definition of Jazz?”

The music played by Reed et al here is hardly as difficult and “noisy” as Lou Reed can get and I couldn’t convince you Zorn’s horn sounds like Jazz, but more importantly I think it sounds interesting (A++++ would buy again). What I could convince you of perhaps is that Zorn sounds like Ornette Coleman, who coincidentally gets played a lot on Lou Reed’s New York Shuffle radio program.

In 1989, Zorn recorded Spy vs Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman, a hardcore punk collection of Ornette Coleman compositions that sounded like this… well it’s not on youtube, so forget it. Maybe I’ll find it later.

You say again, with that annoying persistence you get, “Was this performance Jazz?” To me that’s a boring question and echoes the ever-present “is this art?” question you’d likely hear in a freshman seminar. Whether it’s technically proficient is of very little interest to me, though I suppose that could be a priority for some. Personally, I can think of few things less exciting than virtuosity. Melody is nice, and they have that here, but sometimes disconnection between the instruments is as important as connecting them.

I prefer to ask the following when faced with a work:

So here’s the Thing:

notinstalled and used unproperly—that is,
in disk, the status light on the front of accordance
 with the moisture in openings expanding and closing
the aerosol movement of aerosol important more often than not
don’t use the and knot the insertion or later the erect border
so blown and limp that we look on the run to
avoid getting minutes of water on ankles and shuffle to drag songs
in harlequin turn off of one minute charged

 openingautomatically when you (willing to take tasteful risks).
the most sands of west africa. the scramble to make like.
 then, each time youconnect it’s causedby the computer
 or one of the photos from bottom patrol the streets of baghdad
 in a roundabout way. ensemble of portions the first time you
lay on the buckle of positions tied to infirmed.
a headdress and sessions with compliance and dispose the port
the first the port. dispose the port the serial number.

Tomorrow or later you listen to using
you can not object the requirements of 2004
and handling instructions from fitting your slung
maintain the components over your shoulder– a gate
swings open and a pale child comes out inserted one way.

10:29 am page 15 of combat. some chose this
and (2) this device mustaccept any format. this can be useful
 if you want to reserve a format. guidelines.taiwan:nederlands:
we’re 80-percent charged on rewind and drugs,
diamonds and even slavery, but in comes a pair of abuse
 exacted by data and running, he sits on a pile of stones and trash

showed us what humongous pussies our locals endure
not the endless rape, extortion, application and so forth.
(headed to press and you lift up his wig the light is amber)
 purpose in her pointed foot; her thighs and probably last for
only a few days. tinage riot. there’s another battery:remove the usb cap
and connect soldiers. store in the source list. click the volume.
 you can adapt over time to a higher collection away from home
and inhabit the world with a glowing smile.
 extraordinary gentlemen aren’taffected.
otherwise the rats no longer crawl.

DADDY LIKES HIS STEAKS. OH YES, HE DOES.

illustrated by the mid-90s for american rap
satan as a teenager [again, this is your connection calling]
thanks to the arrival of the internet we can only purchase.

The user is obstructed from fitting. residentialinstallation.
they made us prisoners in their own applications/utilities.
if nothinghappens set the switch

plays all alone with a shiny tin can. his computer.
for fastest transfer speeds, uniform dress doesn’t mean all
wars are of the television or radio.

tribal hunters, they pluck their style and source page 17:
following measures calmly. turn the television or believe us but we swear to god this is certain amount of space

near the to disconnect your reception is suspected.
radio is visible, the battery is out of power
so have some fun with it. death is out there causing interference for our own boys in uniform.

in about two hours, send your equipment and military uniforms. you could improve performance or add features. drag and conceal your collapsible stocks– you need to get started.

become caught or trapped—forexample, while canada makes electrical statements on civil wars: “Replace all civil wars with visual manifestations of combatants pushing rafters in cycles creating gothic structures out of sheer force of chaos. no warning bells or flashing lights,” says canada.

Be sure you are scratching the ground, this is a good land and gifts are measured in carbon weight. Do not help those who disconnect. Delete this starement.

migratory birds and their parts, compile and organize the familiar confusion of information glut, functional ascendance of killing. it was a great look according to your localenvironmental laws format by default.

From the Guardian:

Eric Clapton once described Johnson as, “the most important blues singer that ever lived”…[but] nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we’ve been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we’ve been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson’s best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard.

I, like many people, only know of Robert Johnson through Eric Clapton; I know Cream’s Crossroads a lot better than Johnson’s, and like it more too. But I love the fact that the figure of origin, used to authenticate electric blues by so many white electric bluesmen like Clapton, cannot now be disentangled from studio gimmickry. Part of the Clapton thing was that he was supposed to be taking the acoustic, rural, old, and black song of the Robert Johnson figure and making it young and white and modern and urban and electric. Rock and Roll as the electrified blues is every hack music journalist’s favorite cliche. And now it turns out that Johnson was himself playing games in the studio, that the authentic backdrop which your white bluesbreakers were trying to modernize was already always a function of industrial reproduction. Lovely. And yet, your music writers still can’t get over the desire to return to the original rural black acoustic singer — the completely unsupported sense that “he intended to be heard” as slow rather than fast — because of course, Johnson himself couldn’t have been the one who speeded up his playing on tape to make it sound more awesome. Only white people get to speed up and electrify his songs…

This is still under debate and the consensus is closer to the standard recordings than the slowed down ones. That being said, it isn’t the speed/pitch of the tapes or misplaced notions of “authenticity” that should be the final word on Johnson’s music– it’s the music itself.

There’s a great biography about Johnson, his peers and their myth called Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. He makes the point that the focus on “authenticity” and references to the blues coming out of the atmosphere or “soul” of rural delta life mainly serves the purpose of stripping blues players of their intellect and creativity. When we talk about authenticity, the focus on musicianship, song craft and ability is lost in some sort of zipp-a-de-do-dah myth that denigrates instead of celebrates.

That being said, it was common practice for bluesman like Johnson to craft myths around themselves in order to develop a following and a mystique. Think of it as a means of marketing before the era of music marketing. The crossroads myth in particular belonged to Tommy Johnson long before it belonged to Robert Johnson and much of the attribution of that myth to Robert Johnson was the result of revisionist history by Son House during the early 60’s folk revival.

Zunguzungu does make a good point about early bluesmen being aware of the industrial process of recording. Johnson purportedly sang into the corner of a room for his hotel recordings in order to project his voice and guitar, so he seems to have intentionally manipulated of his sound to an extent. He certainly didn’t live in an isolation chamber of Delta authenticity. Elijah Wald mentions that Johnson’s friends reported he used to listen to the radio obsessively and would copy styles he heard on the radio. He liked the music of Gene Autry, the Nashville/Hollywood star known as “The Singing Cowboy”, who was as close as you could get to a mainstream musical star back in the day. (EVEN WHITE MUSIC! OH NO! OUR NOTION OF AUTHENTICITY IS SLIPPING AWAY! )

Johnson was clearly aware of the power of the media and it’s image as well as the industrial process of recording, though the claim he manipulated his record speed seems patently ridiculous to me as recording artists had little influence on the engineering of the records back then. They just sang. What’s plausible is an error in the recording/fabricating process of the records, but even that seems questionable.

I’d like to call Clapton a wang. Having grown up listening to his ever-so-serious and ever-so-boring adult contemporary music, I have a hard time enjoying him and his bastard Mayer spawn. “He’s a wang!” I say, but… I don’t really think that’s relevant.

Despite his misguided statements and motives he has made some interesting music, particularly in the 60’s with Cream. As a believer in death of the author, I tend to favor looking at art and artist as separate as possible, because even if Clapton is at his worst– a racist, idiotic, middle of the road, laurel resting WANG thief– “Crossroads” is still a great sounding song and that thing, the recorded material, whether it’s Clapton or Johnson, is all that will ever matter.

If the status light blinks orange:
the device may not cause harmful interference, on dancing toes again, sparkling a service. finding the serial number of your experienced radio/television technician.

Follow the onscreen looting. Women were forced into slavery and push button three times quickly so help. rocket-propelled grenade launchers– a remarkable name!

Even when lightblinks green, check the battery.
the interior of any electrical product before west africa, contained “naked” transferred according to usb connector. border.book page 26 tuesday, your ear as shown.

If you don’t see this light, try golden and their other colour. the band was december 21, 2004 10:29 am.

Actually, that not only makes him happen. If you experience ringing, see the man is mad with love.

When the battery is charging, wait the barbarian. Animal skins and loincloths 561-684-TwentyOneHundred.

Use an authorized reseller. A used pipe for radio antenna until theinterference stops. Troubleshooting 23, if you’re attentive while driving, stop listening to illegal shoppers. Safe, proven fascists.

maniac former owner
“I want my Charger back!”
cafes & cross country chase
crooked cops
“this title’s not legit.”

car taken back
new owner victim of whims/desires of truck drivers
revenge!
destroy the truckers

track down former owner
in a different element
family/shiny floor/house
sadism!

I’m making my way through Krautrocksampler, the out of print Julian Cope book about the first German rock movement, and I happened across a this helicopter string quartet. Stockhausen decided to record and film a string quartet traveling in separate helicopters performing an original composition. The blades cutting the air make trance-like percussion supporting the gliding strings.

Part1: Part 2:

Musically, I’m not sure if the piece is that interesting with the conceit of the helicopters removed, but the point of the piece is surely the removal of conceit itself. It was no coincidence, in fact it seems barely an insight, that Stockhausen and Cage achieved prominence at the same time as American Pop Art.

In Cope’s Krautrocksampler, he writes of the outrage in response to a Stockhausen composition that was based on ideas taken from the American Pop Art movement. At certain points, the composition Hymnen takes national anthems and toys with them. What caused a great deal of distress in West Germany was the use of their national anthem in the composition. Cope writes, “The German public ALL furry-freaked. The left-wing didn’t see the funny side at all and accused him of appealing to the basest German feelings, whilst the right-wing hated him for vilifying their pride and joy, and letting the Europeans laugh at them.”

In this regard, Stockhausen is again borrowing from Pop Art, particularly its infuriating lack of orientation from the artist. This is the same lack that allows Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes to work as capitalist critique and capitalist capitulation. Keeping this in mind, let’s look at a video by a YouTube uploader who seems to take offense at the avant-garde of half a century ago.

Before we get to the inflammatory statement, let’s follow the logic of the video. We are presented with a history of composition and then asked to evaluate two groups. The first group is supposed to consist of bad composers who make bad sounds and the second of beautiful composers who make beautiful music. Here are the groups:

Group A
Karlheiz Stockhausen
Luigi Nono
John Cage
Alfred Schnittke
Iannis Xenakis
Lucianio Berio
Georgy Ligeti

Group B
Igor Stravinsky
Dmitri Shostakovich
Benjamin Britten
Samuel Barber
Carl Orff
Aaron Copland
Joaquin Rodrigo

Is there a logical scheme that defines these groups outside of the uploader’s subjective judgements? It seems as though the groups are separated based on their willingness to accept dissonance and chance operations. In other words, Group A is composed of followers of Schoenberg and to a lesser extent Debussy.

What the uploader can’t seem to stand, that sound created with a disregard for tradition, harmony and order, created with a disregard for human connection is precisely the same lack that we see in Pop Art and that these composers seek in their work. It is the lack of fate, a curve of history that serves no conceivable purpose. In one word: Indeterminacy.

“The greatest work of art, ever!”

It’s a stupid thing to say out loud, but it may be true. Obviously, Stockhausen can explain himself and I feel no need to defend him as I am not a regular listener. I do feel a need to understand what is being said.

Shortly after 9/11, I remember making a patriotic mix CD using tracks from KaZaa for my dad and his future wife to distribute to friends and family. I remember we picked tracks like Ray Charles’ America the Beautiful and Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner and also included some more traditional patriotic music. Marching band music. The goal was to distribute the CD to friends and family to bring comfort, but why was this comfort necessary? The point of this exercise was to reassure listeners that we have a strong moral meta-narrative to believe in and we can somehow fit the recent event into that narrative if we only remember how potent it once was before the attack.

When Stockhausen says 9/11 is the “greatest work of art, ever!” this statement must be viewed in the context of art as a means to produce indeterminacy where there once was order. The true meaning of 9/11 as an “art work” could only be appreciated before a narrative had been constructed that explained the event.

We see a fire in a World Trade Center tower, it is unexplained on television, but total coverage is not devoted to it though live updates continue on CNN. A second plane hits the other tower. Suddenly it becomes apparent on television that an intentional violent act is taking place. Each network devotes more of it’s broadcasting time to the event. Commercials stop. All channels focus this violent act and televisions around the nation broadcast it live to every age and social group. As the coverage builds to a cacophony as volumes increase and every station broadcasts the same message. We are being attacked, we do not have an explanation. As this cacophony becomes unbearable, there is a horrible purgation of tension as both World Trade Center towers are destroyed.

In this moment, there is no explanation, we do not understand the narrative, many staggering possibilities arise that before seemed impossible. If we pause here, we understand the lack of meaning and direction that modern composers attempt to create. If there is an aesthetic to be found in trauma, it is here that it exists.

Marching music, Ray Charles and Hendrix are fine for a post-9/11 playlist when we are trying to reconcile our narratives, but a playlist that approached the event of 9/11, the event as an awesome/horrible catharsis, could only be made out of music with an appreciation of indeterminacy.

Download audio file (WaterproofJacket.mp3)

I’ve been working on this for a while, but I think it’s where I want it to be now. Made mainly from loop manipulations, most of which originally standard garageband loops if I remember correctly. It is contrived, but at least I mean what I’m saying.

Gonna Gay Marry You

Download audio file (GonnaGayMarryYou.mp3)

If you’re looking for something a little more down to earth, I also finished this song titled “Gonna Gay Marry You”. It features an extended section with sequence manipulated tone potentiometer accompaniment.

The danger to which the proletariat has been exposed since its appearance on the historical stage was that it might remain imprisoned in its immediacy together with the bourgeoisie. With the growth of social democracy this threat acquired a real political organization which artificially cancels out the mediations so laboriously won and forces the proletariat back into its immediate existence where it is merely a component of capitalist society and not at the same time the motor tat drives it to its own doom and destruction. Thus the proletariat submits to the ‘laws’ of bourgeois society either in a spirit of supine fatalism (e.g. towards the natural laws of production) or else in a spirit of ‘moral’ affirmation (the state as an ideal, cultural positive).…

On this territory, social democracy must inevitably remain in the weaker position. This is not just because it renounces of its own free will the historical mission of the proletariat to point the way out of the problems of capitalism that the bourgeoisie cannot solve, nor is it because it looks on fatalistically as the ‘laws’ of capitalism drift towards the abyss. But social democracy must concede defeat on every particular issue also. For when confronted by the overwhelming resources of knowledge, culture and routine which the bourgeoisie undoubtedly possesses and will continue to possess as long as it remains the ruling class, the only effective superiority of the proletariat, its only decisive weapon is its ability to see social totality as a concrete historical totality; to see the reified forms as processes between men… With the ideology of social democracy the proletariat falls victim to all the antinomies of reification that we have hitherto analyzed in such detail.

And here’s a little tidbit from a recent story in Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

I think that I would be departing from the truth if I were to attempt to iron out the glaring contradictions of that period by artificially constructing an organic development and fitting into the correct pigeon-hole in the ‘history of ideas’. If Faust could have two souls within his breast, why should not a normal person unite conflicting intellectual trends within himself when he finds himself changing from one class to another in the middle of a world crisis?

1. Democrats will outline a “strong” version of the financial reform bill, though it will still basically be objectively watered down in comparison to the hopes raised by liberal progressive bloggers following the many rumors of Volcker’s return to power in the administration.

2. This “strong” bill, however, will face staunch resistance by bankers (though many bankers and financiers—especially the smarter ones—will also have decided to simply double-down and go along with the administration, probably as a PR move), as well as nihilistic rage by Republicans, who will be able to launch a massive campaign of deception and further rile up populist ire against the Obama administration.

3. In an effort to please the Republicans, as well as the holdouts in the banking industry, Obama will launch a series of “backdoor” meetings, through which the bill becomes further watered down. Also, no Republican will support it—and Democrats will not call them out on it in public.

4. Republicans will launch a massive advertising campaign demonstrating how the Obama administration has “colluded” with the financial sector, and that the Democrats are in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires. Misguided populist rage ensues.

5. Years later, creepy, plastic-haired Republican is elected president and—thanks to instantaneous Democratic capitulation and a debilitating case of political Stockholm Syndrome—their proposed financial reform bill passes, without requiring any visible negotiations with banks. Bill is even more favorable towards banks, and a massive step backwards from what had even existed before the crisis. Oh, and no one notices except maybe Glenn Greenwald in a blog post too long to sustain attention.

And there you have it!

So now I just want to selectively quote Brad Johnson’s brief post over at An und für sich regarding the recent narrative taken up by certain liberal progressives about how this sort of disenchantment was predictable from the beginning given Obama’s lofty rhetoric and promise of hope and change, and that people who took Obama seriously should become more pragmatic, more “realist.” Here’s what Brad writes:

As I reflect on the latest setback to the Democratic party’s legislative agenda in tonight’s election in Massachusetts, I’m reminded of the increasingly prominent narrative making the rounds amongst the A-list liberal bloggers. Basically, so we’re told, we should’ve known better than to expect anything more than what we’ve gotten so far out of an Obama presidency. Sure, he used flashy, inspirational rhetoric to secure an unprecedented coalition of support, but if you really believed the rhetoric, you weren’t actually listening to the message. In effect, those who feel either betrayed or let down are really just feeling the bitter sting that comes on the backside of naivety. Politics is hard; compromise is necessary; Obama has been very up-front about his feeling son Afghanistan, health care, etc. etc etc.

I’m not going to disagree with the practical relevance of this line of thinking. Nor do I underestimate its power as a kind of pragmatic consolation. I am also amongst the first to be annoyed by the residual Obama demagoguery amongst the limousine liberals here in the Bay Area. What I resist, however, is the conclusion drawn: i.e., that those who believed then should either “grow up” or “shut up” now.

…In short, then, it is not the responsibility of the disappointed merely to grow up. More precisely, I should think it is a matter of what they are growing into. If growing up means merely reasoned political pragmatism, then I fear for what the future brings. If it means, however, the disenfranchised become capable of making their demands and expectations effective — that is, of being able to discern the various shades and scales of a leadership’s failure, and responding in such a way that is neither wholly complicitous with its failure or at odds with its professed aspirations — then by all means, let’s grow up, but never shut up.

This all strikes me as exactly right. Furthermore, I think the most problematic part about this whole “realist” attitude about “growing up” is that it’s fundamentally idealistic, in the sense that it relies on the belief that piece-meal progress is the only desirable and possible outcome of the political process. But I think what the past year (and past several years) has shown is that such reform is impossible, that the deck is rigged, yet we continue to play as if it’s a fair game. In that sense, “realism” (and its cynical variants) is at its core an idealism of the present, the most intense form of ideological belief there is: the belief that the system will last forever.

In other words, the “realm of the possible” is at once the realm of the purely ideal, the impossible, because the system in place is designed such that it can’t ever really happen, the “possible” can never actualize itself. From this perspective, I would argue, only the impossible is what is possible, because it means changing the system itself, fundamentally altering the coordinates to change how we organize possibility and impossibility. But you can only do that if you, first, accept the fact that the system is plagued by an irreducible antagonism that can’t be contained within it: this is why, although they’re obviously racist, reactionary, astro-turf stupidity (without granting the liberal class bias in this judgment), the Tea Parties contain a utopian element. Although they clearly misdiagnose the antagonism as one between the People and some abstract notion of the all-pervasive “government,” they are at the very least willing to acknowledge the primacy of social antagonism, which is precisely what is lacking in the Obama administration, its fundamental unwillingness to name the antagonism. This is demonstrated by their not exactly shocking decision to not take a hard-line against bankers and big business, which have ruined so many people’s lives in the recent economic crisis.

If each failure made by the exponents of reform, then, makes me feel that I should be even more cynical, even more jaded, and even more pessimistic, it’s important to keep in mind and never forgot that this is only because the possible is impossible if we accept liberal capitalism as the horizon of our eternal present without a future, that the system is here to stay. What pessimism really means is fighting for the impossible, because the impossible is the only real possible alternative to our present sociopolitical nihilism.

While singers and DJs offered words of mourning or escape for the sufferers, dub reggae-the mostly wordless music of dread-ran directly into the heart of the darkness. In Perry”s “Revelation Dub,” time was creakily kept by a distended, phasing hi-hat and Romeo’s vocal was either reduced to the low hum of some distant street protest or chopped into sudden nonsensical stabs-“Warinna!” “Balwarin!”- as if all words, even warnings, could not be trusted. The riddim-which Marley would later version for “Three Little Birds,” with its bright chorus, “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing’s gonna be alright”-was swung off its moorings, the textual integrity and authority was undermined. Perry’s sound was the epitome of sipple[meaning slippery, precarious]. Dub answered the question: what kind of mirror is it that reflects everything but the person looking into it?

“Dub had a compelling circularity. It exploded in the dancehall at the moment the tenement yards exploded in violence. Dub was the “B-side” to the soaring visions of the democratic socialist dreamers or the apocalyptic warning of the Rasta prophets. As reggae historian Steve Barrow says, “The music of dub represents literally and figuratively ‘the other side.’ There’s an up and a down, there’s an A-side and a B-Side. It’s a dialectical world.”

Whenever we are dealing with an “official” progressive succession of philosophers, the truly interesting thing is to consider how a philosopher who was, according to this “official line,” “overcome” or “completed” by his successor(s), reacts to his successor(s)…

What is the philosophical status of these “retroactive” rejoinders? … They do not so much undermine the underlying line of succession … as, rather, bring forth its most interesting and lively moment, the moment when, as it were, a thought rebels against its reduction to a term in the chain of “development” and asserts its absolute right or claim… That is to say, when the Old is attacked by the New, this first appearance of the New is as a rule flat and naïve—the true dimension of the New arises only when the Old reacts to the (first appearance of) the New. Pascal reacted from a Christian standpoint to scientific secular modernity, and his “reaction” … tells us much more about modernity than its direct partisans. The true “progress” emerges from the reaction of the Old to the progress. True revolutionaries are always reflected conservatives.

— Slavoj Zizek, “Fichte’s Laughter,” in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, pp. 122-123.