The stage was set for hip-hop’s embracing of the gangster. Its adherents were fixated on films such as the Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas and (a particular favourite) Scarface, because they presented a kind of anti-mythical myth. The world they projected – of generalised betrayal, distrust and exploitation – was in tune with the capitalist realism of neoliberalism, except that hip-hop’s celebration of the crime lord, its sense that there was ultimately no difference between the tycoon and the criminal, acted as an unintentional parody of neoliberal rapacity. Even so, the left was faced with the melancholy prospect that the dominant form of black popular music was now a celebration of conspicuous consumption and will to power. In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.

Untitled from “Alpine Star” by Ron Jude. Via tv blog.

Via tv blog.

Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.”

1. Monday, 15 June 2009: Utopias
2. Tuesday, 16 June 2009: Architecture
3. Wednesday, 17 June 2009: Wagner
4. Thursday, 18 June 2009: Populism and Democracy
5. Friday, 19 June 2009: Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism

• Lenin’s Tomb poses the question of whether or not the Left should support the demonstrations in Iran. One of the more spurious claims made by certain so-called Leftists is that showing support for the protestors is in essence support for Mousavi’s neoliberal policy proposals, so it’s good to see Seymour properly frame this issue.
• An open letter of support to the demonstrators in Iran, signed by a number of leading left-wing academic theorists (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, and Jacques Ranciere).
• Another interesting post from Lenin’s Tomb: “Iran: This is Not a Revolution.”
• “Will the Cat Above the Precipice Fall?” An open letter by Slavoj Zizek on the situation in Iran. His conclusion:

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

• And finally here’s new blog following the events, so that I don’t have to post any more links: Support for the Iranian People 2009

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.

(Via No Useless Leniency.)

What a relief

 here is your doe eyed conflict
  away from here in broken buildings

 and what do you cover
      yourself, animals, grinning awareness
  they do not do it primitive
   they do it under neath your head

   here is your polite keyhole
  plugged with grass because you believe
   in nature and leniency

   there is a gas leak

   and when they said to count
    you climbed into the drain
      and instantly aged

        you sell fruit
         oranges, lemon

Desperate and in a frame

  I wore a white t-shirt
and questioned my essential homeliness
I made the telephone wood
a road of pantone stones
 and I spoke to so many new peoples
 who respected my lack of dignity

 mainly I retold books I hadn’t read
  something about a bread line and
ASIA minor
     stopped the tea
    with two large cubes
     and reasserted my
     essential assertiveness

the sky moved here as a projection
 I held a ring of thick keys
 and thought about girlfriends
           he would have thought
            this mattered
 each line undone by kettle steam
 in glasgow’s roads a tosser limped
 little burns aside my eyes
 hungry swans and chicken’s breath

 Going back with a head

              on top of
                            the bar

I raised a liter up of gas

tolerance was breed into this
red boy with open jaw how
to stay alive how to stay alive
truly concentrating— oh a metal saw
this cut across a wrapping putrid
in liberty or dreaming of a fascist france
with peasants on the firing squad and
peasants on the blindfold walk a
thought of fascist artist then
three bricks of paints from little
king a roll of bread sees this woman
face my tumbling off and rolling
spoke this broken fist a shovel pulled
an installation oil reserve my
money’s gone I’m of no class
my money left my sister left
All fields here become quite blue
the thirty guns with polished ears
carry me on my face goes
flat this woman’s face I held
her head up and drank coffee
until I couldn’t hold a plate
let alone a sliding draft
became unstuck I left alone
her pleasant mouth we had
a thought we could not save I
could not save you all I’m sorry
we still will have our gallic lies
we still will have you please come back

 0 —-

our pointisthat
     withnothing done
     allsignals off
    the light shut low

my operator
      I am lonely

The records Paul McCartney made in the first ten years after leaving The Beatles are eight parts ego-tripping superstar schlock to two parts outsider art. They have all the slickness of Seventies AOR, but at second glance they’re as disassociated as Wesley Willis. No other major rock star would make an album quite like Ram, so cosy and so conflicted. No other major rock star would think to write a song about his Land Rover, or Fungus The Bogeyman. While his peers were mining Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, McCartney was covering the theme from Crossroads. The man was in a world of his own.

All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.

Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don’t reach for “a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business,” as Paul Krugman said we once had — they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.

Via @HicSaltus.

When I taught at Iowa, then Harvard, then City College, here is what I tried to get away with, only in effect, not actually: I asked each student to open his or her mouth as wide as possible. I reached in with a thumb and forefinger to a point directly beneath his or her epiglottis. There is the free end of a spool of tape there.

I pinched it, then pulled it out gradually, gently, so as not to make the student gag. When I got several feet of it out where we could see it, the student and I read what was written there.

All together a good essay if you’re looking for an excuse to go to grad school.

I guess the obvious place to start is the inspiration behind From the Basement…
NG: It was quite a few years ago when I was having a conversation with Beck about Rock &‘N’ Roll Circus, the film made by The Rolling Stones in the 60’s. At the time they didn’t feel it was good enough because it was basically a little bit plotless, just them hanging out with their friends playing music. But now it’s really interesting to watch all these really great people - the Stones, John Lennon, Eric Clapton - just hanging out and playing. Beck and I both felt that somehow, something had been lost in the way that people film music. It was a lot more basic in those days, and now MTV has destroyed the way that people film performing because suddenly it became about the agenda of who’s filming it, the performance of the director, the shaky cameras…
The other thing, I got this old Whistle Test DVD that blew me away. It’s such an intimate atmosphere that comes over so well, and it’s a shame to think that of the great artists that are around at the moment, no-one is recording them in that way. It will be some sort of horrible, corporate logo embezzled version, which is a shame.

What are the benefits of capturing a performance in such an intimate environment?
NG: I think it provides something very, very direct between the performer and the audience. When Talking Heads did ‘Psycho Killer’ on the Whistle Test, when David Byrne talks to the camera and goes straight into the performance…it makes the hairs on your neck stand up, because you feel it’s just for you. You can tell they were comfortable, and that’s why it worked.

…   A nearly nude man entered among these canvases and into these stretches of ice and desert. He drew along a disorderly caravan and walked alone. A voice that came from somewhere else made our ears tingle with a new sound. But in the mixture of cloaks and daggers, of songs and cries, a carnival atmosphere reigned— grace with spirit was especially lacking.
        A very old world was spinning in our heads and we were waiting for a moment when everything would fall.

— Pierre Reverdy, a selection from “The Intruder”

From a new translation of Pierre Reverdy’s first book Prose Poems by Ron Padgett. As I make my way through Reverdy, there are some translations that are absolutely thrilling and others that are flat. Padgett managed to hit every note and I suspect added a few of his own.