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To Josh: When I went to St. John's College, the "greatness" of the Great Books didn't really daunt us. Most students I knew weren't really prone to Carey's ontological hand-wringing. While we were reasonably passionate about the (rather odd) educational choice we made, we also liked to mock the banal, quasi-therapeutic sentiments that Great Books partisans like Mortimer J. Adler would burp up. In his hands, the Great Books become Chicken Soup for the Thomist Soul: the Great Books teach you how to think, make you a better citizen, purify your soul, etc. I think it's safe to say our position was less therapeutic and more, uh…ironist. More about curiosity, broadly construed. Jacob Klein: "To study for the enjoyment of leisure and in leisure means to be engaged in liberal education. It is an arduous task. This kind of education does not look for some goal or good beyond itself. It is in itself its own end." What do you expect from uber.nu, anyway, Jonno? We've seen this before and we'll see it again. After all, the one-dimensional rant is the fossil fuel the internet runs on. Andrea's complaint runs as follows: the blogger genotype, like that for Republicans, used-car salesman and Korn fans, describes a fairly uniform evil. Since bloggers do whatever they do for the sake of attention, a bloggerspacewide attempt at an AIDS memorial can only be a mockery of A Day Without Art's original intent. (In contrast, it is implied that museum directors, gallery owners and artists do it for the selfless, thankless task of memorializing the dead and not at ALL for self-promotion.) Only in the last paragraph does she grant that A Day Without Weblogs "may have been made with the best of intentions": giving bloggers the benefit of the doubt first would, no doubt, be insufficiently cynical. We can tell a knowing, breezy cynicism is intended because many words are set off in ironic quotation marks. I'm not participating in ADWW either, though. I'd be more happy to participate in a memorial with more muscle. ADWW does not comfort the afflicted, nor does it directly attempt to curb future tragedy, but it could. Instead of blanking-out one's blog, a blogger could instead put something like: I wanted to end this with a quote from Derek Jarman's Modern Nature about how AIDS memorials were gestures for the living, not the dead, but I can't find it. In the meantime, I'm going to be irrationally doctrinaire and say that Jarman's book should be on every gay blogger's amazon.com wish list. It's a diary -- I want to say that this is how you do it. If we can't trust human beings to count votes, how can we trust them to govern us? The greatest website, ever. Epitaph Band to Band Links Epitaph Band to Band Links:The Oracle of Bacon::rock music:cinema::John Lydon:Kevin Bacon . The Ohio Express, "Chewy Chewy" The most boundlessly oral rock & roll song ever. Dubya, in The Nation: "The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law." To Josh: What disturbs me about discussions of "authenticity" (especially when they bring Hegel into the mix) is they describe scenarios where human beings are, for all their best intentions, doomed to be inauthentic and self-deluded, mere hapless victims of world-historical forces they barely understand. These discussion engender feelings of helplessness in the reader. How far do we carry technological praise in music? I'm not sure what you mean. How far should we carry praise for any kind of formal innovation in any art? Santarchy. Porn Again Anarchists. Inappropriate Sexual Behavior. How To "Lay" Girls. Thomas Frank, Xena Fan. Richard Rorty. Snacks. To Josh: In cinema, as in music, we can and do distinguish between examples of technical virtuosity that are "rifts" -- exploitaions of technology that provide new possibilities -- and those which simply offer more polished versions of the same old crap. Think drum & bass vs. uses of Cool Edit technology that wipes away every potentially consumer-unfriendly eccentricity in a singer's voice; The Odessa Steps sequence in The Battleship Potemkin vs. Twister. Michael Bérubé, "Pop Culture's Lists, Rankings, and Critics" I've just come to conclusion that if this is how academics defend pop culture, maybe they're not fit to steward over high culture either. I love pop culture as much as the next guy, but the purgatorial jitters I get in my belly when I read Adorno won't be spirited away by Bérubé's tea-leaf readings and straw-man knockings. He belives that merely by showing that pop culture fans can passionately discriminate between cultural products, this gives the lie to the elitists who say pop fans are stupid and passive. But the elitist may, if he is Adornianally-inclined, complain that arguing the relative merits of the Group X and Group Y is like arguing the differences between Tide and Gain (or Chris Gaines vs. Garth Brooks). To the elitists, whatever differences exist between The Cure and Poison are only deviations in what is still essentially a standardized and uniform product are in fact quite minute and meaningless. In reality, there are no choices; each pseudo-individuated product merely helps to clog up the field of culture and prepetuate the illusion that there is choice. The elitist may accuse the pop aesthete of butterfly collecting: yes, you maybe able to tell explain why product X is better than product Y, but what of The World? What of the death of the soul and the starving Cambodians? Or, alternately: what of Bach and Van Eyck and Plotinus? Where is your sense of perspective, home-fry? The elitist might argue that pop culture, for all its opportunity for argument and taste discrimination, still serve as a distraction -- or something worse than a distraction, a drug, a jail cell with mirrors on every surface, leaving the prisoner nothing to do but stare at a purely negative infinity: "Television is employed primarily as a well-defined method of pleasurable brainwashing; it serves as personal hygiene, as self-medication. The zero medium is the only universal and widely distributed form of psychotherapy. It would be absurd to question its social necessity." Random, undigested thoughts: The idea of a writer for The New Criterion or the National Review wearing muttonchops is...rich. Groovers and hippies wear muttonchops. William F. Buckley and Roger Kimball don't. You see, though, one of the things about TNC and TNR is that their hatred for popular culture is nowhere near as categorical as Bérubé suggests. Especially TNR, what with its lame attempts at a kind of populism, does let on that there are acceptable movies and pop music (though generally value is found in the past rather than the present). And that jazz about how with Jurassic Park merchandising, the ad and the critique of the ad being one and the same? That's a new insight to him? Sheee-it. It is, like, sooo played-out in left-crit circles. Goes as far back as Mark Crispin Miller and George W.S. Trow, at least. Bérubé sounds as false as an ad-copy man -- according to both the worlds of advertising and media theory, I (as a lover of rock) am smart, discriminating, active rather than passive, rebellious even. Academic pro-pop discourse nauseates me because it's not critical enough. What Bérubé should be saying (and he almost says this, but never quite does) that it is the person most uniquely qualified to rigourously critique pop culture would be someone who happened to be on some level a pop culture fan. What I mean is: I learned far more about what's wrong with popular culture from Pauline Kael's "Fantasies of the Art-House Audience" and "Why Are The Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers" than I ever did from Allen Bloom. (Even Adorno had kind words for the Marx Brothers...) Why do I care about what bunch of big ol' cultural elitists have to say about my beloved? Because I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. Bob Dole I would never consider voting for him, but I have often felt sorry for Bob Dole. Indeed, I have sometimes wanted to hug Bob Dole. Think of Michael Lewis' portrait of him in Trail Fever as a man who, in light of Clinton's inhuman gift of seduction, seemed deep down conflicted about wanting to be president. Oh, and then the excruciating earnestness of that Viagra commercial and then...this is a man who has had to accept second-best all his life, and will continue to do so for its remainder. True, Dole is often arrogant, but it's a defensive arrogance, which is to say one where weakness is easily visible under the skin. The same cannot be said of either Bush or Shrub. With the Bushes, arrogance pitches ever upwards towards the whine of entitlement. It is, as such, much less lovable. Dole was uncomfortable all throughout his appearance on Meet the Press today. He had the unenviable tasking of trying to make the GOP's actions of the last few days seem reasonable while, at the same time, seeming reasonable. And in the middle of it, he said casually, completely without a hint of self-awareness, that regardless of whoever won the election, history would regard the other candidate as a "loser." From Trail Fever, on the night of Dole's '96 defeat: Hermenaut Beyond excellent, and even Freaky Trigger can't boast having a reader-response section one-tenth as spirited. Even if Joseph Lanza contributes. Fuck Joseph Lanza. Jacob Weisberg, "Steal This Election" Useful, because it summarizes my irritated beliefs that by nixing the state-wide manual vote recount and impugning manual vote counts in general, the Republicans are not merely being hypocritical but are stupidly acting against their self-interest as well. I'd also add that such actions are only gonna haunt come the next close and hotly contested election. William J. Bennett Watching him on CNN's Capital Gang, I'm reminded that I've always thought he missed his true calling: playing dispeptic dads in antacid commercials. Actually, the 300dpi version is even funnier. Derrick May, "Strings of the Strings of Life" Gospel music with all the hysteria -- but none of the wonder -- boiled out of it. I prefer Stay Free! to Adbusters anyway. Less smug and superficial. Carrie McLaren, if you're reading this (and I'm assuming you're not), I want to take this opportunity to say that, on the basis of the back cover of Issue #17, I would very much like to date your roomate. Bet you think I'm kidding. Max Weber: "Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards." Yes. I mean, really. Do you think a politician needs a bribe of money -- or some Toblerone, for that matter -- to side with a corporation? He needs the money, of course, but the terrifying, difficult thing is that the money never actually convinces. The politician is already convinced. Even if no money was transacted, the politician would probably still believe in his heart of hearts that what is good for General Motors is good for this country, and act accordingly. Assuming a bribe from Philip Morris is gonna prevent some senator from unmasking the truth about smoking is about as naive as assuming athletes would be burning down sweatshops were they not shilling for Nike. Of course, they wouldn't -- politicians and athletes are largely apolitical anyway. Adbusters, on the "unexpected upside" to the largely awful oil strikes in Europe: "Many people in oil-short cities realize that life without cars is, well, pleasant. They walk, ride bikes, meet in the streets. In Paris, the sound of songbirds is louder than traffic for the first time in memory." (God, I wish Tom was here.) "...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..." -- Romans 3:23 When everyone is guilty, guilt ceases to have meaning. It's long been a rhetorical cliché to claim Marxism or capitalism as "a kind of religion". Anti-consumerism, with which I have some affections but even more misgivings, is a religion with a Satan but no God, an original sin but no redemption. I don't believe in capitalism as a totalizing system for the same reasons I don't believe in God. Of course I believe in God. The Homosexuals, "Kiss With Venom" From the first tummyache to the last bout of diarrhea took twenty-four hours, almost exactly. In between was a trip to the hospital. Now please, don't go rattling off any concerned e-mails. I feel fine now. Though if you are weak of stomach, you may not want to read further. It was...well, we're not sure. Probably food poisoning, maybe gastroenteritis, and quite possibly whatever it was that made one of my bosses miss two days of work. It seems to me that my body was trying to purge something. Coming home early, I had to throw up three times on a largely empty LIRR train. Luckily I bought some plastic bags for the occasion. There was nothing really to purge, though. I missed breakfast that morning, so all that came up was stomach acid and mucus. It was puzzling. I got home in a blur. I whined and moaned and threw up about four times more. My nausea replaced by a heartburn feeling right over my stomach. After purge number seven, my mom called up a nurse who said something about appendicitis, so we were like, fuck THAT, fuck going to the doctor, we're going to the hospital. I was too weak to put on my jacket or my belt. I had nothing to do but fidget in the wheelchair at the waiting room and mumble for about an hour an a half. I was completely incapable of sitting still. No position, no shift of leg or arm or neck relived this purgatorial nervousness, this desire to shed my skin. Children looked at me like I was a freak. A passerby suggested I try to faint to get some medical attention. The high points were the three or four times I went to bathroom and relived some explosive, watery diarrhea, hooked on a cycle of feeling horrible, splat, feeling noticeably better and then gradually worse, splat, feeling better than after the last time, the good mood decaying slightly, splat, and so on. Another good sign was that I managed to down half a can of ginger ale. When I finally got the emergency room, I undressed and put on the robe, I felt humiliated and absurd -- why did I have to be son my mother took to the hospital? I laughed and cried but I was too dehydrated to tear up. Medical equipment binged and bonged in the background; an elderly jewish had non-specific complaints for her family. I gave the doctor what seemed like the third or fourth run-through of my symptoms I gave that day. He didn't think it was too too serious. I got hooked up to an IV unit, which pleased me immensely. The saliva eventually came back to my mouth. I spent the next two hours talking to my mother about North Bellmore, Al Gore, Christmas presents: niceties to keep me alert. Singing Stephin Merritt songs, fumbling the words when I couldn't remember them. Now I am on strict diet of Gatorade, broth, and farina (so much for Thanksgiving), but if I didn't know any better, I'd say I feel exactly the same as I did 48 hours ago. This explains a few things: "Until the end of the 1970's, Levitt homes had septic tanks. Sewers were installed in 1979. For nearly a year, Levittown had beautiful crimson sunrises and sunsets due to the great clouds of dirt in the air from the extensive sewer construction work." I didn't grow up in Levittown, New York, but in North Bellmore, which borders on it, and I remember both the vast sewer work and the awesomely beautiful atmospheric displays circa 1979. But I had no idea they were related. I am obsessing over the post-war boom. The era ends with Watergate and the first oil embargoes, almost exactly at the fade-in of my memories. For some reason, I picked up Armies of the Night, Mailer's Narrative about the '67 March on the Pentagon. Absolutely spellbinding. From the Manics' "Faster": "I am stronger than Mensa/Miller and Mailer/I spat out Plath and Pinter." That's quite a claim. Norman Mailer is the literary equivalent of the Manic Street Preachers -- naively existential, pretentious, doomed to succumb to their most reactionary tendencies, and when ON, far more powerful than they have any right to be. The novel captures the fear of sixties leftists with an apocalyptic bent had that Vietnam was a turning point, the big lie that once understood, demonstrated concentration camps were the only logical outgrowth of the country's newly banalized landscape. Such a situation demanded personal action, the need to offer oneself as a monkey wrench in the death machine: This site looks fuckloads better in Microsoft Explorer. Sorry. I expect to correct all that jazz once Tom gets back. It was a machine not much more different than the one my mom voted in back in the '76 election. Dinky curtain, aqua paint on metal. Florescent light glow. Plastic arrow switches. The oversized lever -- almost like a car stick-shift -- didn't budge. The chubby lady who helped sign me in has seen this before. She does some mysterious thing at the back of the machine the curtains close and I'm left to my own devices. Nader. That was easy. And then Clinton. Though I can hardly begin to imagine how she could do too much good for NY, at least as a junior senator (albeit an incredibly famous one). Contrast with Lazio, who the GOP would no doubt give a juicy subcommittee position if he defeated the evil bitch. Next come the judges. Shit. I didn't even make a token effort to study this one. Democrat across-the-board, except for the one case where the Democrat nominee was also the Republican one, and the Conservative one, and the Right-to-Life one as well. Uh, no. Onto the House. I'll have to go with incumbent Steve Israel, even though he (or somebody) outrageously played the race card against his black (and Republican)(and female) opponent. For the State Senate I get perverse and go for Greenie Noah D. Landon -- still in college! and nineteen! -- in opposition to the Right-to-Lifer and the Republican who actually helped bail out Babylon last year. For the State Assembly, I choose Willard L. Christy, a doomed Dem, over a Republican with an (ahem) "pragmatic" view of the environment. Did I miss anything? Nothing much to miss. But I check, I always check, much the same way that I have to check a bill before it goes into the mail slot, then place the bill on the door and sloowwly close it shut. Then check it again to see if the mailbox properly digested my bill. Everything has to be right. There is no going back. The enormity of this little action is clear. There was a bit of the ritual in it: like in weddings or graduations or funerals, there is a moment when the eyes open wide with the realization that through this action, you enter into a kind of mystic communion with all those who came before you and all those who will come after, which is to say every voter in America, ever. With my choices complete, I pulled the lever and sent my vote with an Archimedean THWACK! into history. Beautiful. People reading this in Britian have to understand that this is all happening in a school gymnasium. Indeed, every time I've ever voted was in a high school of some sort. Nice to see Bay Shore High didn't succumb in any noticeable way to the corruptions of corporate sponsorship since the last time I was there. Look at everybody. I've got this song in my mind and it goes "...nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, alcohol..." It is the sound of trouble. An absolute furious insistence on oblivion, numbness. Irresistible. I feel good now, but it's ebbing already. I'm sick. My throat's sore again. I couldn't even remotely explain any of my political positions to these people or their children. "Madame, regard the results of our NAFTA treaty." They're aliens to me. So much for mystical communion. "Co-co-co-co-co-co-CAINE!" I'm voting for Nader. I have the luxury to do so. The polls aren't even close in New York, so Gore can afford to have his lead in this state shaved a bit. Wizened leftists like Todd Gitlin see Nader's supporters as deluded fundamentalists who cannot understand the necessity for compromise in American politics. But my reasons are actually quite pragmatic. It's not that I want Nader for president. I detest his moral absolutism, his paranoid anti-corporate worldview and his narrow focus. But I do want a half-way decent Green Party, one strong enough to win a goodly number of local elections and one day maybe, just maybe, a couple of seats in the house. Something like the Green Parties as they exist in Germany and Canada, modest but visible, visible enough to keep certain issues like the environment and labor at the forefront of the national consciousness. A vote Nader is not a vote for Bush; a vote for Bush is, sooner or later, a vote for Nader. This isn't gonna work. But I got shit I wanna say. So it stays. For now. |
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