ultramaroon

"black metal": soothing?

2008-04-22T21:40:00.007-05:00

Listening to this album is kind of like wearing noise cancellation headphones. Which is, I guess, how I relate to a lot of black metal, especially in a cafe, or when a group of talkative undergrads is sitting at a neighboring table at the library.

Listening today
Torche, Meanderthal
Tortoise, TNT
The Wire on Air, 3 April 2008
V/A, Smithsonian Folkways Sampler
V/A, A Raga for Peter Walker
Ulaan Khol, I
Swirlies, They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World
St. Vincent, Marry Me

good noise

2007-12-16T01:56:00.000-06:00

I went to a show tonight not really knowing what to expect. It was Lampo’s first show since the spring, and the inaugural show in its new space on the near north side. The guy who introduced Marcus Schmickler quoted Phil Niblock as saying that Schmickler is (if I recall correctly) a “future kid,” and extended the metaphor half-jokingly to suggest we were about the hear “the sound of the future.” I had heard one album by Marcus Schmickler, Amazing Daze, which in my memory consists almost entirely of low drones, but according to reviews is at times fairly abrasive. The piece Schmickler played at this show was very different: roaring, howling, shrieking, gurgling, crackling, mostly with a metallic edge to it. Very “busy,” as the friend I heard it with put it; like me, he was bowled over by the complexity, density and inventiveness of the sound. The sound was produced entirely from Schmickler’s laptop. He sat at a desk during the performance, looking down at the computer. There were four speakers, surrounding the audience at its four corners.

I don’t know quite how to write about this music. It is best experienced live, I think, and perhaps part of the attraction is being able to experience it, to endure the cacophany. For one stretch I was contemplating getting a hearing exam at the university health center, wondering if I would have to go see a specialist and how much it would cost. My grandfather on my dad’s side experienced hearing loss when he got older, so I’m worried that at some point I’ll have to stop listening to loud music. His hair also went completely white in his early 30s, but that didn’t happen to my dad. I should mention that I have forgotten almost everything I learned in high school biology and the physical anthropology class I had to take at Cal. Of course there are ear plugs (they were being offered at the front table), but the sound is just not the same, as I experienced at a Rocket from the Crypt show at Bimbo’s 365 in 1999. At that show I had the plugs in for most the set, taking them out only in the last five minutes. Without the plugs the band was a revelation.

Anyway, I do not want my writing about the show to be overly hasty description-wise. There’s a risk of heavy-handedness in wanting to “explain” this music (or sound art, or whatever): to thematize it, to taxonomize it, to too securely spatialize (place-ify?) it. What I guess I’m saying is that there’s an interpretive risk of reifying an art form that aims to subvert, transgress, and/or overcome. (Exactly what the object – “object” in the sense of “a thing which is perceived, thought of, known, etc”, not “aim” – of this subversion etc would be I’m not so sure of.) On the other hand, I don’t necessarily want to posit a pre-critical or pre-rational domain of sensation in which the work operates, though such an idea has recently attained renewed critical respectability.

The sound was at times mimetic, to almost comic effect. (Indeed, a dude in front of me burst out laughing several times.) One of the dominant motifs was a tonal upswell that made me feel like I was close to an airplane taking off. After church sometimes my family parked next to the runways at SFO, just off the frontage road next to 101, mainly because my dad wanted to and he was almost always the one who drove, to watch and hear airplanes land and take off. Other sounds being mimicked: ambulance sirens, machines in a factory. The latter has, of course, been a dominant motif of experimental sound art since its earliest days. Some phases of washed out noise sounded like Niagara Falls (I went there in summer 2004), which is also extremely common in noise music. For a moment I thought of the noise torture at Guantanamo: I can’t decide if this reaction is banal, or if such an aim on the artist’s part might not be inconsistent with the diabolical character of the work.

The sound also created a sense of space, which is what this kind of sound art (if we can speak of "kinds" here) also tends to do. Schmickler creates sonic spaces incredibly well. “Sense of space” does not necessarily mean built space. In fact, it sounded more like the destruction of built space, in the manner theorized by Benjamin or in a certain sense Bataille, or Pynchon (see "Zone") or Sebald. Sometimes I felt embraced, with vibrations swelling up from the floor. There were occasional sensations of being in a natural space: underwater (maybe under the river Lethe, or the lake of fire (see also this, which has a handy glossary of literary terms)), and at the very end, in the simulacrum of rain forest full of mechanical birds and bugs.

The new space turned out to be ideal for this kind of performance. The acoustics seemed excellent, and the spareness of the décor, as is the custom in art galleries – off-white walls with green light projected on to them – provided a more or less neutral material support for sonic construction of space.

At one point in show I saw a scrap of something fall down from the ceiling. I looked up to see if there was anything above me. At the Alexei Pliousnine show at The Renaissance Society last October, the sound was so loud that it actually dislodged a huge piece of equipment from the ceiling. Luckily no one was killed. I was at that show, but left at the break, before the sky started falling.

It was snowing heavily tonight, making the trip from Hyde Park a little rough, but it was thoroughly worth it. I walked in the new snow with few people or cars around, not being able to discern the boundary between sidewalk and street, throwing a few snowballs at the trees lining the street.

p.s. Peter Margasak, the most open-eared music critic in Chicago that I know of, has a good take on the Schmickler show.

Noise/Mummies/Trees

2007-12-13T12:49:00.000-06:00

Just found out about this great new band. I should mention that it is experimental black metal. Does this have to mean that I am a hipster? The OED says that “hip” is a variant of “hep,” even though the first citation for hip is 1904, while hep is 1908. Hep is defined as “well-informed, knowledgeable, ‘wise to’, up-to-date; smart, stylish.” Okay, nothing terribly wrong with that, I guess. The first citation for hep is symptomatic in a rather funny way, from the Saturday Evening Post of December 5, 1908: “What puzzles me is how you can find anybody left in the world who isn't hep.”

Insofar as it’s pejorative, which it is in my book, would I disqualify myself for hipsterism if I said I listened to death metal when I was a teenager, and thus have a history with it, and am thus not just associating myself with one of the latest trends? Black metal is never going to be all that popular anyway, even in what one can loosely call indie culture. Or is simply saying that I listened to metal as a teenager also identify me as hip? Of course, one’s art consumption practices do possess social significance, and of course in some cases grant one cultural capital. I can’t very well adopt the naïve view of “I just want to listen to good-sounding music”; it sounds too much like the tautological “I like what I like,” and it begs the question of what "good" is.

A gigantic garbage truck or some other kind of industrial vehicle was parked yesterday afternoon at the service entrance to the undergraduate dining hall just down and across the street from where I live. I was walking out the library when I heard it. Its mechanism was doing some form of work, generating a massive drone that could be heard for blocks. I thought, wow, that’s really nice, an unintentional piece of sound art in the middle of the day. It continued for a good twenty minutes. It reminded me of KTL, and Marcus Schmickler, who I hope to see at Lampo this Saturday.

This past Sunday in the mid-day I went for a walk down the street to the look at the empty quads. On a whim I went into the Oriental Institute to walk through the exhibits and return home. At the far end of the first hall, under the huge Assyrian statuary there were two rather fetching women dressed up in Egyptian garb giving a demonstration of how to mummify a corpse, or a fabric imitation of one, on a table in front of them. They invited the three people standing there to take out the felt “organs,” place each one in a little container with tops that associated them with particular deities. We cured the body with “salt," brushed it with “resin” and wrapped it up. Fun stuff. Then we went to look at the actual mummification implements in the collection.

The lights are turned off in every single one of the rooms in the undergrad dorm across the street. This is the dorm that resembles a prison inside and out. I went inside once to visit the room of my former Chaplain at Berkeley who was at Chicago for a conference. We had to go through five locked doors before we got to his room. I can see the dorm through the gnarly top branches of a tree, now bare for the winter. A haunting image, especially at twilight. It reminds me of the view out one of my windows at Canterbury in Winter 1999, a dead tree through which I looked at the backside of the Berkeley City Club’s neo-gothic building, with its lush green backyard where classically trained singers would warm up before concerts, and the aquamarine light (what else?) from the gorgeous swimming pool slightly visible through a few windows. The tree was cut down soon after I moved into that room.

I can also see the Brutalist-style library from my window, which is a little disquieting for some reason. Lots of my friends have moved to other parts of Chicago, but I've been living about as close to campus as is possible for a grad student.

Tragedy/Farce

2007-11-04T21:55:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal asks incisive questions relevant to the lives of many: “Hat-doffing on the 18th green is a common occurrence and appears to be growing in popularity -- but why?” (“Deconstructing Doffing,” WSJ, 11/4/07).

Anti-advert of the day: “Japanese pineapple-cheese crumbly candy”

Best thing I’ve seen this week: Shoes

Listening today:
Lair of the Minotaur, The Ultimate Destroyer
Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala
Neurosis, Times of Grace
Skeletonwitch, Beyond the Permafrost
Roisin Murphy, Overpowered
Ratatat, Remixes Vol. 2
Sally Shapiro, Disco Romance
Fe-Mail, Voluptuous Vultures

good article on Hugo Chávez

2007-10-25T01:12:00.000-05:00

Geoffrey Hawthorn, "Baseball's Loss"

If only Americans got this kind of analysis on its major media. In its absence, it's up to socialists and progressives to make the case for an analogous "revolution" in the US, respecting, of course, the traditions and peculiarities of US culture and politics. Chávez obviously recognizes the need for international solidarity, and has successfully advanced that agenda, even if it puts him into strategic relation with despotism. Hawthorn's article, however, concludes by echoing the dreadful doctrine of "socialism in one country," which he thinks Venenzuela will be constrained to accept: "Socialists elsewhere will no doubt continue to enthuse, but Venezuela will in the end be on its own." Let's see how long they can keep it going.

Reasons and Evidence

2007-10-24T23:39:00.000-05:00

Excellent op-ed on Iraq’s “patrimony” from last March, referenced in a Tomdispatch article by Jack Miles today.

Conference: “In Defense of Sloth”

Jens Lekman: “but I will never kiss anyone…who doesn’t burn me like the sun.” Night Falls Over Kortedala is such a wonderful album.

Listening to Max Richter, The Blue Notebooks. It sounds derivative of something, but I can’t quite place it. Have the suspicion that it would be extremely impressive to people who listen mainly to pop music, but old hat to people who work in experimental/electronic/ambient music. I happen to love it, though I couldn’t imagine being an artist who put stuff like this out regularly. Need something else to lighten things up, which Richter actually has, e.g. production work with The Thermals and other rock groups.

Example of an independent Left: Socialism ou Barbarie. Its program would not really work in the US, however, given the intransigence of libertarian ideology in this country. That is to say, its critique of bureaucracy is too-easily folded into the knee-jerk US libertarian fixation on liquidating state agencies and leave the provision of health care, education, environmental control, etc., up to the free-for-all of the market. The same goes for Autonomia, perhaps, though there does exist such a thing as left libertarianism, i.e. anarchism, academic proponents of which include David Graeber and Simon Critchley.

Reason number 53 that it is difficult to take The Man without Qualities seriously:

"Ulrich [the main character] liked girls like this: ambitious, well-behaved, in their well-trained timidity like little fruit trees whose sweet ripe fruit is destined to fall one day into the mouth of some young knight of Cockaigne as soon as he deigns to open his lips. 'They have to be brave and tough,' he thought, 'like Stone Age women who shared their hunter's bed by night and carried his weapons and household gear on marches by day,' although he himself had never gone on such an expedition except in the distant prehistoric age of his awakening manhood" (189).

cultural transmission

2007-10-06T23:22:00.000-05:00

"The Blue Angels were established following World War II by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, chief of naval operations. Their mission is to enhance Navy recruitment and to act as ambassadors of goodwill. They got their name when one of the original team members saw a mention in the New Yorker magazine of the Blue Angels nightclub in New York City." -- SF Gate, "Mayor blasts conservative critics, says S.F. supports military," 10/6/07.

What the ace pilot might not have known is that the Blue Angels night club was most likely named for the 1930 movie Der blaue Engel, in which an elderly secondary school teacher played by Emil Jannings (who would continue to be a major film star in Germany 1933-1945) lusts after cabaret singer Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich. Cultural inheritances can certainly be odd. Perhaps the pilot did know; I know at least one naval officer (my brother) who spends some of his time reading high-brow magazines. I wonder what the audience for The New Yorker was in the late 40s. And the corollary, how many New Yorker issues get mailed every week to US military installations around the world today?

Music today
Wolves again. Two Hunters is a masterpiece.
Hyphy Hitz again. Good house chore music.
Les Savy Fav, Let's Stay Friends
Trelldom, Til Minne
Chromeo, She's in Control
Spektr, Near Death Experience
St. Vincent, Marry Me
Love FM

NPR Gem

2007-10-05T02:01:00.000-05:00

When the Dodgers left in 1957, "Brooklyn was spiritually eviscerated, to whatever extent the spirit possesses viscera." Uttered by Robert Siegel.

Also eviscerated, to extend the metaphor: Chávez Ravine.

Music Thursday
St. Vincent, Marry Me
Chromeo, She’s in Control
Supersilent, 6
James Blackshaw, The Cloud of Unknowing
Pelican, Australasia
Nielsen, Clarinet Concerto
Wolves in the Throne Room (again and again!)
v/a, After Dark (Italo disco)

move is complete, sort of

2007-10-02T22:40:00.001-05:00

Now I just have to rearrange my stuff [initially wrote just now, involuntarily, "rearrange myself"], buy lamps / lighting fixtures, remove stick-on crap from walls, buy rugs, paint, make five wooden shelves for the cabinets, get a filing cabinet, and buy/make curtains. Very lovely to know that I have this room all to myself. I've been in a walk-through room for the past two years. Paid my dues. The trees in front of my windows are rustling in the wind. The person who painted this room a long time ago thought that the green paint, along with the brown cabinets, would create a forest ambience. It sounds really nice in theory (associations with transcendentalism, black metal, fairy tales, the Sierras, etc), but a) that spatial metaphor is way too overdetermined, and b) the green is not even a forest green, just an ugly green. It is also a dark green, and among the rooms in the upper floors of the house, this room probably gets the least sunlight. Hence lamps and painting it a brighter color. One of the undergrad dorms, painted orange and resembling a prison, is across the street.

Listened to Hyphy and Wolves in the Throne Room again, on my cell phone, which I can finally upload music to again (problems with the driver). Music for room-moving. Also a new Wire Tapper came in with the new issue; favorite cuts so far are the fun years, Damon & Naomi, and Tarentel. D & N opened for Boris on Sunday night at the Empty Bottle. Despite the little paper signs at the bar asking people to stop talking and listen to the music, the band could barely be heard above the din. I think most people, myself included, really just went to hear Boris. The two bands are touring together under the moniker The Roaring Silence Revue, featuring a sweet sweet poster. I don't see Boris's name on the poster, though.

Sounds

2007-10-02T08:37:00.000-05:00

Went to Boris on Sunday. Even better live than on record. Three shows coming up this month I hope to see: Beirut/Colleen at Portage Theater, Asian American Jazz Festival event at the Velvet Lounge, and Wolves in the Throne Room / Lair of the Minotaur at the Empty Bottle.

I'm moving to a new room at the co-op - one that is a lot roomier and which I have all to myself.

Music yesterday:
Tina Brooks, True Blue
Boris, Pink
Gato Barbieri, Latino America
Francoise Hardy, La Question
Hyphy Hitz
Wolves in the Throne Room, Two Hunters

Serious Fun

2007-07-24T01:04:00.000-05:00

Socialist magic

Dictionary of War

The Guild of Funerary Violinists

Melvins

2007-07-22T15:58:00.000-05:00

I showed up at the Melvins concert Saturday night at Slim’s, somewhat inappropriately, in a black cashmere sweater. Black is fine, of course; cashmere not so much. Went with my friend Dave, who was listened to the Melvins back in the day, i.e. early 90s. People were being frisked as they entered by a man and a woman. I was frisked by the woman, who felt the pencil in my pocket. “What kind of pen is that?” she asked. I took it out and said it was a pencil. “It’s a knife!” a friend of the woman’s next to me said, jokingly, as if I couldn’t possibly be carrying one; unlikely, but not unfathomable. “Ah, a ball point,” the frisker said. Inside the opening band was in the middle of playing what sounded like music. It was mostly start and stop on one riff, a bit of a joke on the audience. I said to Dave that I would like to know the name of this band so that in the future I can avoid them. Their performance had the feeling of last-minute-replacement. (Alas, the show is no longer listed on the Slim’s calendar; I won’t bother to search any further.) At Slim’s a screen comes down in front of the stage before and between sets to entertain the crowd and to allow musicians to set up without being gawked at. They were showing animations by Dalek, an unusual hip-hopper on the local Ipecac label. After a while, screen still down, Buzz Melvin appeared to the left of the screen and began playing a fuzzed-out drone, which continued on for ten or fifteen minutes. Fuzzy, not buzzy, as it were; that's a different kind of metal. The screen – which had been blank while he played – rose, revealing a drummer and a bassist. The project of the concert was to play two EPs from the early 90s, Lysol and Eggnog. Imagine a homemaker, or janitor, at Christmas-time – spray, wipe, sip; spray, wipe, sip. Either the band was missing a member, or the albums they were playing were recorded with only three people. I’m not sure at what point they switched into the albums, or between the albums for that matter, as I’d never heard them before. Buzz had a fan behind him (the cooling kind), which I imagine most of the audience was looking at enviously, as it was like a sauna on the floor. The music was, as anticipated, sludgy – loud, heavy, and chugging, though with quite a few up-tempo sections, one of which brought to mind Bon Jovi, though maybe John Cougar Mellencamp is closer to the mark; I am only half-joking. The best parts of the concert were the phases of fuzzy drone noise. Earlier in the evening at a bar called Casanova a friend told me that Mastodon had played at Slim’s some time ago. Having seen them at Pitchfork last week, I was longing for their technical sophistication, their creative hybrid of metal genres, and their energy. The concert ended without an encore; no opportunity to scream out “Bloody Witch” at Buzz as a request. Right at the end staff security took someone from the front of the stage and carried him or her outside. Perhaps s/he had been attempting to mosh or stage dive, both of which are forbidden, according to a prominent sign, high up and to the right of the stage.

On the drive to South City, our ears recovering from the show, we opted not to listen to the Weakling cd I had picked up earlier at Aquarius, tuning the radio instead to KALX and KFJC -- two excellent radio stations, particularly the latter -- both of which were playing rather boring but agreeable electro dance music.

My friend Efrain’s project Cook the Vote is holding its second dinner tonight. The candidate of the day is the “Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-Administration, Anti-Medicare” Ron Paul. Check it out!

10 very fine recent metal albums

2007-06-15T18:00:00.000-05:00

Endstille, Navigator
Converge, No Heroes
Nachtmystium, Instinct: Decay
Watain, Sworn to the Dark
Crebain, Night of the Stormcrow
Antaeus, Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan
Xasthur, Subliminal Genocide
Sunn O))), Black One
Jazkamer, Metal Music Machine
Spektr, Near Death Experience

Antaeus is the winner for best album title, bar none. At some point I am going to write about the appeal of metal, particularly black metal, to myself and to contemporary art practices.

Notation

2007-04-25T12:46:00.000-05:00

Startling fact of the day: 1 in 3 American Indian women will be raped during her lifetime. Non-Native men commit most of these assaults. In Alaska, Indian women are 10% of the population, and 50% of women raped every year. Almost none of the rapists are charged with a crime. Do Native lives not matter? Source: Amnesty International, via NPR.

The subsequent story that day concerned the laying of an egg by a California Condor in Northern Mexico, the first time in 70 years that such has happened outside US borders.

I wonder what to make of this sequence.

I'll Sleep When You're Dead

2007-04-07T13:40:00.000-05:00

Amazing new album by El-P.

Thursday Videos

2007-03-22T17:55:00.000-05:00

Heavy Metal Baghdad, Part 1 of 5, courtesy of the sketchy dweebs at Vice Magazine.

Herbert's Hippopotamus: Marcuse and Revolution in Paradise

Mathman: "Play by the rules, get eaten by the rules."

Television

2007-03-22T14:03:00.000-05:00

The Nielsen Ratings service is trying to get my coop to sign up with them. A guy came by our door; I happened to answer the door. He gave me a brochure in an envelope with the question on the front, in fat red marker, "Do you watch TV?" I raised this prospect at last Sunday's house meeting. It wasn't taken very seriously. No one wants to have to record their TV watching every week, and since we're not actually paying for our cable (the cable company has so far forgotten to disconnect it, even though we haven't paid anything since last July), a box electronically monitoring our usage would probably not be a good idea. Too bad, because we could then keep the TV tuned to Animal Planet or CSPAN twenty four hours a day (we imagined a clerk at Nielsen headquarters in Florida exclaiming, "well, gee, there's a curious spike in the viewing of animal documentaries and senate hearings in Hyde Park!"). A few days ago, we got an letter from them. I decide to keep it for myself. Last night I opened it and found five new dollar bills, apparently as an inducement to fill out the enclosed questionnaire. Finding cash on the street is one thing; having it mailed to you is quite another kind of pleasant surprise. Thank you, Nielsen!

word of the day: incunabula

2007-03-13T15:45:00.000-05:00

From OED:

L. incunabula(neut. pl.) swaddling-clothes, hence cradle, and fig. childhood, beginning, origin, f. cunæ cradle.

1. The earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything.

2. (With sing. incunabulum): Books produced in the infancy of the art of printing; spec. those printed before 1500.

3. Ornith. The breeding-places of a species of bird. Hence incunabular a., of or pertaining to early printed books.

Earliest usage was in the first sense, by Thomas de Quincey in 1824: "Here they fancy that they can detect the incunabula of the revolutionary spirit."

Why Don’t Republicans Write ("Literary") Fiction?

2007-03-07T01:09:00.000-06:00

Yes, why don't they?

Puh-thetic

2007-02-08T15:25:00.000-06:00

“It is easy for academics to talk about their leftist commitments; it is harder for them to act upon them in public, in the world.” In other words, academics who don’t “act on” their commitments are just a bunch of fakers. Their lifestyles are radically at odds with the political commitments (or “principles,” “ideals,” or whatever) they claim to uphold. If they invite each other to their dinner parties, talk “uncritically” about art, eat and drink well, engage in personal hobbies in their “free time,” have families, talk about their work in difficult, non-ordinary language (i.e. that foresakes, reflects upon, or works to undo language as “communication”) – many more complaints can be added to this list – they can’t possibly be the radicals they purport to be. Their habits of living distance them too much from “the people.” Unless they somehow intervene in a material practice of renegade politics, their commitments are vain, pretentious, useless – a form of careerist posturing that does little other than secure their institutional location and professional status as “dissident intellectuals.” They can then use their political commitments as a form of cultural capital to belittle, intimidate, and shame students and colleagues who don’t measure up to their standard of ideological correctness. What sad creatures they are. End of story.

Purple Rain

2007-02-04T12:54:00.000-06:00

This film is apparently making a comeback, if it ever left. Does it have anything to do with Prince playing the Superbowl halftime show? I have heard it referenced by smart people on three occasions in the past week. I still need to see it.

Dissidence

2007-02-02T16:11:00.000-06:00

If you appear to take a position without considering others, or simply defend one position among others, one is said to be “lacking balance” or “biased.” Defending a position based on a set of beliefs that one doesn’t or cannot or can barely put into practice (because of external constraint, whether absence of funding, or working to support others financially, or wanting to spend time with your family, or disagreement with colleagues, or sectarianism, or melancholy, or mental illness, or horror at the intransigence of dominant ideology, or seeking pleasure and avoiding pain) appears petulant, peurile. And if you defend a belief without acting upon the consequences of your belief, you are a hypocrite, or pathetic. Thus dissidence in the US gets assigned to youthfulness, conservatism to maturity; the chronologically young welcome difference, mature adults are set in their ways. Children can dissent from (or appear to dissent from) normativity because they don’t "have responsibilities"; that is to say, no one depends upon them to eat, or be housed, or clothed, to be educated, or receive medical care. And the primary locus for ethical relation is, of course, the family. (“Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.”) An adult active in the world must be responsible to him- or herself because others rely upon him or her to survive. ("I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.") Those who challenge the dominant order – the order which enables life – have no one to support, and are thus “being selfish.” Or vain (cf., Sloterdijk on cynicism). Dissidence is thus seen as a way of displacing their personal frustrations: hysterically acting out, or narcissistically drawing attention to themselves, or getting even with their parents, or getting laid. Dissidence is thus unethical. On the liberal account, youth also dissent because they don’t understand the complexity of an issue; once they learn how complicated it is, an activist will realize that it is not so polarized (“black and white”), that there is not simply a right side and a wrong side, that reality is actually rather ambiguous, and that it is often difficult to assign virtue or blame. Dissidence is thus intellectually shallow. Youth also dissent because they are misled by older leaders who have competiting priorities, and who cynically manipulate young people for personal gain. Dissidence is thus traversed by cynicism on the one hand, and delusion on the other. In none of these explanations does one find an acknowledgement that counternormativity manifested in a set of firm beliefs can be the outcome of rigorous study, hard thinking, and self-criticism. This is not surprising, as the notion of counternormativity is practically illegible to people who say such things, and in any case, it is all too often the case that what looks dissident reinforces what it aims to counteract (thus Horkheimer & Adorno on the culture industry, Marcuse on repressive desublimation, Foucault on the liberal progressive subject, Zizek on “self-realization,” Lyotard on metanarrative, Nietzche on Schopenhauer, Heidegger on Nietzsche, Derrida on Heidegger, and Stiegler on Derrida).

Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

2007-01-31T19:55:00.000-06:00

"In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by 'truly impressive amounts of beer,' landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive."

http://tinyurl.com/3bzecm

Flexibility

2007-01-30T22:32:00.000-06:00

The "Center for Teaching and Learning" at my school is promoting a workshop they are calling "Adjuncting 101." I don't know what is uglier, the word or the practice.

Zizek the Heideggerian

2007-01-28T14:27:00.000-06:00

"The true despair is precisely that; all historical acts disappear. Like all those classical statues are there, but they are deprived of a world. They are totally meaningless, because what does it mean to have a statue of Michaelangelo? It only works if it signals a certain world. And when this world is lacking, it's nothing. It all depends on whether we have a world. Doe we have some horizon that makes it meaningful?"

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2006/12/zizek_and_child.html

Ten Bad Films

2007-01-08T00:53:00.000-06:00

Badlands
Bad Santa
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Bad Education
Bad Lieutenant
The Bad Seed
The Bad News Bears
Bad Blood (i.e., Mauvais Sang)
Bad Taste

Last 20 albums I've bought

2007-01-07T21:34:00.000-06:00

Max Richter, The Blue Notebooks
Ekkehard Ehlers, A Life Without Fear
Broadcast, The Future Crayon
The Microphones, Mount Eerie
Nas, Hip Hop is Dead
Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury
Wolf Eyes, Human Animal
Spektr, Near Death Experience
Striborg, Embittered Darkness / Isle de Morts
Boris & Sunn 0))), Altar
Boris & Merzbow, Sun Baked Snow Cave
Alvin Lucier, I am Sitting in a Room
Rhys Chatham, Two Gongs
Tony Conrad, Joan of Arc
Leo Kottke, 6- and 12-String Guitar
John Fahey, Sea Changes and Coelacanths
Henry Grimes Trio, The Call
Last Exit, Koln
Rashied Ali & Frank Lowe, Duo Exchange
Rashied Ali & Leroy Jenkins, Swift Are the Winds of Life

missed callings

2006-12-08T14:13:00.000-06:00

Richard Nixon is the Executive branch's Sol LeWitt:

Sol LeWitt is Art's Richard Nixon:

word of the day: fillip

2006-12-08T14:12:00.000-06:00

"Fillip," from the OED:

1. A movement made by bending the last joint of a finger against the thumb and suddenly releasing it (so as to propel some small object, or merely as a gesture); a smart stroke or tap given by this means.

b. Something of small importance; a trifle. Also, a short space of time, a moment.

2. In a wider sense: A smart blow (with the fist, etc.). Now rare.

3. Something that serves to rouse, excite, or animate; a stimulus.

Recently

2006-11-21T16:48:00.000-06:00

Reading:
Habermas, "Modernity-An Incomplete Project"

Listening:
eRikm & Fennesz, Complementary Contrasts: Donaueschingen 2003 (review and review)
Tim Hecker, Harmony in Ultraviolet
GZA, Liquid Swords
Electralane, Rock it to the Moon
Jay-Z, Kingdom Come

Watching:
Casino Royale
A Good Year
Rosemary's Baby
Nouvelle Vague
Knife in the Water

words of the day

2006-10-05T16:35:00.000-05:00

From OED.

1. apophatic: Applied to knowledge of God obtained by way of negation. Hence apophaticism, an apophatic approach to knowledge of God.

[ad. Gr. negative (see G. W. H. Lampe Patristic Greek Lexicon s.v.).]

2. nemoral: Of, relating to, or characteristic of groves or woods; living in or frequenting groves or woods.

[<>nemorlis belonging to a wood or forest, frequenting woodland < nemor-, nemus wood (cognate with ancient Greek wood, Gaulish nemeton holy place (prob. orig. holy grove), Old Irish nemed holy place) + -lis -AL¹. Cf. Middle French, French némoral (1564).]

one reason i like napalm death (still)

2006-09-25T01:35:00.000-05:00

They are vitriolically anti-fascist.

fury

2006-09-16T16:12:00.000-05:00

tasteless swimwear, part 1

"President Nazarbayev will visit the White House and the Bush family compound in Maine when he flies in for talks that will include the fictional character Borat."

poor editing aside (the daily mail isn't such a great paper), bush would ideally serve as mediator at a conflict resolution session between "borat" and the kazakh president. at kennebunkport, of course. i can't wait for the play to open off-broadway.

banksy is the man

2006-09-15T22:01:00.000-05:00

Banksy in LA.

Banksy's recent book.

See also:

Monsieur Chat

Monsieur Chat on Flickr.

Subject of this sort-of okay movie.

I think Chris Marker may (may!) be overrated. But I haven't seen Sans Soleil, so I am not qualified to have an opinion.

puzzling puffy planet

2006-09-15T14:29:00.000-05:00

Less dense than cork.

"'From the point of view of planetary theory, they’re in a region we would call Neverland,' Dr. Sasselov said."

good recent stuff

2006-09-15T13:34:00.000-05:00

reading:

emily apter, "weaponized thought: ethical militance and the group-subject" (kind of a portmanteau essay)

paolo virno, "childhood and critical thought" (just perfect)

francoise dastur, "phenomenology of the event: waiting and surprise"

diana coole, "politics without nostalgia" (review of wendy brown, politics out of history)

jameson's review of the parallax view in the lrb (coruscating density, as usual).

j. hoberman's review of v for vendetta

cat and girl
_____________________________

music:

unwound / leaves turn inside you

the red krayola / hazel (with reservations re the pretentious parts)
_____________________________

cinema:

the shipping news (surprisingly good for a stupid self-help movie)

divine intervention (droll, brilliant)

finding neverland

munich (dark but also funny, viz. the anarchist prank midway through; great screenplay)

mamma roma (lapidary, devastating)
_______________________________

recent suckage: smilla's sense of snow, after she boards the boat to the arctic. before that happens it's really good.

so-so, but hard to dislike: the decemberists / castaways and cutouts

Role Models

2006-08-29T19:43:00.000-05:00

The University of Chicago Law School library now has DVDs available for check out. Many are law-themed, although there are some (perhaps predictable) omissions, e.g. The Trial and The Passion of Joan of Arc. On the other hand, law students do have the opportunity to view inspirational classics such as Erin Brockovich, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Legally Blonde (+ its sequel, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde).

boris heavy rocks

2006-08-22T13:26:00.000-05:00

good article in the london guardian about the "new rock underground." there is one strange omission - boris, another rockin japanese band.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1852426,00.html

http://www.inoxia-rec.com/boris/

also, stephen o'malley of sunn 0))), etc., has an excellent blog:

http://www.ideologic.org/index2.html

utopian desire

2005-11-25T18:34:00.000-06:00

There's an unusually good account of Fredric Jameson's new book on science fiction in the Boston Globe this week:

http://tinyurl.com/9q73o

That's all.

rip shit up

2005-09-21T19:01:00.000-05:00

courtesy of the new york times. would this be considered "going postal"? consider barbara ehrenreich's new book bait and switch, on the anxieties of "white-collar" laborers who struggle to find work (i'm delighted to see the book front and center at my local borders). there's a scarcity of decent jobs, and many who have them are subjected to the stress of continual speed-up. there was a great discussion on cspan book tv the other week between her and and stephen moore, senior economics writer at the wall street journal.

speaking of book tv, i see on their website that they also recently broadcast a panel discussion here in chicago on "race and hip-hop" that included one of the best music critics working today, oliver wang.

bill clinton talks some sense

2005-09-19T02:05:00.000-05:00

The former US President expounds thusly:

“On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefited just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included.

‘What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts,’ he said.

‘We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else.’

Clinton added: ‘We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense.’”

working

2005-09-18T23:49:00.000-05:00

One of the best responses I’ve heard to the common question at academic social gatherings, "What do you work on?": “Right now, I am occupied chiefly with the fable, the poetic view of history, and the architectonics of the skies, especially our nation’s.” – Friedrich Hölderlin, letter to Leo von Seckendorf, 12 March 1804. (Epigraph to Jennifer Bajorek’s fine article, “The Offices of Homeland Security, or, Hölderlin’s Terrorism” Critical Inquiry 31 / Summer 2005.)

headline of the day

2005-09-15T23:30:00.000-05:00

"Frisco fuckjobs shoot arrows up indie kids' butts"

hold everything

2005-09-15T17:01:00.001-05:00

getta load of this.

refraining from potty humor now.

viewing/reading

2005-09-15T03:20:00.000-05:00

Friday Night and Me and You and Everyone We Know are beautiful films.

Scott McLemee interviews Astra Taylor, the maker of a documentary on the self-professed "dialectical materialist philosopher." I wonder if Doc Films could book it before Zizek comes to campus.

New "biopics" of Bettie Page, Truman Capote, and Johnny Cash.

body modification

2004-08-02T01:20:00.000-05:00

Soldiers and their immediate families are eligible for free cosmetic surgery, according to The New Yorker.

Franz Ferdinand

2004-07-14T03:16:00.000-05:00

This band rocks.

Music

2004-07-12T02:43:00.000-05:00

A few recordings I came upon recently and would enthusiastically recommend:

Jane Birkin, Arabesque (Narada World)
Lester Young, The Complete Aladdin Sessions (Definitive Records)
Stanley Turrentine, Never Let Me Go (Blue Note)
Magnetic Fields, i (Nonesuch)
Alfred Brendel and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Franz Schubert/Winterreise (Philips)
Vienna Art Orchestra, The Minimalism of Erik Satie (hatART)
Irshad Khan, The Magic of Twilight (Naxos World)

And five, among many, I need to hear:
m83, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (Mute)
Mr. Lif, I Phantom (Definitive Jux)
Asian American Jazz Orchestra with Steve Lacy, Monk's Moods (EMusic)
Jackie-O Mofo, Fig. 5 (Road Cone)
Miles Davis, The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions (Columbia)

24

2004-05-25T01:17:00.000-05:00

The last of the season is tomorrow. My interest has waned somewhat, especially since the writers made the arch-terrorist a cartoon anti-imperialist, and a petulant one at that.

Against Love

2004-05-25T00:46:00.000-05:00

Been reading the above-named polemic by Laura Kipnis, admiring how she smuggles marxist and post-structuralist thinking into a certain kind of public sphere. I do wonder, though, who would want to be "caught" displaying the cover (man on bed, empty chair, woman in underwear) on the subway during rush hour.