jane dark's sugarhigh!

Peril-Elle

For the next four days (through Thursday 9/2), sugarhigh! will be working for the woman, man, posting reports from the Republican National Convention on the Village Voice website, under the heading Guns of Brixton.

Goodbye to all of this/I'm Lovin' It!

To my Parisian gym employees smoking outside the entrance: c’est tout ce que j’aime.

To my middle-aged women driving Smart cars past the Tuileries in the shadow of the Ferris wheel: c’est tout ce que j’aime.

To my frenetic old guys lane-splitting on Blvd. St-Germain in their original Mini Coopers: c’est tout ce que j’aime.

To my French radio DJs who really feel just fine breaking out very minor
Guns’n’Roses singles from a dozen years back a couple times a day, super!, c’est tout ce que j’aime.

To my people lip-synching to their personal stereo devices while walking away from the Metro because that song which is perhaps “Ma revolution” by Jenifer makes you feel like the city is your stage: I feel you.

To my French people wearing their tiny MP3 players on lanyards round their necks: c’est tout ce que j’aime.

To my kids from the Nine Three wearing their teeny mobile phones on lanyards round their necks: c’est tout ce que vachement j’aime.

To my French people in general making all choices so as not to ruin their line and/or to keep pocket space available for cigarettes: c’est tout ce que j’aime.

To the last remnants of Benjamin and Aragon trapped in the decrepit Passage Brady with its eleven Indian restaurants, its low upstairs rooms pressed against the dirty glass roof: tres melancholique but c’est tout ce que j’aime.

To my Metro worker leaping out of the little conductor’s box at the front of the lead car as his shift ends on a Friday night and running happily up the platform steps even as his train leaves the station under new guidance, street clothes swinging in a plastic bag and his smile of release set on stun, c’est tout ce que j’aime.

To my gentlemen running the ponies in the Luxembourg Garden: put the sad ponies on the Metro, take them to Versailles, and double-kiss them goodbye.

A Difficult Biscuit

Suppose you are on strike. You collate the time cards at a battery factory, and you love the people you work with. You know them. But you are not the only people on strike. In fact, yours started in sympathy with the strike at the auto factory, and you know them too: you know, exactly, how their shoulders ache by the end of the day, how their eyes run, how they come home to tired to play with their kids.

And the public transportation workers, the railway workers, the trash collectors -- they’re on strike too. You are on strike together and you have agreed, with these people you love, on some basic demands. You will not quit the strike until they are met. You’ve made this a promise to each other.

The basic demands include, let’s say, just these: that everyone will have quality medical coverage. That everyone who can gets to sit down while working, and that those who can’t will have the right to rotate jobs. That childcare will be provided equally to anyone who requests it.

These are your basic demands, and it seems fair to insist also that no funds will be generated to meet these demands by wringing more profits from workers at other factories. In fact, your demands go for all factories. Everyone gets this stuff. Oh, and just for the hell of it, a demand that doesn’t cost anyone a penny: anyone can marry anyone else. And no more executions.

You are on strike and the union, which claims to represent your interests, which in fact exists because you called it into being to care for you in such situations, sends a rep to your factory. The rep says, “We can’t do that. It’s not possible. Here’s what we can get for you: a 2.5% raise. An extra week’s vacation every other year. The right to retire early for a lesser pension. About the rest, there’s little we can do. We’re really sorry, we’d like to help you. Maybe two judges will retire in the next couple years, and we’ll get to appoint the replacements. Of course, that doesn’t mean we’re supporting the whole marry-who-you-want thing. Nope, not us. And sometimes, you just gotta give people posion injections.

“Oh, yeah,” concludes the union rep. “This offer is really only good for the factories we control in this country -- in fact, only some of them -- and we may have to move a lot of your jobs to factories we control in other countries.

“Take it or leave it.”

The comments box is open.

From The Military School Of Life

The Army don't dance, they just pull up their pants, and do the auto-da-fé.

After the recent entry, one wants not to toss analogies about like confetti. So I won't note the congruencies of the current circumstance in Iraq to that of a previous dallliance in Vietnam. Such invocations are lax, and depend entirely on the long-gathering rhetorical freight in the term "Vietnam" -- you know, when we were wrong both ethically and in our strategy + tactics.

Without wandering too far into ethics, which is now the province of advice columnists and I say good riddance, it's worth noting that the current conflict is far more an overtly economic action that the avowedly ideological struggle in Vietnam. Yes, there are current claims about fighting murderous fundamentalism and evil regimes, and there has even been a concerted effort by loyal intellectuals to render this as a global struggle between two opposed ideological systems, CocaWorld Vs. McJihad, etc etc. The Republican party in particular doesn't breathe well when cut off from the oxygen of Manichaean absolutism.

Nonetheless, the distinction in economic determination becomes obvious when one turns to strategy + tactics. In this current bloody struggle, the assets are fixed: strategy demands that cities be pacified, oil fields be secured. In Vietnam, this was far from the case; as a result, the opposing forces could make far greater use of those tactical advantages that accrue to a guerrilla army: infinite mobility, freedom to decline combat when outgunned, unfettered use of terrain.

In Iraq, that is to say, because of the particular strategic goals, the Alliance of the US And Its House-pets has a considerably better tactical position than in Vietnam. Nonetheless, I have been watching a lot of video feed and I would llike to proffer the suggestion that it is very hard to beat an enemy that dances communally before, after, and even during mortal engagements, no matter the temporary results. Such activities may indeed be marginally more powerful than two girls jumping rope. The Mehdi army, and other Iraqis, treats combat the way that Americans treat only the ends of wars.

We were told the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms and dancing in the streets, which turned out to be true, excepting the word "open."

Passing Strange Daydream [Special for Mlinko]

Amazed, on revisit, to realize that Nietzsche's most Bartletted single phrase is always taken, in the most literal sense, out of context. In my edition of Twilight of the Idols, item 8 of "Maxims and Arrows" reads, in full:

"From the military school of life. -- What does not kill me makes me stronger."

As such, the famed phrase makes the mortal leap from universal assertion to conditional -- presenting itself as a description true only in a given circumstance, or perhaps even a hypothesis intended to set the horizons of a particular and limited conception. What of the other schools, the School for Scandal, the New School, Schooly-D, School's Out Forever?

The Land of 1,000 Bad Analogies

I shall leave a full-figured takedown of Todd Gitlin for someone with more patience than I for apoplectic dwarves, formerly progressive category; I spent mine on Chris Hitchens. Perhaps it will suffice for now to note that, as long as maturity is equated with the politics of seeking out a marginally better deal without upsetting the apple-cart, I will persist in extreme immaturity; better a Christina Aguilera and/or anarchist fan than an actual whore. No, I take that back. I know whores, and I've never met one as self-righteous as Todd.

I did want to offer a passing thought or two on the casual invocation of Gandhi by supposed progressives and radicals, generally by way of condemning property-damage as violence too (there is yet another example of this in Salon; you have to pass through a stage or two to reach the article, a digital vitrine of faux-left fallacies).

1) Gandhi actively wanted to remove the government that was currently in place. Not change parties from Conservative to Labour; remove the government, and replace it with an entirely different form and mode of governance. If that is not your ambition, your analogy is perjured.

2) Gandhi recognized that the price for renouncing violence was accepting violence upon one's own body; that there could be no negotiations. If you are not willing actively to pursue this course, every time you invoke Gandhi's non-violence, you achieve nothing but a rather cowardly disingenuity.

3) As a strategy, Gandhi's non-violence is particularly practicable for a colonized nation. The greater the distance of the colony, the more effective: the chain to supply ever-increasing military forces for repression, as well as replacement labor to harvest the natural resources of the colony (that is, those beyond the local labor itself, frequently the most valuable natural resource of a colony), is far more difficult to maintain at distance. The moment of diminished gain for the maintenance of a distant colony must eventually arrive. Contrarily, it's never profitable to abandon the governance of the homeland, unless there's another green country waiting. As a result, the cases where a colonial government has been removed with relatively little violence from below are considerably more numerous than the number of non-violent revolutions at home.

Gandhi sought to overthrow a distant colonial power and had a massive population willing to endure considerable violence toward that end. When these three conditions are in place, get back to me with your analogies. Love, Jane

If you stare long enough into 1915, 1915 stares also into you

Hugo Largo Holds Chez Guevara

During yesterday's CNN European feed, they had two kinds of people commenting on the Venezuelan election and its implications, because they have two kinds of shows: news summary and business summary. They also have weather summary, but appparently there was some inclement weather elsewhere which had to be covered, despite being in an oil non-rich location.

The business summary guys said this: that Chavez's victory was good for oil prices in the short run, because he promised to keep the juice flowing United Statesward (Venezuela, the fifth-largest oil exporter in the world, sends two-thirds of its tea to Texas et al.) We knew this already because oil prices dropped at the news, and would have dropped more if the Russian government would stop fucking with the fine folks at Yukos. However, noted a series of money guys, the large proto-dictator's survival of this recall election boded poorly in the long run, because his spending on social programs -- education and medical care, that is -- was too high, and was artificially supported by inflated oil prices; should they come down, the furious social expenditures would precipitate an economic crisis.

The news summary guys said this: that Chavez had polarized the nation and, in effect, bought the election by throwing an unprecedented amount of cash at the poor over the last year, in the form of education, medical care, and training of educators, doctors, and nurses. This produced his victory in the short term, but wasn't a practical long-term strategy because it isn't sustainable -- and when the opposition could come up with a candidate who both has no ties to the pre-Chavez era of runaway corruption, and appeals to the lower classes because he's not a super-rich technocrat, they might eventually oust Chavez.

You will note that the business reporters and the news analysts said the exact same thing. I suppose the weather analysts, had they not been touring southern Florida, would have chimed in: Chavez really made the sun rise a lot over the last few months, essentially paying it to rise with government money, but the money will run out and one day it will just stay dark, which will be bad, so it would be better if we could transition to a new regime which is committed to sustainable sunrises, albeit, we fear, limited to the upper classes. We are very sorry, there is just not enough money in the world for consistent sunrises for the poor.

No one ever suggested that education and health care for poor people might be, you know, good, other than as a strategical ploy.

Perhaps no one mentioned this because it begs the exact question, Why is "money" constituted in such a way that it's unreasonable to expect the sun to rise on the wretched of the earth? Shouldn't we make fundamental changes in how "money" works? No, I know, communism, very bad.

But there's a more immediate curiosity that has to be suppressed: why doesn't the current pres of the richest country in the history of the world endeavor to buy the election this way? There's a lot of casual talk about buying the election, about advertising and soft money and billionaire wives. But why doesn't the president do something so simple that even a backward commie paratrooper can figure it out? I mean, there have to be more poor people than rich people, right? I think a meteorologist told me this. So why doesn't the guy throw a lot of money at social programs for the poor? Kerry wouldn't know what hit him.

Alas, poor people in the States can't be bought -- they have too much integrity, and will vote for whoever speaks in the least grammatically complex sentences, even if that person spends much of his non-vacation time buying the votes of the wealthy. Another way to formulate the immediate, tragic question: how come poor Venezuelans can figure out who is buying their votes, and sell them for stuff that's very very useful to them, while Americans cannot? Could it be that, in the United States, nothing particularly useful is on offer from either party; that neither candidate is prepared to make the sun rise even once on national health care, on gay marriage, on education, in the Eastern windows of the little houses and apartment buildings, on the shacks and cardboard boxes where the poor live?

Does the formula "X and Y" indicate that X and Y are different?

Can I just say I am pretty excited about this year's "Oil and Money" conference, scheduled for October 27-28 this year in London, and featuring, you know, OPEC reps, the Prime Minister of Libya, that sort of person? I feel there will be some useful discussion about futures.

My favorite thing about the event is the struggle to make the connection between the event's two eponymous heroes. What're the odds? It reminds me of the New Yorker's annual special number, "The Money Issue," a sort of jaw-dropping concept which exists perhaps for young'uns from Business School of the Maldives who have never read the zine before. Everyone else ends up paralyzed in the chiropractor's waiting lounge where one has encountered said curiosity, trying desperately to recall if there was ever an issue of said journal that was somehow not about money.

The Bread Prohibitions

A loaf of bread is a lovely thing, as well as being a set social relations so intricate and dense that it appears as a social fact. The claim, for example, that “all revolutions are about the price of bread” may be vulgar, but it’s historically pressing nonetheless; in pre-Revolutionary France, one recalls, the average peasant family spent between one half and two-thirds of its total income on bread. One recalls as well the powerful and complex phrase “to break bread with,” which intimates simple communalism but carries just the historical force of a blood oath, an extension of the kinship bond to a visitor.

Around here, the bread prohibitions are considerable -- but then, France is a bread culture pure and simple. In other places, the social fact congeals in whatever form of basic food survival predominates, hence the ladenness of, say, pasta culture in Italy. In Paris, bread is king; the bakers’ syndicat has a grand building on the same lovely and exclusive river island that has been home to Japanese princes, Charles Baudelaire, and Brian Ferry.

The most authoritative convention is the price, fixed by the government (just as the state sets the cost of tortillas in Mexico): 80 centimes for a baguette, a bargain even with the Euro running at over $1.20 (one loses it back on the billiards: two Euro for a game in a bar). The social rules are by definition more subtle, if no less prevalent. For example, it’s considered rather rude to eat one’s bread (and, by extension, food in general) while on the street; the partial exception extended to laborers on break. And even workers are allowed this only so far as they are evidently in the midst of working; one doesn’t see a laborer munching a ficelle on the way home.

So though one sees many people carrying bread down the street, if they’re eating it as they go, they’re probably foreigners -- or perhaps latter-day bohemians who’ve opted to thumb their noses at social graces. What one doesn’t see is people carrying their baguettes home on the metro: a parallel regulation.

These are matters of etiquette, but what are they for? Like most matters of etiquette, they exist (as noted above) to display and regulate the borders of social class; those who do not eat bread in public are precisely those who are enfranchised. The exceptions, as usual, indicate exactly the quality of the prohibition. The working classes, like children, are forgiven impoliteness as part of the social contract disenfranchising them; bohemians, one is supposed to imagine, have voided the social contract by choice (though how to tell the bohemian from the vagabond?)

In return, this set of social relations assures the survival and presence of a multitude of local bakeries (and, in general, local aggregations of such small merchants); it’s very hard to walk four blocks without seeing one, even on chic or busy throughfares. In short, the bread prohibitions are arranged in every regard to celebrate, circumscribe, and buttress the petit bourgeoisie; no wonder the phrase, even in English, is French. By the way, one can’t spell “disenfranchise” without “France."

Dude, I am just so psyched ...

...about this whole bringing democracy to the world thing. It's really working out.

Meanwhile, on the home front, here's a fun game: without referring to American Heritage, Google, or Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, write down your own definition of "martial law."

Are we there yet? Award yourself a score based on the published "security precautions" for the Republican National Convention, and the provisions of the Patriot Act.

Now practice handcuffing yourself and assuming the "compliance position." You'll know it when you feel like you are about to give the State head.

Who are you negotiating with?/We be clubbin'

“Any dialogue betweeen matraqueurs and matraqués is impossible.” .... The relation between beaters and beaten is an antidialectic of absolute difference and total opposition--a relationship of “pure violence,” not unlike the one Frantz Fanon theorized between his paradigmatic figures of “colonizer” and “colonized” in Les damnés de la terre. The matraque, a short, generally balanced weapon used for bludgeoning, made of a wooden stick, thicker and heavier at one end and and covered with hardened rubber...frequently serves an almost pedagogical role of “awakening” or revelation..... “I saw street battles up close, I saw cops break peoples’ heads open. When you see cops charge, it marks you for the rest of your life.”

"The verb “matraquer” that appears so frequently in the literature of May-June takes on a figurative meaning for the first time only after ’68. It is only then that the French begin to speak, for example, of the matraquage of televisual images, or of other sensory experience of incessant repetition: no longer literal blows raining down, but the repeated staccato of advertising jingles, the refrains of popular music. After ’68, the word is most often used in the context of certain kinds of media or advertising “saturation” campaigns, when advertisement slogans decsend like cluster bombing, creating the bland monotony of received ideas or doxa, the whole reiterative logic of the “society of consumption.”.... the word derives originally from the Algerian Arabic, matraq, or “club.” In 1968, the same word contained both the future announced by its figurative sense, which was just appearing, and the materiality of past colonial violence. In the future lay the way in which the values of the dominant ideology (the market, profits, the firm) find their praises sung--or hammered out (matraqué) by the dominant media. But the colonial origins of that long national history and of other bloody confrontations in the not so distant past...."

-- Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives

Something in the water

When one considers the recent members of the Iraqi police force, several of whom have been, of late, kidnapped, branded with an X on their backs, and set free, does one not hear the phrase Vichy Iraqi echoing in the back of one's mind? Does this require require an oceanic mistrust of the American Imperium, or just a dram of negative capability?

"I understand guns in the A & R office"

France speaks to me, it says lunch is a good time to start drinking, it says no, really, 400 dollar shoes, but mostly it says don't go home until they promise to stop having jackass reunion tours. Listen, I love you because you are reading my blog, but if you went to the Pixies this year, you are the enemy. You are part of the chain of proof which eventually secures the advance funding to lure bands back out on the road for abassinations so horriff' that the devil figures he can take a day off. And Mission of Burma was every bit the awful idea, don't kid yourself just because you can't spot the major-label money. Ben says his worst concern is "if the Minutemen return, with Jack Black as D. Boon," which you'll admit could have you buying Kashmiri grenades. Me, I live in fear of some utterly tragic Clash reunion, some in memoriam tour couched as a benefit for Joe Strummer's favorite anarchist charity, with the Mescaleros opening and then a set with Mick and Shane MacGowan, playing also a couple Big Audio Dynamite songs and climaxing with "Trash City," "Should I Stay Or Should I Go," walk off stage, walk back out for a bring-the-mouse-down arrangement of "London's Burning" as a dirge with solo accordion before an exultantly optimistic "Clampdown." This one's for the children! If this happens I am telling you right now, I don't care about how its phrased, how persuasive the press release, how noble the charity, that I will throw bricks through the window of a record company, music magazine or other such target every night there is a show, with a little note that sez "oh mi corazon."

More Assignats

“What I sent are a reflection of a continuum of desires I carry around all the time, (as well as mental actions). They might seem primitive:

1. decompressing after a shitty day at work
2. simultaneously shutting out the bad thoughts and letting through the good
3. remembering passing someone hot on the street
4. reading an ekphrastic passage that will be interfaced on your brain for the rest of your life (Proust is hot, too)
5. listening to music that makes you anticipate every next moment even if you know you will simply be sitting on a train for the next ten”
-- M. Dalton

“I used to feel that way for music--like flirting, like eyes across a bar. O, like sex. Now I think they are masks and these ten are fun for me because they are not where I am now (an all-night robot-boy, gloom-goddess, zippety-do-dah type, a suicidal, homicidal, an obsessive, a beggar--a pretty average grouping I’d say for a suburban mother of two/PhD student). --Sort of me in lyrical relief-- you can find me in between these 10 fingers with a knife.”
-- K. Kaschock

“Or all this is to say that I noticed that the key word in three of the nine songs that I‚d snippeted had the word “c’mon” as integral to their affect: the musical shorthand for a becoming-collective.”
-- "gseigwor"

“...a view of the type of confident coolness I've always wanted and have always been SO not.”
-- C. Bull

“There is a good balance of lines I can personally relate to & lines I like for their instruction. There is possibility in most of them, & an eager embrace of the unknown. I find myself less interested in lyrics that retell past events, or a specific course of action. The lines I singled out are more invested in exploring the unknown events of the future. Most of the songs I picked are I-don’t-know-where-I’m-going-but-I’m going songs. This type of song can be found in every form & style of music. And it can take a wide array of stances: defiance, fear, excitement, apprehension, stagnation. Feelings that I have been sitting with for over a decade. These are songs of metamorphosis, certain of only their uncertainty.”
-- C. Meng

“The lyric I identify with least is the most specific: “So we rode to the club, to see if we could get it on, even if we don’t know how we're gonna make it home.” But this precisely describes a situation that many people I have known have been in (none of the other lyrics give themselves a chance to form such a concrete attachment). It’s no coincidence that the rapper here is (or rather, was) the closest to me geographically. The thought comes to mind that it represents a life I decided not to lead: a concrete world I gave up for the abstractions of the academy. “Gave up” possibly overestimates the choice I had in the matter. The point is that this is the sort of life that many kids I went to school with are leading. The full lyrics to this song make the connections of this with race and class and gender clear -- it blasts the “white collar criminals,” with the (female) rapper spitting the word “white.” You could say my championing of this song has something to do with liberal guilt. But nothing in the world makes me so proud to be not white. So let’s call it liberal glee.”
-- B. Luen

“Can’t find any connection to my life without a stretch, but then again, has there to be any just because we chose the songs? Writing down the passages I absentmindedly sing along has actually imbued meaning into them, much to my grief...”
-- M. Roddier

Some Assignats (more coming)

“...what I take to be the recreational consumption of consciousness-restructuring invisible culture product is in fact a feedback loop informing me of the affect I am choosing to insulate at a given moment. Y'know, like dreaming.”
-- J. Davis

“...As for the grown-up songs, dusty & old, I tried looking for a thread & there is one, rather tenuous, but it's about competing desires: change vs. stasis.”
-- K. Hanlon

"I see tangled body politic, being in love with God and struggling to love everyone else in between, with a special disgust on reserve for others. That nutshell fits pretty snug."
-- J. Hopper

“...the words I wrote down didn't tell me about my life precisely because the act of interpretation you requested would have required a more detailed patterning as its basis. The words I had just didn't take me far enough.

"OK. That's my serious answer. But then, I'm not always so serious; that's one thing my songs (as opposed to words) told me. So here's a more flippant answer: "The words told me I'm sentimental, pessimistic, wish I could believe in all that is good"--things I already knew.

"And here's a more literal answer: "That I'm beautiful, believe in fairy tales, say yes yes yes to love, am just a speck of desire"--one lie after the next.”
-- B. Friedlander

“An outside reader would probably think I sit at the window, wringing my hands as I wait for my man to return from sea or something. I don't, of course. But, uh, metaphorically at least, I probably do more often that I care to admit lately.”
-- J. Draper