jane dark's sugarhigh!

Since You Asked

1) Total number of books I've owned
This is tricky. Do you own them if you stole them? Do you own them if you gave them away or left them somewhere as soon as you finished them? What if both stolen and given away later? Do poetry chapbooks count? If yes to everything, I’m going to guess about four thousand.

2) The last book I bought
Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara by Joe LeSueur, which I was surprised to find in the little EngLang bookstore down the street. I went in looking for The Art of War by Sun Tzu (now the owner tells me I should have looked in “Religion” — umm?)

3) The last book I read
Okay, Karl Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me (in no particular order)
Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
A Wave, John Ashbery
Farewell To An Idea, T.J. Clark
Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz
In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, Guy Debord

5) Total volume of music files on my computer
I have three computers, but there’s a lot of overlap. Maybe eight or nine gigs. I trash files about as fast as I add them, and I almost never move anything from a CD to my computer if it has more than one good song, which is laziness disguised as “policy.”

6) Last CD I bought
Like Caramanica says: “Bought”? I doubt I’ve paid actual cash for a disc more than ten times this millennium. Anyway, for sure it was that Chamillionaire triple-disc I got in Austin last fall; Joe Gross took me shopping.

7) Album playing right now
The recent album by Camille (no relation to Chamillionaire, as far as I know) that my friend Mireille (who is in fact Kamillionaire's niece) burned for me; I don't know its name.

8) Five songs/albums I listen to a lot these days
Still listening to Ciara’s album; Arular; and the new Nikka Costa, cantneverdidnothin or something. A song called “Vivons pour demain” by one Leslie. And, uh, “City of Blinding Lights,” by U2, about which I actually do feel embarrassed.

[typos corrected 8/2/05, in wake of Brother-Jones]

The Case

Although if allowed I would watch them until my retinae melted, most music videos aren't very "good." When they are "good," it's usually because a) it captures the song's affect well, or b) the performer is trés charismatic, or c) lots of hot people, or d) the video's visually arresting, or e) hip-hop dancing and choreography is my jam. Sometimes these reasons overlap, especially b and c, or c and e.

It's quite rare that a video will actually show me how to hear the song better; the only superb case I can think of until now is Michel Gondry's clip for Kylie's "Come Into My World," which is not only a casually staggering bit of temporal mind-fucking, but an irreducibly elegant explication of the aesthetic philocophy behind the pop song, particularly the multi-tracked vocal that has so thoroughly shaped modern singles.

Dave Meyers' clip for Missy's "Lose Control" isn't quite that insightful (in part for being less casual; Meyers' lighting is always so portentous. Dude, we all like Mark Pellington-Romanek, get over it), but it's pretty fucking great. I haven't had much use for the arbitrary surrealism of Meyers' previous work with Missy, often because, aside from a vague parallel to Missy's presumed "weirdness," the clips didn't seem to have interesting relations with the music (look: bees! look: a dancing child!). But this one, co-directed with Missy, makes the song about a dozen times more interesting (and it wasn't dull to start with).

The main thing that holds the clip together is Step dancing, of the sort practiced competitively in African-American frats and sororities — though each section of the video varies the style, and the clothing that goes with it, from the highly gestural moves of the behoodied and begloved contempories, to the quite astonishingly-costumed passage with Ciara et al done up in clothes pointedly alluding to the plantation era: singers in ruffled gowns, dancers shirtless in suspenders and long shorts. That is, the ladies are dressed as mistresses of the manor, the guys as field workers — even though everyone seems to be a person of color. Slave color, that is. This alone is absolutely compelling, the idea that such a narrative could be retold not as a race but as a gender drama, or as a voice/body drama.

But it's only one section, and there are several. They exist at a fascinating balance of likeness (the general dance style, the nature of the cast, the velocity) and difference (the costumes, the specific dance styles and casts, the film stocks and lighting). And fairly swiftly one notices how many different parts the song has. Many many parts. This is one complicated song, and the complications pile on each other at breakneck pace without ever going muddy, without even seeming all that boggling.

It's not like a prog song, Bohemian Karnevil, with grinding time-signature changes and total stylistic shifts: it's a singular track, a hip-hop song with a fixed tempo. Can she work it? She can Kraftwerk it! But the Cybotron lick isn't as steady as I thought it was when I heard it on the radio; it comes and goes, rapping turns to singing and back with implausible frequency, the melody shifts, sounds drop in and out. I don't recall so many hooks in one song since "Semi-Charmed Life."

If this song is about anything, it's about the dramatic tension between hip-hop and r&b, which is one of the things Missy has been about since she couldn't stand the rain. But it's not just "you can't tell if I'm a rapper or a singer"; Missy's 37 chambers past that. This is a constructivist tower of half the possible things you can do with those categories, no one gesture lingered over, each humming with the conflicting desires to be like and be different, to join or to go flying off.

Missy's drama, which is the drama of the generic in urban pop (and perhaps the drama of identity itself, what the hell), and the tensions it produces, and the historical imagination that gives the drama much of its charge, has never been brought into such expressive clarity as in this video. In the relations it maintains between is shifts, oscillations, divergences, it's a clip about what makes Missy's musical vision so singular and astonishing; a clip, ironically, about why the categories of genre are so undecideable, so that everyone has to puzzle over which VMA it should be nominated for.

That is to say, Missy (and this is what Meyers helps catch) is a truly dialectical artist: songs like this defy the fixing-in-place of songs like this. The very art she makes destabilizes the field it arrives into, and that instability becomes the topic without ever abandong the dance beat. It's never just a position piece, nor is it a position; one result is that institutions committed to fixing things in their correct positions can only look foolish. Best Rap video, best Hip-Hop video, best Dance video, best R&B video? Whatever, dude, good luck.

Princeton Economist/Times Columnist Makes (Not So) Tacit Case For Socialism

...The French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out.

Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. In America, that figure is less than four....

I wish, however, that Doc Krugman had lingered over this passage in the column: I've been looking at a new study of international differences in working hours by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, at Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, at Dartmouth. The study's main point is that differences in government regulations, rather than culture (or taxes), explain why Europeans work less than Americans.

Well, sure. But what's the history of how those government regulations came about? Did they produce these desirable conditions of education and health care, and the accompanying decreases in competition, anxiety, threat — or were they produced by such desires? Structural reciprocality makes this difficult to discern, but at a minimum, might it be fair to suggest that certain forms of government are more amenable to such desires?

Or, to put it another way, could a nation choose such governmental regulations if they were never actually on offer? Or is that what the word "revolution" means?

It's Funnier When He Says It

“I don’t think Osama bin Laden sent those planes in to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of for our support for Israel and our ties with the Saudi family and all our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that’s what he fucking said.”

Slate Supports Your Right To Free File-Sharing!

I'm charmed by this pro-payola article in Slate. To save you the elephantine prose slog, here is the brief version: dude, we all know this is capitalism and we're cool with it. Here's a sweet nothing, sweetened with analogy:

It's a truth universally acknowledged that manufacturers of everything from soap to computers pay the folks who control crucial distribution channels to display their wares prominently. It's legal, and no one minds....come on: Barnes & Noble is a retail operation, not a progressive book-lovers' cooperative.

This is charming in part because it's always charming to watch someone explain that hegemony is cool because it's, uh, hegemony [for those somewhat puzzled by accounts of cultural hegemony elsewhere, particularly regarding its leading theorist Antonio Gramsci, here's how the cheerfully desciptive, Bob Marley-quoting wikipedia entry defines it]. In Slate's "argument," the domination of the heavily-funded over the less-so is simply the way it is and everyone knows it. Moreover we assent to it, apparently by the simple act of getting out of bed within its logic. There may have been a time in the past where we understood the state as something other than a series of predations weighted by wealth, but come on, fellas, let's not be naive, etc etc.

What is additionally charming is the author's courage in calling for a truly free market; perhaps he will spend the rest of his day explaining to the Senate that, because it's founded on a many-hundred page regulating document, the North American Free Trade Agreement (brought to you by a Democratic President; perhaps this will help in the understanding of hegemony) isn't truly free? Ditto CAFTA, passed just this week. And GATT, and the FTAA, and the WTO regulations. I feel this fact is underexplained.

Now it's possible that the author intends, like the Senate, to clarify that freedom's just another word for pro-corporate regulations imposed by force. That would be charming of itself. But let's assume the he actually believes what the essay says: that even within capitalism, freedom is freedom for everyone to go for theirs; that there should be no legal barriers impeding the travels in the life of the commodity, from its birth in labor to its death in your attic; and that such things were an artifact of a bygone era when the principles of capitalism were still shrouded in mystery.

Now that we can all honestly act like we know, let's go. For this belief perfectly is inconsistent with, for example, any limits on copying, sharing, and downloading music; Gross, in fact, offers a clear articulation [Mac users click here] of your right [PC users click here] to give and take anything you'd like [for BitTorrent click here; it's tremendous] without threat of legal consequence. You see what I mean about "charming"? Ah, freedom! Dude. Sweet. And when the RIAA and Justice Department come to your door, you can just give'em the hegemonic wink: Come on, fellas, let's not be naive, etc etc.

What Is To Be Done

New Name for 'War on Terror' Reflects Wider U.S. Campaign

Let's take this slow. Here's a good paragraph:

In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation's senior military officer have spoken of "a global struggle against violent extremism" rather than "the global war on terror," which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.

Now at some level you have to admit it's superb that the Government concedes, openly and without averral, that the purpose of language is to make its citizens think certain things, rather than to express actual conditions or any such nonsense. Finally the postmodernists and politicians are on the same page. Didn't someone already say we live in the era of symbol management? What we have achieved, after prolonged effort, is the monotone of such management. There was once the domination of appearance, and the simultaneous dissimulation of that domination — the promise that we were being shown things as they are. It formed a sort of vacant harmony, now derelict. We have arrived in the age of la la la.

The shifting language is one of the most public changes in the administration's strategy to battle Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and it tracks closely with Mr. Bush's recent speeches emphasizing freedom, democracy and the worldwide clash of ideas.

One might guffawingly note that this is a lame way to prosecute said goal or, more nuancedly, point out that this "shifting language," this image-manipulation, has a more nefarious goal than "to battle Al Quaeda and its affiliates"; it's relevant intention is to divert the glance of citizens to whom it is directed away from the current losing war in Iraq toward other matters.

But it is not finally sufficient to critique this sham, to speak of this particular phrase. It is the mode of language that must be refused. This is what George Lakoff has exactly wrong, and anyone else who believes that their side just needs to spin better. I think the Government is making this quite easy for us to understand: there will be no more debate here over whether or not to spin, to frame, to manage. No one will be expected to make an account, only to persuade.

"Seeing through" this one image is an irrelevance, ifs one agrees to the quest for a competing one, a marketable image that will win more people to your side. The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image, said a fellow once upon a time. This has been difficult to understand, certainly for me. But certain implications are clear: that if one pursues a strategy of images, for example, one has committed to a politics in which capital itself remains the unchallenged power. Those who fantasize about better and worse symbol management are simply teams of gravediggers in slightly distinguishable uniforms, with a vaguely different sense of for whom they are digging, and when the job is to be finished.

To rephrase this issue for those who prefer Gandhi and King to French theory: if one believes the pacifist creed that a violent regime will be the inevitable result of a violent revolution — that truth will out, that the strategies of achieving change will condition the shape of the changed world — one must believe equally that any new government achieved by spin will be a regime in which spin still reigns, in which the basic goal of communication is to cause people to believe things that serve particular interests. There is no freedom, no autonomy, and no broad community in that direction.

Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview that if the nation's efforts were limited to "protecting the homeland and attacking and disrupting terrorist networks, you're on a treadmill that is likely to get faster and faster with time." The key to "ultimately winning the war," he said, "is addressing the ideological part of the war that deals with how the terrorists recruit and indoctrinate new terrorists."

This, the last paragraph and particularly its last sentence, is odd in a dozen ways. As an immediate claim, it's non-sensical, since there are in fact material causes for how new warriors are recruited. For example, a non-ideological removal of all military from the Middle East and an end of US support to Israel in the UN would, I suspect, bring a fairly swift end to terrorist recruiting. But no, it must be a battle only of our indoctrination against theirs. Events and actions literally cannot be thought — and that is the very purpose of spin, of symbol management. Doug Feith and George Lakoff finally share the same faith and purpose: to admit only the play of ideology. Material history itself is what must not be thought. Which is to say, not framing itself but a belief in framing is the most purely ideological belief imaginable.

But it is neither the ideology not material history of "the terrorists" that is at stake here; even Feith couldn't believe that the new language will have any persuasive force over the jihadists. It is, as the rest of the article concedes, a charm offensive directed at the American public. We are the ideological subjects here, and what's at stake is the general contract confirming that symbol management is the only game in town, to be played without hesitation or shame — a contented agreement about how humans should relate to each other.

This is what Debord spoke of: not music videos, advertisements, or Potemkin D-Days. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. When one agrees that this is the right, no, the only relation among people, that one should play along and get what one can, that what matters is who controls it...then one digs one's own grave, presumably after digging several others.

Shadow Play

The iconic, threatening figure of the recent, crucial, and bitter election in France — concerning signing on to an EU constitution — was "the Polish plumber," who would hypothetically storm the Champs Elysees to take away French jobs. And of course, this figure recurs from country to country, not just drawn in but drawn into being by hysteria around heavily nationalistic issues: the Turkish guestworker, the Korean bodega owner, and on and on. The person from somewhere else whose mere presence here will result in a kind of destruction, whose existence will somehow negate my existence.

In what relation to this idea stands the Brazilian electrician?

Zzzzzz

The distinction between analog and digital is between wave and particle, or perhaps that’s flippant. It is, as I had photographers explain to me back in the early digicam era, the difference between a continuous spectrum and a series of discrete steps -- slices -- of a spectrum, cut so fine as to (ideally) disguise the material discontinuity of points, much as 24fps seems like continuous motion. This remains true for sound as well as image.

I am reading a book that happens almost entirely at night, in which no one seems to sleep, and Paris is reduced to a cast of about fifteen people and eight places. Insomnia, of which Levinas is the most eloquent theorist (or maybe it's the astonishing Eighties comic Mr. X), is so compelling because sleep itself is so strange. It interrupts the fundamental continuity that defines a sensual experience of consciousness. This is why so much thinking has gone into the very odd conception that sleep is continuous with consciousness: to repress the irreducible strangeness of sleep.

Benjamin’s boredom as an “index to participation in the sleep of the collective.”

Note To Self: Hang Out In Virginia

In January The Roanoke Times fingered Mr. Baron Cohen as the "Middle Eastern man in an American-flag shirt and a cowboy hat" who had angered the crowd at a rodeo in Salem, Va., by mangling the national anthem ("and your home in the grave!") and calling on President Bush to "drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq."

Stencil Artists & Bloggers: 3 Requests

Rather amazing that this entire article never mentions that you might decline to be searched, per the Constitution, which may not be suspended even in a state of emergency (for a musical refresher course, please download this song and revisit the second verse. There's also the ACLU, the Jay-Z of civil rights organizations).

THREE REQUESTS

1) If you are a stencil artist, would you be willing to design a simple and clear stencil reading I DO NOT CONSENT TO A SEARCH, of a size to fit on the front or back of a t-shirt? (It would be swell if it said in small lettering underneath, per the fourth amendment to the constitution, but this isn't requisite)

2) And would you be willing to send a copy of that stencil to anyone who requests it, in return for mailing and material costs? (If a t-shirt wearer would like a copy of the stencil and cannot afford one, sugarhigh! will help).

3) If you are a blogger, would you be willing to post addresses of stencil artists (and images of their stencils) to help t-shirt wearers and stencil artists hook up?

Please email me at the address somewhere to your right >>>

Thanks,

Jane

And then, at 1:12 a.m.,

...while working on a long post regarding other matters (tomorrow? The next day?), I looked up to MCM to realize they were playing the video for Prince's "Girls and Boys." Who knew there was a video? There is nobody like him and never has been. He does fine with Ashbery, Dylan, Dickinson, Manet. The compulsion to watch him is so powerful it makes him almost unwatchable.

The Names of Things

Does anybody think that Chevron's late offer (one they seemed unable to make two weeks ago) might be bolstered by certain commitments from the US Government (which did, after all, name its forward camps during the now-happily-concluded major combat in Iraq "Shell" and "Texaco")?

When the government arranges to make sure that corporations stay within the economic logic of its nation-state, rather than allowing the free market to work freely, this is a step toward nationalizing industry. Oh Chavez, oh Lula, oh yeay! We are almost a socialist nation! Already!

P.S., Movie Critics:

Did any of you successfully title your Charlie & The Chocolate Factory review "I, Candy"?

Depp. A Coat.

Every now and then, just to keep my game up, I like to take issue with the eminently reasonable and dulcet tones of the multi-talented Sasha Frere-Jones, who writes about a current film, "Does anyobody think it's notable that Tim Burton made a whole movie about how Michael Jackson hates his Dad?"

I don't read much, but I believe this is noted almost universally: The New York Times, Slate, Salon, and et cetera...though the general move seems to be to find this so obvious that one must find some more-subtle-yet-more-apt reference (Phil Spector! Truman Capote!).

The problem is: not at all interesting. The Michael Jackson thing is part of a larger Relevance vibe that is yawningly dull (the Oompa-Loompas are cheap third world labor!); the Elfmanica is embarassing ("Check this out! I can set these songs to — Different. Styles. Of. Pop!"); and the psychological determinism proves once and for all that, well, psychological determism is what makes life boring. My dad was a mean dentist and so I must make candy, kaboom.

The only thing worth liking conceptually (there are a couple diggable visuals) is how the order and method of the ticket-finders (Augustus pigging out, Veruca's father's factory, Violet's eyes-on-the-prize mania, Mike's mediatized algorithm) goes all ontogeny-replicates-phylogeny, laying out the myth history of Western economic ascent: European individual greed, British industrialization, American can-do spirit, inhuman (yet still American) technologics. What country, by the way, is Charlie from?

Lastly (and here I think Sasha and I are in some agreeance), how many times will poor Johnny Depp, who surely must have better things to do, have to stand in for Tim Burton in the man-child who, abandoned by horror-movie dad, must thence reintegrete himself with a new family storyline? Aren't they freaking shooting Pirates II yet? 42 Jump Street?

News Can Use You

I was sitting at the big table working on the poem; I had the television on to MCM, the local music video channel, which I rarely look up at. It happens at the edge of awareness. Some song came on with a lightly Arabic string loop; someone started to rhyme in French, and I kept working on my own French song. At some point I realized that I may actually have liked the track, and looked up to check on it; a French-African face, not Solaar. He half-whispered “insh’Allah” and the clip was suddenly over, no tag. Now 10 days after the London bombings, one day after talking to Mike about current French hip-hop, the oddity of all these happening now, at the periphery of the zone, as where it is hard to decipher the city from the suburbs, where data shifts through the space of flows. The jetsam that accrues in the whorls and eddies, and the whorls and eddies themselves, and the spinning force beneath them. All these, the objects and the motions, the almostness of comprehension, as being consciousness. About things taking place “behind the back of consciousness,” I don’t know.

Make Way For The...

Now me, I love Lady Sov (roughly) as much as the next blogger. And I don't think it matters a whit whether she's staying true to grime or not. Still, it must surely give the yips to everyone steady next-big-thing-ing that each song made available to us is a bit less raucously spastically frenetically elastically great than the previous. And that, moreover, for all the righteous she's-a-commercial-ho (and I'm not!), Ess-Oh's diss of Jentina really isn't quite as sinuously grooving as the very song it endeavours to savage. As Alanis U.K. said, Ironic, innit?

The Future of Poetry, etc

Given that I generally expect to like about one in every twenty poets, The Hat is improbably pleasing (though I also understand how this inflated pleasure rate is to a certain extent perfectly probable; I am interested in The Hat exactly because it’s interested in a number of poets I already know I like — Ange, Sasha, Garrett, Michael, Franklin, Liz, to name only some examples — and this means both that there is already a shared taste and that there’s a guaranteed core of poems I’m likely to enjoy).

Perhaps this explains why I am surprised to be surprised by all that God. But you have to talk about something, and Christianity’s always handy 'round here. I have some interest in understanding this little efflorescence not in Jordan’s terms, as inarguable as they are ahistorical, but as perhaps somehow related to the recent shifts in the field of critical philosophy toward more overtly Christian terms: Agamben’s Paulism, the always-already Christic Virilio’s newfound virulence, Zizek’s political theology. This motion, not easily isolable from recent philosophy’s “ontological turn,” might be understood as a way to readdress ethics while eschewing Bad Enlightenment. The discussion might be seen as including Steve Evans’ notes on convenient apocalypticism, and Chris Nealon’s “camp messianism.” Somehow, I am trying to say, amidst this constellation, it is becoming apparent that poetry, like some other forms of critical thinking, is finding an increasing value in the deployment of concepts and categories based in modern Christianity. I am not so bold as to claim to have an explanatory account of all this, though I do sometimes get the sense that one is saying given that I take the thinking of ethics to be more necessary of late, and gievn that at this late date ethics seems a trifle silly, let’s just go whole hog toward the transcendental.

Meanwhile, on an unrelated* note: in twenty years we’ll see the first anthology of SSRI verse. The first section will be called “Fuck the Talking Cure” and will chronicle the late confessional mode; the second, titled “The Displaced Of Cipramil,” will feature poems that actually thematize the consumption of said medications; and the last, “Proze Poems,” will gather poems that in their forms express the structures of consciousness particular to the anti-depressed. I believe this will happen. I do not know if the anthology will mean to register the history, or critique it, but should like to imagine it will depend on the poems themselves.

* I am always "joking" when I say this.

Paperback Nouvel

"City of a thousand spectacles that turn out to be one spectacle multiplied a thousand times, that of the Modern strippping off over and over again the rags of God."

217. Letters Are Commonplace

Letters are commonplace enough, yet what splendid things they are! When someone is in a distant province and one is worried about him, and then a letter suddenly arrives, one feels as though one were seeing him face to face. Again, it is a great comfort to have expressed one's feelings in a letter even though one knows it cannot yet have arrived. If letters did not exist, what dark depressions would come over one! When one has been worrying about something and wants to tell a certain person about it, what a relief it is to put it all down in a letter! Still greater is one's joy when a reply arrives. At that moment a letter really seems like an elixir of life.

— Sei Shonagon

Poetry Blogs: Helping Poets Google Themselves For Over 30 Months

It's hard to engage his Henry Gould's political thought, as it's hard for me to engage the political thinking of anyone who seems to think that "1989" changed the fundamental conditions described by many, including Karl Marx and Adam Smith (what a relief, to have a pseudo-official Event® which lets one off the hook of thinking the basic relations between people who own shit and people who don't own shit but their labor. As the Retort collective said about the images of 9/11, How much of the real dynamic (and pathology) of American power is conjured away by pinning it thus to a single image-event -- in much the same way that American victory in the Cold War was rendered in retrospect magical, unanalyzable, by the mantra "Fall of the Wall?")

But one of the wonders of "art" or something, is that such differences don't demolish the possibility of engagement otherwise. This is a long way of saying that, finallly (I need tranquility for reading more than writing), I have had a chance to sit down with The Hat, authors A-M, and I like Henry's poem, the third part of Dove Street. For every Leonardo there's an ocarina, and there's something salutary about taking the shape I associate, for the last decade, with Alice Notley's "White Phosphorus" and Descent of Alette (Lisa Lubash takes up a version of this as well, though Dickinson'd a bit) and leaning it back toward a romantic interior.

The poem features a cameo by Mary; Christian ghosts flit in and out of Hat poems far more frequently than I might expect, including the repeated apparitions of Jesus, God, "virgin blue," tabernacles, devils and angels and etc in the poems of Tanya Larkin -- poems I love, though my sense is that the Christic array is the least of it, setting conceptual horizons on a verbal imagination that might otherwise tango off into even thrillinger distances. I shall also admit, since no one else has, that I find "Pet Names," by Mary Donnelly, finely adorable, couplets three and nine especially. But of course, nothing is happier-making than Ange Mlinko, line by line and poem by poem and then just casually planting a panache and an earache in tandem as if they rhymed, which they do, just as in the following couplet, it turns out that life rhymes with French. Which it does! Chapeau!

Another American Genius

From this dispatch by David Plotz, in Slate (links courtesy of sugarhigh):

I will be curious to see how Britain reacts to Islamic terrorism here. Britons have been relatively welcoming to Asian immigrants—the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi communities here are huge and old—but if the attacks turn out to be homegrown, there may be a backlash. This is a much more Islamic nation than the United States. Many British Muslims here belong to distinct, unassimilated communities. As an American, I find aspects of that unsettling: There are lots of women clad in burqas and lots of men with long beards and skullcaps. (I don't think I have ever seen men outfitted like that in the United States—I suspect the post-9/11 American suspicion—who's that jihadist and what's he doing at my shopping mall?—discourages even devout American Muslims from adopting such a look.)

Look Away

The jetsam of recent news drawn into the whirlpool of this picture, into the vortex of exactly what isn't here, threatens vertigo: how can we think this, how think, when there's a hole in the center, a white slit mask, horror's mirror image of a grin without a cat?

Terrorist Spice

I find music mystifying. I don’t mean this in the sense of, Why is Luke Haines so genius and awful alternately, or How did Prince misunderstand hip-hop so badly at the crucial moment? It’s more like one day I am riding my bike through the nature preserve listening to “Pull Up The People” so loud it fills my skull like helium and then it is inflating my head even further so a lot of the sky seems to be inside of it, and the birds and the passing cars (it’s not a very rigorous nature preserve, okay?) seem to be inside of it, and I am mystified, or maybe it’s just befuddled. I am befuddled that I could have a job, that I could “go to the office” and follow all sorts of rules and be pleasant to people I find loathsome or dull or both -- that I don’t just chuck it and wander around, reading and listening to music loud and working only when I can’t borrow any more money from friends, and quitting as soon as I’ve paid back my debts and filed a month’s rent. Though of course I remember living like that and it was awful, but mostly because it was lonely. And I can’t tell if I could or could not go back to this tomorrow, whether the heart is atavistic above all things or if I am more like the Wild Child of Aveyron; and then I can’t believe that this uncertainty has any stopping power whatsoever, much less enough force to keep me going in to the office and everything this entails, up to an including mostly not being in the midst of riding a bike around listening to M.I.A. on blast. I don’t want to make music any more than I want to make life. I want to be music.

[see beginning of post above]

Reading the journalistic and epi-journalistic dust that’s gathered around M.I.A. in the last year, from the fascinating review’n’correction in the Village Voice (starring no less than Simon Reynolds and Bob Christgau), down to the infinite thread at ILM, I’ve come to suspect that one good measure of a really interesting artist is if she can make smart folks, well, stupid. Take, for example, Jon Caramanica, who is such a smart cookie he could be a cake. At Slate, he felt compelled to point out that if you separate Maya’s lyrics from the music, they’re not that trenchant. The oddity of this claim is that it is true of every musician in history. If the words do all the meaning-work independently, you got yourself a speechwriter. Or, worse, a poet.

But such odd analyses aren’t at the heart of the matter. The heart isn’t so much the clarity of M.I.A.’s politics, but her right to politics as such. On ILM, the discussion about what Maya’s politics might be, whether she has a right to them, whether she has a right to represent them as she does, and how exactly this representation works or doesn’t, led to an intertwined debate about doings in Sri Lanka, the nature of the civil war, who was good and bad, and whether the Tamil Tigers/LTTE were rightly “terrorists” or “freedom fighters” (generally, these were presented as mutually exclusive choices, which seems to ignore a lot of history. Or maybe it’s just absurd. This cannot be debated as if it were an empirical question -- as if, if we somehow just had all the facts and weren’t taken in by cunning spin control, we could objectively identify who was a freedom fighter, who a terrorist. Dude, comma, if they're fighting for your freedom, they're freedom fighters. If they're terrorizing you, etc.... This logical oddity is mirrored by a discussion on the same thread about whether “Galang” had a more “harsh” and/or “raw” sound than popular songs X and Y, as if these qualities were descriptions of factual conditions, and could be agreed on by every person from every place in every era).

This sequence was mirrored in the Village Voice dialectic, where Simon decided he would talk mostly about the sound’s social formations (and perhaps get at politics that way), and then Bob chimed in with a heaping helping of due diligence about the history of the Sri Lankan struggles in relation to the sayings of M.I.A. (in lyrics and interviews). I loved both these pieces, though I wish Bob had mentioned Ceylon’s deep history in relation to the West: for example, how the United Provinces’ empire (in the form of the Dutch East India Trading Company; ah, the irony, Gerard!) that dominated the Indian Ocean rim in the 17th century designated Ceylon as the official cinnamon island and, to preserve its monopoly, obliterated various other locations where cinnamon might be grown (such as Cochin, India: occupied for no other reason). Ceylon was Ceylon, owned and operated by white Europeans and known around the globe, because it was a tea and spice island (and, finally, because it had some strategic importance to the Allies in WWII); it became Sri Lanka as part of the decolonizing movements of the last century. In short, for all Xgau’s generosity in inquiring after and rehearsing some useful portion of facts about Sri Lanka’s horrific internal conflict, it really ought to be seen as the latest chapter in a larger narrative.

But that’s for those who actually wish to delve into the political history; not a separate discussion (there are no “separate discussions,” okay?) but one with quite a different weight of interest than weighing responses to Piracy Funds Terrorism and Arular. I have no clear opinion about Tamil Tigers, except to say an explanation of why “suicide bombing” is more inherently terroristic than any other form of bombing must surely lie in the future, since it existeth neither in the past nor the present.

As for artists’ political self-presentation, in most ways, the critiques of M.I.A. are bitterly familiar: political speech is discounted because the artist doesn’t have a right to it, generally because they are not members of the truly afflicted class for whom they claim to speak -- the class, that is, which must rest silent, since if someone achieves access to big media and moreover makes the best of such access, this by definition reveals one as not being a righteous member of the oppressed. If you’re articulate and on Warner Brothers, well, that proves you’re bourgeois and should shut up, please. Did you hear Joe Strummer’s dad was a diplomat?

And yet, the case of M.I.A. is not exactly like every other case. Her rhetoric is intensely similar to a plethora of post-Public Enemy acts; the Nineties and Oughts have been sick with language about refugees, rebellion, dropping bombs, pulling up the people, Hey la la la, Galang-a-lang-a-lang. So why is it so important to delegitimate M.I.A.?

The Fugees, for example, had political lyrics but no political content; by that point, the political charge in hip-hop had come out in the wash; it was just a pose, and we could all love it if we wanted to. The era of panic over dangerous rap guys was over; the ‘toon quality of gangsta and, more significantly, hip-hop’s narrative shift from black/white conflict to intraghetto (“black on black”) violence, laid the political threat of hip-hop lyrics in the ground. It seems absurd now, but once upon a time, RUN-DMC had to be politically delegitimated (because they were too scary; was it “Peter Piper” or “My Adidas”?) -- they came from Hollis, you know. A bourgeois suburb.

What makes M.I.A. especially compelling is the re-establishment of the link between inside and outside: between her musical claims and her potential as a social being. For once, the gutbucket rhetoric of righteous hip-hop violence (which has always had a third-world, post-colonial tradition) might have a real bloodline. Anybody can say “I got the bombs to make you blow, I got the beats to make you bang” (though nobody has, exactly, and it’s freakishly satisfying when she does), but nobody can threaten to mean it. Except her.

That’s not to say that M.I.A. is a freedom fighter, or terrorist, or that her dad is one or both of those things, or that it’s good or bad. It’s that the risk is present; it isn’t just porch-outlaw bullshit. She may not have the clarity of analysis one finds in, say, Rage Against The Machine...but we're let off Rage's hook viz the knowledge they got a million from The Man. Funny how the terms of political legitimacy come back to money over and over, huh? What's your 'hood's median income, c'mon and show me yr advance, why you gotta talk like that when we just want to dance?

To repeat: it's the money trail that giveth rhetoric content, or taketh away. When M.I.A. and Diplo called that mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism, it resonates like that indie lady’s harp. We’re invited to consider, and perhaps laugh at, a slogan of the British copyright-enforcement thugs FACT (by the way, when you see those little ads at the movie theater, wasting your valuable preview time, suggesting that you aren’t supporting the non-celeb laborers and craftspersons if you pirate films, please remember that if you want to support these folks, if you want to be down with common people such as yourselves, defending the corporate right to profit is not even vaguely a useful step. You might consider not crossing any more picket lines, and generally supporting the power of unions everywhere.)

But this very allusion suggests that the pirate in question is you...and then reveals that almost immediately as a confusion. When you listen to PFT, and hear, for example, that Susannah Hoffs’ vocals have been gaffled for an involuntary remix, you realize that the “piracy” in question is M.I.A./Diplo’s; that their piracy funds terrorism -- at least, if we're buying. They are directly threatening you with what might be done with your money, and they know you know the story.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe some slice of the $8.99 I sort-of-paid for Piracy Funds Terrorism went to Tamil Tigers; maybe some of the advance for Arular, a fund into which I indirectly paid; maybe some of that tsunami relief dough...that’s the threat. I dunno if it’s real, but it’s really possible, and that makes all the difference. And so one starts to see why there might be an interest in depoliticizing, delegitimating M.I.A.; because we’re as a public rather ill-equipped to deal with the alternative. Slim Thug or dead prez can say anything they want, and we’ll say they’re so for real because they’re not. And it better have a bumping beat because no one gives a fuck otherwise. Maya, on the other hand, must be discovered again and again to have vague politics exactly because she has politics in the first place; must be found to dissemble about political violence because, despite the t-shirts, the truth about political violence is exactly what music fans and critics wish only to avoid; must be determined to be a poseur, because she might not be.

Brief Proposal (to Improve the City of Paris)

Museum gift shops shall be required to sell small explosive charges.

Spring Follows Autumn and Vice Versa

At one point along the southern edge of the river the Mondial Moquette building, perched on supports above its parking lot, hung out almost over the water, leaving a covered area set along the stone retaining wall that kept the river on course through the city. It was here that the the drunken and exhausted often stayed, the sans-abri and vagabonded, and where any number of sexual trysts, some of which involved other transactions as well, went unrecorded. One day I passed a man seated on the stone ground, shirtless, with a straw hat and a pipe under his moustache, a small gray Olivetti portable, not much more than a rat upon which one could type, on the stones next to him.

What is remarkable to me is that this passage smelled strongly of urine, meaning that time after time, the gentlemen -- one rarely saw a woman down here -- chose to piss against a column rather than into the river. What sort of habit or reverence this might be, I cannot claim to understand.

Music Is the Scandinavian Coastline

Music is the Scandinavian coastline, though it is more precise to say that recorded sound is the Scandinavian coastline, surrounded not by silence but by a sea of static.

It has nothing to do with refined sensibilities. When people tell me that they don’t hear much difference between “CD quality” and MPEG compression, or between 256kbps and default 128, I know by this that they don’t listen very loud. From orbit, in a true school of quietude, the coastline is smooth, forming clean lines and elegantly contained arcs. As one boosts the volume, like cranking a zoom, the edges start to show their cracks and crumblings, fjords and inlets, static crackling into the open spaces.

I’m all for compression, because I’m all for theft. But I’d happily keep 130 stolen songs on my shuffle rather than the promised 240, so I can take the volume to full. Even then it’s not loud enough. It never was.

Brief Music Reviews (from the desk of Wallace Stevens)

"You Got Me," Eskobar feat. Emma Daumas: Keaner sounds.

"The Coffee Exporter"

I am always trying to remember, without ever asking him, which Rimbaud biography was declared defintive by John Tranter several drinks into the one night I met him. Jennifer Moxley, I should say, who so recently mentioned Rimbaud in a context I'm not sure I quite comprehend, was there that night, as was Steve Evans, himself no stranger to insight regarding Rimbaud. As for Tranter, one can be certain his preference wasn't for Graham Robb's, which was not-yet-published and, one trusts, too dully-written to please.

Though Tranter himself passed over it with a single sentence in a different review it must be Enid Starkie's Arthur Rimbaud, esp. since I recall Tranter mumbling something about "still..." or "it remains...." But what to make of Starkie's peculiar (or perhaps not-so-peculiar) panic as she approaches Rimbaud's disputed time in the Paris Commune: the committee was to be a kind of soviet which eventually would become all-powerful in the government of the country, she writes of Central Committee of the Fédérés, after referring to the revolutionary National Guard's supposed endeavor to set up a military dictatorship at the Hotel de Ville.

But of course, such dreams don't walk alone; on the same page, Starkie graciously elides the hordes of disgusted demobilized soldiers, half-starved and ragged, the rogues and adventurers of every nationality who are always able, like carrion crows, to smell out a sick or dying body....They flocked into Paris, Irishmen, Italians, Poles and Arabs, all on the pretext of helping France maintain her liberty, but all adding to the general confusion and to her ultimate suffering and loss.

Starkie's life is published in 1961, near the height of Cold War anxiety; still, it's interesting that the time-traveling fantasy of always-incipient communist despotism must appear as a terror inseparable from a generalized race/class panic -- and that the fascist language of the health of the civic body must haunt such discourse unfailingly. Well, so it goes, so it must; far more than poetries or paintings, eras get the biographies they deserve, even if -- no, wait, exactly because -- they can claim to be about other eras entirely. "The sublime displacements of biography." So what would be the moment in which the great biography of Rimbaud could be written? This is the most practical question. What would it look like, how would it feel?

Generally, the concepts tower and freedom stand in opposition to each other

At what point does the use of the word "impregnable" start to seem like you're just asking for it: the first, fourth, eighth time?

The following three stories go together: the suggestion that the new honcho d'Iran may have been one 1979's hostage-takers; the Gaza settlers' passionate refusal to leave the Strip; and last week's surprising Supreme Court decision (the one that didn't involve file-sharing or Ten Commandments).

The link is most apparent between the latter two, not for the legalities, but for the actual actions of the humans involved, the extent to which individual actors conceive of themselves as serving at the pleasure of the state, or being the state. One can certainly see, whatever one's stance on Israeli occupation and the struggle for a Palestinian homeland, that the settlers identify themselves less as subjects of policy than as the form a policy takes in the sphere of life; to accept the dismantling of the policy would be to accept their own non-existence.

The idea that one makes the state via one's actions, rather than that one makes one's actions acccording to the demands of the abstracted "state," seems like a belief that would be proper to new republics; surely this the proposition that haunts the Ahmadinejad narrative. By one measure, Israel and Iran are profoundly old, but by other accountings, their current forms are artifacts of recent awakenings into orders considerably less entrenched than the regime at home. The strangeness which for us shrouds these actions abroad is an index only of the depth of our historical sleep.