jane dark's sugarhigh!

the dust that Pancho bit down south

...but I'd like to write, just, some songs, sez Townes Van Zandt, in an interview near the end of his life (found late in the documentary Be Here To Love Me) in a voice as flat and damaged as a shanty-town after an earthquake, that are so good that, you know, nobody understands them, including me.

ranking full stop

Your Pazz & Jop albums ballot was submitted as follows:

1. MIA - Arular - XL (30)
2. Miranda Lambert - Kerosene - Sony (25)
3. Kelly Clarkson - Breakaway - RCA (10)
4. Brad Paisley - Time Well Wasted - Arista Nashville (5)
5. Leann Rimes - This Woman - Curb (5)
6. Liz Phair - Somebody's Miracle - Capitol (5)
7. Robyn - Robyn - Konichiwa (5)
8. Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten - Epic/Homogenic (5)
9. Ciara - Goodies - LaFace (5)
10. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter II - Cash Money/Universal (5)

Your Pazz & Jop singles ballot was submitted as follows:

1. Camille - Ta Douleur - EMI
2. The Game - Hate It Or Love It - Aftermath/G-Unit/Interscope
3. Lady Sovereign - Random (original radio edit) - Casual
4. Garth Brooks - Good Ride Cowboy - Pearl/Lyric Street
5. Jessica Andrews - Summer Girl - Dreamworks
6. Xzibit - Hey Now - Columbia
7. Fallout Boy - Sugar We're Going Down - Island
8. Missy Elliott - Lose Control - Elektra
9. Anna Nalick - Breathe - Columbia
10. Gary Allan - The Best I Ever Had - MCA Nashville

two notes on Munich

[for a more formal account of this film, please see here]

1) Sugarhigh does not find this movie to be remarkably "anguished," nor especially charged with "moral ambiguity," nor any of the similar claims. It's basically a movie designed to make murderous claims defensible by asserting that one already knows that they're murderous and destructive, and moreover that one mightily suffers the weight of this self-awareness: a proleptic strategy indistinguishable from calling women "bitches" ironically. It's hipster Zionism.

2) Imagine a movie that starts with verité sequences of the violent expropriation of Palestine, and then tracks a band of Palestinians as they seek retribution in increasingly violent ways; the film's last act of violence is the Munich Olympics. But the Palestinians feel bad and have trouble sleeping. Could this movie be made in America? Could it expect to recoup a nine-figure budget?

"somebody let me hold a #2 pencil cause they testing me"

Heading home, sugarhigh discovers a new level of security. Having already passed through screening, sugarhigh proceeded to the jetway in an effort to "board the plane." At this juncture, the greeter for the airline took sugarhigh's boarding pass but, rather than allowing us onto the plane, pointed out the "ssss" code on the lower right, and personally walked us back to security for a special session which included not just the removal of various pieces of attire, but the individual x-raying, in a different machine so special it's kept in its own room, of various items such as sugarhigh's boots and, indeed, our wallet. Yes, sugarhigh's wallet—which is in point of fact a clip, such that all items are already visible—was carried into a side room and placed in a superspecial x-ray machine, presumably to avoid the recent rash of wallet-bombings.

effects without causes

An interesting meditation over at Samizdat blog, from which future Professor Corey pulls the tagline "Disinterest is modernity."

That seems about right as a summary; the argument runs, in more detail (and with some intriguing digressions) that the pivotal quality that determines subjects Western modernity is disinterest and gessellschaft—of setting aside personal interests and convictions in a society of abstract, contractual relations. It makes for a very split self (the part of me with real convictions, and the part of me that performs a social role according to ethics determined by that role alone). This separation allows/produces behaviors good and bad, examples freely given. In short: impartiality of care, probably good; versions of "I was just doing my job," bad. Either way, it requires a divided consciousness, a separation between "feeling" and "understanding," the source of which turns out to be "good taste":

The interesting thing to me is this: the idea of disinterest in the West begins to come into being in the 18th century, and it begins in discussions of taste. It travels into the realms of politics, institutions, corporations, and professional ethics [...], but it begins with taste and aesthetics. You don’t really get it as a part of ethics until after you get it as a part of aesthetics....

There's something frustrating about Samizdat's acccount, even as it seems smart and useful. The frustration lies in the way history is narrated, so that the cause for a bunch of powerful, potentially useful and destructive ideas turns out to be another idea. Locating the appearance of this separation of thought we're calling "disinterest" is useful. But history simply can't be told in such a way that thoughts always come from other thoughts; this approach is literally non-sensical (albeit occasionally convivial to folks who think for a living); effects without causes.

Whether or not the conditions of a place and time cause people to have ideas can remain up for debate. Yet few doubt that such conditions have a pretty influential—even determinate—effect on whether ideas take root and flower. No ideas but in things, and that goes for history too—when people speak of "materialism" they mean nothing other than its thingness, in the exact same sense meant by Dr. Williams.

How then might we return to thingness, to material life, the history of this idea (which is, finally, of a piece with that skepticism about the Enlightenment crystallized in the critique of instrumental reason). What relations were changing that might fructify this changed idea? Adorno offers at least one idea that seems no less worth entertaining for its simplicity, and has as well useful implications for debates about the nature of poetry, and the ideology of MFA programs (always hot topics in this corner of the blogosphere).

Intelligence is a moral category, he writes in Minima Moralia, warming to his analysis. The separation of feeling and understanding, that makes it possible to absolve and beatify the blockhead, hypostatizes the dismemberment of man into functions.

One sees immediately the response this makes to the ongoing debate about the status of "theory" in poetry, which is itself a high-level recapitulation of the workshop distinction between brains and heart in a poem. Adorno's point is that pursuing the right ratio of "thought" and "feeling," or of "theory" and "life," is a fool's errand; meanwhile, the move it requires—separating out the categories in the first place—is a deadening calculus that does nothing but replicate the logic of the division of labor.

But Adorno isn't writing about poetry. He's writing about, you know, moral minimums; that is, he is making account of exactly what Samizdat has been meditating upon, of late. And has managed, in his turn, to locate the separation in question within history's thingness—particularly, the ways in which a being is turned increasingly into a divisible thing, as part of a clearly nameable process that comes to permeate all social life, from ethics to poetry.

the maths

As we're in the middle of a strike by civic employees: an occasion to recall some of the implications of universal health care (as distinguished from "single-payer" plans still funded by the employer, of the sort that Hillary Clinton labored for last millennium).

The primary benefit is that when people get sick they can receive medical care.

There is another benefit so critical that to call it "secondary" betrays its significance. If health care isn't tied to employment (and here, rather swiftly, is where the distinction from Clintonian et al corporate plans becomes crucial), then a worker has that much more latitude to complain about working conditions. This is pretty straightforward, right? One the main reasons it's incredibly hazardous, for example, to go on strike is that you immediately lose your access to medical care—for yourself, your husband, your kid. If there's any care, it's provided by union slush funds (if one is unionized in the first place); this becomes an impetus for unions to aggregate large and often corrupting institutional apparatuses. But mostly, strike = no medical coverage, under the current dispensation. Basic health care, conversely, means the ability to say I can't work overtime today, to say I can't afford food or Stop grabbing my ass, without the fear that you're risking your sick child's life.

There is a reason that a cashier at any supermarket in France can sit on a stool while at work, while American cashiers must stand: France has universal health care; workers can safely demand the most minimally decent conditions; the end.

It is insufficient, that is, to imagine the issue of universal health care as concerning the simple bottom lines of companies and governments. Companies are not simply protecting their profit (always presented as an issue not of profit but of viability, natch, with its menacing leer). The denial of universal health care (and no less the unveiled threat of eventual penury that comes with pension dismantling) is, always and at its core, a basic strategy for maintaining labor in a state of perpetual risk, and assuring a lack of any leverage over their own conditions. It is a form of domination and nothing else.

This structure is repeated ad infinitum, projected even to the sphere of world systems. Whatever poor matter the laborer or client nation can bring to market must be exchanged for basic physical protection which is always under threat of being removed or indeed turned on the protectees, should they fail to perform as commanded: Pinkertons, embargoes, bombers. There is no corporate language that is not the language of threat, something Mayor Bloomberg knows perfectly well when he dares to call the striking transit workers "thuggish" and "selfish." He should perhaps make investigations with the dictionary. Meanwhile, sugharhigh! urges you to stand with the strikers not until your sense of inconvenience becomes too great, but as long as the mechanism of client states and client persons does not suit you.

missed opportunities 2005

1) I assume that when former Dia foundation deep pockets Charlie Wright purchased Verse Press, he opted for the imprint Wave Books because, had he gone with Dia press, it would have been all too easy to mistake for Diapers.

2) Puffalo Soldiers breakfast cereal. Dreadlock Pasta. These and various other marketing concepts for rastafarian cuisine: available on demand.

3) In my home state, we sent Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Governor's office for one reason, and one reason only: to see him kill a man with his bare hands. He recently had a convenenient, legal, and easily televisable opportunity to do so, and completely passed. I feel ripped off.

echo chamber (year-end lists: I too dislike them)

Over at sillliman dot com, here's the roundup roundup:

The Voice’s roster contains just 25 books, and in it we find poets doing everything but poetry: writing fiction (Sesshu Foster, Kenneth Koch, Dennis Cooper), writing letters (Robert Lowell), writing a memoir that may or may not be fiction (Harry Matthews’ My Life in CIA, tho one might counter that Matthews is really a novelist who writes poetry, an argument one might make with Cooper as well), and just one book that might be poetry, Geraldine Kim’s marvelous Povel [....] The implication, at least as I read the Voice selections, is that poets exist, but the poem maybe not. That’s something to ponder.

Which reminded me...distantly...of something...familiar...:

This is the paper's vaudeville; as ever, poets and the idea of poetry have a pretty decent chance of making it to the Sunday Times' Carnegie Hall, and long as no actual poetry is performed onstage. As long as the book in question is the letters, the journals, the year in Tuscany, the cookbook by or biography of—poetry is a hot ticket [....] "Poetry" has become a category revered only in proportion to its absence. Give people a novel, a film, a memoir that's "lyrical" or "poetic" and the critics will swoon and the blurbs will fly. It means these things are light and lovely. Poems themselves, however, are too heavy to bear.

Silliman simply redirects the analysis from the Times to the Voice—and rightly so, I would say, though it misses the ways that the Voice doesn't endlessly play-act how important it thinks poetry is, and does actually publish poems occasionally. Nonetheless, I think the cultural assumptions played out in both the Times and the Voice (and, and, and) bear thinking about, recongnition, articulation.

Truth be told, the two books I wrote for at the Voice moved me more than any poetry books released this year, with the posssible exception of Juliana Spahr's book reviewed elsewhere, which I continue to think of as dating from last year—that's when I read it. My two favorite books of 2005 weren't poetry, yup. My fault, I'm sure.

round down

The Village Voice's list of 25 Favorite Books 2005 is available; I had some small part in assembling it, and advocated strongly for two of the titles.

Moreover, even though I am a fan neither of sestinas nor McSweeney's, a poem from last summer can be found here. The "kudzu" solution was suggested to me by Seeta.

allegory in the age of technological reproduction

From The Colbert Report:

This movie’s been labeled a Christian allegory, just because its hero, “Aslan the lion,” sacrifies his life on a hilltop to save the world, and through the power of love rises from the grave to defeat evil. Sorry, doesn’t work as an allegory. Last time I checked, Jesus wasn’t a lion. This is worse than taking the Christ out of Christmas; this is taking the Christ out of Jesus...[The Passion of Christ], now that was a great Christian allegory. I’m pretty sure Jim Caviezel symbolized Jesus.

translator's note: on popular language

The patiently directionless New York Times article about the town of La Corneuve translates this reverse-tag as Sarkozy, you're finished. Which is not wrong in its basic sense. Ironically, however, by switching immediately from the literal to the figurative meaning, it has lost rather than preserving what I can scarcely resist calling the literary elegance.

Literally, the phrase (including the elision tes which casually replicates the English confusion of "you're" and "your"; one might think of it as the email subsign "yr") translates as Sarkozy yr cooked. Notably, we have that same expression—"yr toast," one might even say—in English, which makes the translator's choice even more puzzling. What's lost in this choice is the image-connection between the infamous burning cars and similarly infamous Sarkozy.

At a minimum, the graffito's sheer aggression has been greatly tempered; the fantasy of retribution in which Sarkozy is imagined in one of those cars has been lost. But imagination does not serve just to serve so crudely. The sense here makes explicit both that the cars were taken (and burned) as symbols of the elite, of Sarkozy's class—and that Sarkozy's political fortunes were what was put to the fire.

This may turn out to be accurate—the fires of Autumn may persuade the nation that Sarkozy is a firestarter, and not to be trusted. It may go the other way; he may have succeeded in polarizing the nation. There's a political canniness to this; in general, the polarizing strategy belongs to the Jean-Marie LePens of the world, rousing the provinces against the technocratic elites of the capital's grands écoles. If a Parisian can gain the faith of the LePenistes, and surely this was Sarko's play, he may find himself sitting pretty for the Presidential run in 2007.

Should it play out that way, this graffiti writer will turn out to have been mistaken, or at least optimistic. Regardless, the implication of the phrase ought not be lost. To think that the scum of the banlieues are in control of their language is to think they might be acting out of reason—out of a kind of strategy, and a kind of hope. But of course, the business of politics is to refuse all forms of agency, including the agency of language, to anyone who refuses the sanctioned politics on offer. If one doesn't support the current set of official meanings, one doesn't get to mean at all—no metaphors for you.

from notes

Aesthetics is not the cargo pulled along by the engine of economics, but the train station into which the engine eventually arrives.

revision

A couple months ago, I wrote here that Miranda Lambert was "better than you think", that the almost-runner-up on country Idol show Nashville Star had a swell third single against all likelihood. I wish now to back away from that position.

What I meant to say was: Miranda Lambert's Kerosene is easily the strongest Nashville album of the year, with no garbage, six or seven superb tracks (today's favorite: "What About Georgia?") including a couple that'll likely never be singles, one starting "The sun just started going down on a sleepy little Texas town, population plus one/minus one..." that then pays off that oddity of language gracefully with the zero-sum narrative. For those who care about such things: she co-/writes her own songs. For those who don't: the songs are great.

odd parabolas

The IMDb is so thorough, and the tendencies of "superaggregate" industries to cross-employ and reuse human resources so powerful, that most names that appear in the register appear repeatedly. There are, of course, those who appear only once, and we can imagine the circumstances: the assistant director's cousin covering a sudden absence, or the nascent star wrecking a car on the night of a first wrap party. But what to make of someone who seemingly played the female lead in her debut film, then vanished for 23 years, only to return at some untold age as the singing voice of an animated spacegoing girl star? What happened for this to happen? The mind reels.

dinner with old friend

I'm in the middle of a poem about a train station.

You're always in the middle of a poem about a train station.

This one's a Wittgensteinian train station.

[eyebrows quizzical]

The duckrabbit; how you can't tell if people are arriving or departing. A kind of aspect seeing...I know; it's terrible, I'm always in the middle of a poem about a train station.

Well, when you phrase it as arriving and departing it makes sense. Those are all you need.

It's like presence and absence without ontology.

all that is solid melts into boilerplate

Ten Marines were killed and 11 wounded by a roadside bomb near Fallujah, Iraq, in one of the deadliest attacks on American troops in recent months.

nominal, 1990

It figures that the profoundest patch in the history of rap/hip-hop, since its birth, would happen exactly during the two years when I was socked away at a midwestern grad school. I left Brooklyn for Iowa City to the strains of "Welcome To the Terrordome"; the movie version of Boyz N The Hood came a month after I graduated and headed to California. Between 1989 homecoming and 1991 commencement, the world changed from Black Nationalism to gangsta.

I continue to think this wasn't as much of a volte-face as some have claimed; it strikes me as rather notable, in fact, that the focus on having things, on possession and dispossession, remained constant. What flipped was the stance toward these fixed ideas, from the tribulations of living in a land where the property and power were always elsewhere, to the long folktale of getting and having these things. The song remained the same, except fantasy replaced factuality. This split is already clear in "Rapper's Delight," shifting awkwardly between quotidian accounts of dinner down the block and the high life of Big Bank Hank. These two modes would be played out in series, and really 1990 was when the latter superseded the former. "No more props I want property," Rakim said, and the story pivoted on that point....

I don't think it's any coincidence that this period, 1989-1991, is the height of the culture war against rap/hip-hop: the time of Billl Bennett and Charlton Heston, of C. DeLores Tucker, of court judgements against unpaid sampling, of the generalized pressure (what's up, MTV?) to prove you were a real musician by cashiering the very things that rap was made of, and playing with a "real band." History, one might say, is the history of making politics turn away; one can't blame fantasy and aesthetics for filling the absence.

But I digress. I had meant only to set the context for understanding my favorite nobody rapper. His name is The Jaz, though he has also been known as Big Jaz and perhaps Jaz-O, though that may be someone else. Allmusic.com is, for once, not so sure. What is certain is that he was a New York rapper of some local repute and no national presence who made a disc released on July 16, 1990 that is one of the great unremembered hip-hop reccords. It's called To Your Soul.

Song after song is quick, serious, deeply musical, with playful lyrics that come at varying speeds, sometimes blunt and heavy on the beat, sometimes syncopated and sudden, looking for a way to slip past any defense. It's a kind of style-shifting that would become common later, virtuoso and then familiar and then just one of the ways hip-hop sounds. But in 1990 it was fresh, and it was the problem.

Or it was an evocation of the problem, which is that The Jaz didn't know who he was. He didn''t have a clear style, or a sure point. He was right in the middle, see, and he wasn't the only one: Ice-T had been juggling the roles of social critic and hustler long before PE slammed into NWA, and Ice Cube was just then reversing the trajectory of the narative from sunroof-down-diamond-in-the-back to working with the Bomb Squad. "Once Upon A Time In The Projects" says it all, the way social reality and the gangster's fairytale hept hemorrhaging into each other. And The Jaz didn't know if he was a Nation of Islam radical (there is this long Q'n'A at the heart of the record called "Flag of the Mahdi") or a thug: it turns out he keeps a great whte shark in his swimming pool. I'm 6'3", 210 and I keep funds comin' in, he announced, this year the Max, next year the Benz. It's just at the edge of that exaggeration that would buy and sell the decade. And meanwhile, the beats come from all over but especially from Prince Paul, who just then, at a musical level — because I will still tell you that the Bomb Squad sound wasn't music, it was politics for the ear — was the best producer in the game, Mark the 45 King included. Check the next line it seems so sensible: for the dope beat you seek the Prince Paul. That's what the Jaz said, except because of the rhyme word in the set-up, it sounds like the punchline is "you seek the principle," and that makes sense, because what it Prince Paul after all but the very principle of the dope beat?

That's from the song "It's That Simple," one of the two standouts along with the title track (for which he sings one quotation of Marvin Gaye that still gives me shivers for its suddenness and audacity and for all that for its seeming inevitability). "It's That Simple" is almost a duet; The Jaz's sidekick/protegé/water carrier gets a few lines and a writing credit. The two voices, actually, sound almost identical as they start the song trading phrases, now finishing each other's sentences, now calling and responding, impossible to know which one is saying what:

Let's begin with the beginning the start
Let's get deep within it the heart
Partner? Yeah You got a partner? No
Don't be sarcastic partner OK partner let's go
Who's superior? Opposed to who? The inferior
We are the two in prior criteria

...and as it veers toward utter confusion it suddenly unfurls into a dazzling sprint:

You mean we're in the barrier of the better area causin' havoc and hysteria?

and then both voices, filled with certainty: Yeah, whatever: friends, we're in there.

It's as dazzling as any sequence on record, playful and deft and in love with the sounds that syllables can make, and in the end perfectly good-natured: boasts not against each other, but on each other's behalf. Hear it once and you'll remember it for years.

It's quite remarkable how similar voices are, and how alike they looked: the protegé was more like 6'4", and had almost the exact same name — another thing that makes the record confusing. When The Jaz namechecks his boy, it seems like he might be talking about himself. In one place he wonders who else is poetic as the J - A - Z; at another turn, he suggests play the track with ease, J - A - Y - Z. Becazuse that's who the watercarrier is: Homebase Brooklyn: break, ya get bent; Jaz and Jay-Z represent. And this is as uncertain a moment as one can imagine. Summer is turning to fall. The future is up for grabs. Nation time is ending. Dre and the other architects of G-Funk are perfecting their game. You can still do the Humpty Dance. Exactly half the century so far has been before The Bomb, and half after. The Berlin Wall is down. The ravers are sampling like sampling was always cool. There are tanks in the Kuwaiti desert, and the Airborne is in Saudi Arabia. In a few months, Rodney King will be beaten almost to death, on videotape, by three LA cops. Everything, later, will seem to have been happening at once. A star is busy being born...