jane dark's sugarhigh!

too good to be true dot com

Apparently there is a "car communication manager" at Ford named Linda Perry-Lube.

nexus etc

The scenario recounted via the chain of emails here is all too familiar: an ideologically-loaded text (often art, though not always) gets displayed within an institutional context, and then someone complains that it doesn't behoove the institution to support and/or lend credence to the text's ideological position. Structurally, the fear is that an object that is purely rhetorical can gain substantial force through the context of its display, and more easily cause people to believe stuff that they shouldn't believe.

This claim is easily and sensibly shrugged off, as the Institute for Cinema and Culture has done. There are certain absolute debates underlying this sad scene, and those cannot be easily resolved: Is there a real historical truth, for example, which representations must either get right or wrong? Does art really get people to do anything anyway? But beyond these issues, which must remain undecisive as long as they are undecided, more immediate — dare I say "pragmatic"? — concerns make the concerned citizen's position incoherent.

What would it mean, according to his own logic, to regulate "particular description of [a] film"? Who would be in charge? Would that not involve controlling, institutionally, the rhetorical weight of the movie? Is the goal to produce a rationalized balance to make sure no one is ever threatened with being convinced of something? Would this balance assure that texts would never threaten the truth value of absolute historical fact (which would be known methodically via...)? — and would that be a good thing? Really, the attorney's stance is not a stance at all, just a sense of aggrievedness that makes a convenience of the very instability of rhetoric — of the uncertainty of art and propoganda and all other forms of contingent communication — while purporting to object to excessive stability. All messages are spinnable; spin this another way, because the way it's spun now I don't like it and what's worse it doesn't appear to be spinning. That's not really an argument, now , is it?

And yet, as I am fond of saying. The attorney's intuition is not finally one that I would dispute. Signification doesn't happen in parallel; as a given object, the poster in question forms a complex of signs which achieves meaning — which is rhetorical, that is to say, like a film or an email — through the relations between the parts (as well as in relation to surrounding matter). The director's squib description of the film is indeed part of a meaning that includes what institutions' names appear alongside. That Hayek has interpreted this meaning-complex in a banal, univocal manner is merely the sign of a weak reader, not of a failed understanding of how social meaning appears in the first place.

Hayek's intuition, alas, goes thoroughly unexplored, because of a very particular slippage: the slippage in the contemporary usage of the word "ideology." It's not a word Hayek employs, but it's what he means when he says "politics": the commitment to a prescriptive line about how social relations should be organized, before which historical truth — objective reality — is cast down. This is the meaning mechanism by which, most famously during the last century, communists are ideological but capitalist humanists are not — and, in a hysterical farce of recapitulation, the New York Times is ideological while Fox News is not.

The Times is ideological, of course, as is communism and Fox and capitalism and the poster at the University of Iowa announcing the film Blood of the Condor. The use of ideology described in the previous paragraph is more or less the second definition in the American Heritage dictionary: "A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system." But as it's come to be used, this use of "ideology" is purely ideological, per the main sense of the word: "The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture." That is, "ideology" as used by the current President (and former Prezzes), Bill O'Reilly and, implicitly, by Matt Hayek, is itself little more than a bludgeon used to discipline anyone who would threaten the body of ideas reflecting their own social needs etc.

The main function of "ideology" is to conceal the workings of ideology.

Another way to put this would be that Hayek (as a representative for a familiar strategy) doesn't wish to protect the truth from rhetoric, but rather to protect his preferred rhetoric from the truth of its own rhetoricity. To do so, he must produce a privileged category (what usually gets called "art") that is at once separate from the basic truths of daily life and capable of threatening them. Having done so, he must demand that all the meanings in this sphere replicate Moretti's Lukacsian account of the modern novel, that does the endless work neither of casting doubt on, nor lending credence to life, but of modeling conciliation, of showing us how to modulate the demands of the radical and of the daily life on offer so their distance is made tolerable. The Iowa poster's failure of modulation is in fact its only failure; the content is scarcely relevant. It's ideological — "political" — to Hayek not because of its expressed politics so much as because of its distance from the activity of conciliation that must define the supposedly non-ideological. That distance must be closed. (There is no radical activity, one notes in passing, that does not promise irreconcilability; a fact that goes equally for "art" and "politics").

What Hayek's intuition, structured by such interests, thusly must turn away from is the application of his own initial logic beyond the space of the University's arthouse. I note for example that various seals of the United States are generally present when the President speaks on television; does that mean that the US endorses the President's claims? Am I in fact being forced to play a part, as a citizen of this nation, in endorsing the President's expressly rhetorical and ideological claims? This is quite disturbing. But moreover, when I watch such speeches on, say, NBC, and the little NBC floater-logo appears in the corner of the screen, does this mean that NBC is endorsing the truth-value of said claims?

I could poke fun at Matt's initial ire, because the answer to all of these is, Of course not!

Except that the answer is, Of course! That's exactly how truth-value is produced (and we are enlisted to endorse it "against our will" every day), replete with its internal fractures, its disavowals, its proleptic recuperations of dissent and its cosmetic self-doubts. When Fox News announces itself as "fair and balanced" night after night, and then the FoxSearchlight logo appears on a poster for the film The Dreamers, this is an aggressively ideological labor, and I resent the ensuing effort to persuade me that the spirit of 1968 concerns free love with a little hullaballoo downstairs as a backdrop, a meaning I necessarily understand Fox to support and propose as "fair and balanced" — that's pure ideology! It's a lot more pernicious than Blood of the Condor, and it's got to be stopped! And this is true, in various ways, of every movie and its poster ever!

If you believe in the dangers of complex ideological signs, you can do a little better, sir. And there is indeed work to be done. One more try if you want to be a social critic...

match point (quantity v. quality)

Here at sugarhigh! we're promised to write a brief something about each new movie seen, if only so that we can recall what we saw at the end of the year. After seeing Match Point last night, we pondered in conversation with friends whether it was more or less boring than Brokeback Mountain (seen in 2005), which admittedly managed some emotional weight despite the requisite Ang Lee yawns and horrific soundtrack.

It's not so much a difference in quantity as quality. Brokeback Mountain offers its boredom as a marker of aesthetic virtue: the standardized indie [sic] mode of proffering slowness (and its invocation of mid-century European cinema) as a proof that this is art we're watching, gosh darn it. Jim Jarmusch, we're looking at you! Though Ang Lee is at least as villainous in this regard; alas, no amount of homotext can free Brokeback from the director's addiction to making vague impressions of genre films that didn't need tarting up (or down) in the first place (cf. Crouching, Hidden).

Match Point, on the other hand, would have genuinely liked to be darkly sprightly, to zip along from plot point to plot point in an accelerating descent; Woody just doesn't seem to have the chops anymore (Mr. Rhys-Meyers' acting didn't exactly help), and the boredom is incidental to a more generalized incompetence.

We have no verdict, as yet, as to which of these qualities of bordeom is preferable. It may come down to a taste for landscape porn as opposed to real estate porn, or the reverse.

journal, 7 February 2001

The horror of recalling in detail some day of no particular import from twenty years ago should not be confused with vertigo. The vertigo comes from the skewed perspective of double vision: one sees suddenly the street down which one walked some day long ago laid over the boulevard along which one walks at this moment; those passing buildings laid over these; those unknown passersby over the present bustle of equally anonymous citizens, going about their equally opaque business; and feels like one could fall from one scene to the other without effort or notice. But the horror is something else entirely; it comes with the effort of suppressing the awareness that, some day twenty years in the future, you might recall this day with just such material force, and be equally shocked to discover the absence of important or even meaningful events in your daily life. It is the threat that any future moment might return you to today and you will finally come to know, really know, your own banality.

yes, yes

Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humor as Hölderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness....
— Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"

Without ascending to the questions of happiness, laughter (and delight, pleasure, desire) that haunt especially Adorno's aesthetics via their negative apparitions, I wish to pause only to notice that Baudelaire and Hölderlin are the only poets mentioned in the length of the landmark essay. In this way, despite its claims on radicality, the essay stands at the median of modern aesthetic philosophy, Heidegger to Deleuze, Benjamin to de Man, for which those same two poets must always be exemplary.

This is not to say that the pair are not astounding, signifcant, and particularly generative for philosophers of language and experience — of course they are. And yet, Baudelaire and Hölderlin share with Sex Pistols and Eyes Wide Shut the quality of being more interesting to read about than to read (or listen to, or watch). There is a suggestion in this about what critical accounts are less able to engage (again Adorno is exemplary), but there is also a sense that the aperture on what lyric poetry might yield is disastrously narrowed for even the most acute of philosophers — narrowed and pointed obscurely into a certain historical depth. One thinks, in corollary, of Lukács — always the absolutist case — and his inability even to figure lyric poetry tout cour as historically substantial: a true moment of comedy which inevitaby returns upon its author, in this case when Lenin, meeting Lukács, dismisses his dallying with culture entirely.

But the very unreadibility of the modern lyric (which, per Poetry magazine, is its own fault, natch, though their periodization of when things went off the tracks can't account for this particular history) remains as a powerful horizon for the most far-seeing critics interested in aesthetics and literary historiography. Franco Moretti, in the extraordinarily lucid and insightful introduction to his newly-reissued signal volume Signs Taken for Wonders, nonetheless joins the queue (in which Frederic Jameson is a notable and generous absence). After writing of tragedy's role in the age of absolutism, of the value in "a study of sexual prohibitions and certain dream symbols deriving from them" for understanding a time's literature of terror, of the relevance of the second industrial revolution to science fiction, he proposes that not all historical knowledge is necessarily pertinent to literary analysis:

The Second World War — to take a strident example — does not seem to have much usefulness for literary periodization or interpretation: this does not, obviously, make it a secondary episode or one without enormous explanatory power in other areas.

He could just as easily have said, "I have not made a reading of my century's lyric poetry" — and perhaps he does say so, insofar as the only poet he mentions twice in this introduction about literature (as opposed to the novel alone) is also the only poet he mentions once: "Baudelaire"...

rabbit rabbit

A 1913 Literary Evening
Presented by The Lab
www.thelab.org

Wednesday, Feb. 1st, 7pm, 2948 16th Street San Francisco, $5-15 admission

Readers: Hillary Burrill, Chris Chen, Joshua Clover, Stacy Doris, Scott Inguito, Susan Maxwell (guests are threatened).

Please join 1913, a journal of forms, in celebrating the publication of its second issue where Bay Area contributors will read from their interdisciplinary work. Dedicated to printing the finest in contemporary poetry, art, poetics, and their intersections, 1913 numéro deux includes a chapbook by Brazilian poet Josely Vianna Baptista with original artwork by collaborator Francisco Faria, as well as a section of contemporary French poetry. Other contributors include Fanny Howe, John Taggart, John Yau, Sally Keith, Chet Weiner, Jen Hofer, Cort Day, and Lisa Robertson. http://www.journal1913.org

Download a flyer

which side are you on?

The debate about James Frey and J.T. Leroy seems to divide between two positions: on the one hand, some find it worth pursuing that things represented as true about the author's life are false, casting a pall of disingenuity or indeed dishonesty over the enterprise; on the other, some note that in each case it's a literary production we're talking about, wherein truth is in the experience the text conveys, about which (potentially hypocritical) games of literary gotcha have little to say. To put it in old-fashioned terms, there's the author-based and text-based responses, facing off.

(It's worth noting the substantial irony that the text-based position, which in these last decades has been understood as an idea of the theoretical margins (often described as "postmodern") — indexed to the Barthes essay "The Death of the Author" and understood to privilege the reader (and, in a dominating synechdoche, the critic) over the author — is now employed by the very nexus it supposedly banished, and which otherwise profits from the production of authors. This is particularly piquant in the case of "James Frey," as the producers known variously as James Frey, Oprah Winfrey, and The Publisher scramble in all-but-identical words to assure us that the fringey text-based understanding is in fact at the very center of common sense.)

Predictably, author-based/text-based proves an insufficient antithesis (and not just because Doubleday has modeled for us in the purest terms that sublation is the methodology of capital just as much as it is the methodology of history itself; see previous paragraph). The division between the two positions, insofar as it might be imagined at all, is contingent — in particular, contingent on qualities of readership and the text both. All this hubbub is a story about the nature of the readership istelf, and what it consumes; as long as the drive obtains to extract some kind of "real-world" value from literature — and this includes not just the self-help virtues of Frey's memoir but the self-congratulatory encounter with the seamier side of "life" vended mercilessly by Leroy, a pleasure which defines faux-populist hipster narcissism and is the enabling ideology of gentrification — the crudest mechanisms for opening a route between the page and daily life will hold sway, and the crudest among these are the explicit and implicit claims on "real life" which "Frey" and ""Leroy" proffered at every turn.

And yet. Among the things that will not finally suffice, a critique of readership ideologies takes its place as well. Surely another reason that people feel betrayed and ripped off by the demolishing of authorial integrity in both cases is exactly because the authority of that position was so necessary for the books. That is to say, neither Frey nor Leroy can lay legitimate claim to a text-based understanding because neither could produce texts that suffer such engagement. To put it bluntly — and here's what the hand-wringing responses shy away from, even as they claim to have smelled a rat all along — readers are led to a need for the author's truth-value because that's about all that's on offer: the only folks with a right to I-told-you-so are those who noted all along that both Frey and Leroy are terrible prose writers; neither could build a truth out of text no matter what had or had not befallen them otherwise.

sic transit

The confluence of the Bay Area and the northern Central Valley is the historical wellspring of outlaw biker culture; living here means finding oneself rolling down the freeway next to a leather-vested dude on a chopper regularly. The thing is, these guys are old; no less common than the pointedly undersized fuck-the-man helmets are the fluttering handlebar moustaches and beards, in rebel gray.

There's always some easily-mined irony in any circumstance of a youth culture grown old. Yet it's not the historicality of an idea which staked everything against the clock and in favor of presence that's so powerful to me, it's how recent it remains. It seems amazing that such people are in fact still alive, that it was in their brief lifetimes — mine too — that this vision of freedom seemed possible as a material fact, abetted by individual high-speed transportation, and supposing spaces, empty spaces, as a fact of the nation. The nomadic myth, escape into the unregulated interior — these romantic ideas were more immediate than myth recently enough that the believers are still riding pillion past my town in their original bodies.

Seen also in the town where I was born, an enduringly adorable scene: two girls; maybe seven years old, sharing a single pair of rollerskates, each with one sneaker and one set of wheels, balancing for brief runs along the sidewalk.

sitekeeping

Some updates: sugarhigh! has added a link to the new blog formed by Laura Moriarty, A Tonalist Notes; some other urls have been updated. A new section of links has been added, to non-poetry blogs that I read (and that are updated regularly). Almost all the poems linked in the "Read Poems By" section are new; there is also a new download, of the Juliana Spahr chapbook "Gentle Now Don't Add To Heartache." Hope you are dry where you are.

things said in Nelly songs that we are still trying to deal with

I'm leavin', please believe in oh! me and the rest of my heathens — "Hot in Herre"

where I got'em you can spot'em
on the top and the bottom
got a bill in my mouth just like hillary rodham
— "Grills" (feat. Paul Wall)

and one more thing

...to add about the Chronicles of Narnia Rap: there can be no doubt that it has replaced unfuckingbelievable as the greatest achievement in tmesis technology.

solace and scrub

I would have to start doing tae-bo and anabolics to have the strength to care any less about this year's White Stripes album than I already do. It's not just that it's dull and poorly-conceived, that Jack's a liteweight creep who thinks he can fight middleweight by preening as a race-baiting aesthete, or that rooting for Meg to make a break for it can be exhausting. It's that this album, if one had been uncertain, confirms that the White Stripes are bare schtick and have always been bare schtick. By winding the retro-blooze/hillbilly-savant cuckoo clock a few turns too tightly this time, Jackie has exploded the works for all to see, and it turns out it was always a shallow and mean-spirited machine.

Therein lies the rub. For suharhigh perserveres in its belief that White Blood Cells is, more or less, a superb album. One could offer some explanations as to why it might be an exception, e.g., that the folk influence is more powerful here than elsewhere, which means more melodic range and less sphinter-clenched formalism. But this is specious, in the end; White Blood Cells is no less schticky a contrivance than anything before or after, even if the ratios of revanchism show mild variations.

It's something at once simpler and more mysterious: even schtick, and hypocritical authenticity-touting schtick at that, can have its moment when it achieves true artfulness, even if it never exits its limitations — can achieve an intenisty within them that is nonetheless powerful and moving and surprising. Even assholes in straitjackets with midget visions can make great music. It can't stay great; aesthetic flaws are as fatal as a lame character, and the more one has, the sooner they will bring you down. Jack can never go back to Hotel Yorba, but we can, and that seems like a cause not just for hope, but a kind of celebration, even if — especially if — it's at Jack's expense.

PS: as a sort of related reason to be cheerful, I think that Robin Thicke's original musical bed for "Shooter" is kind of dully disorderly, and his loop of it a little laughable; moreover, with the exception of one verse, Lil Wayne's lyricism on the track is unremarkable to say the least. And yet, somehow — and in that "somehow" lies all the ineffable that subtends the idea of art, the shape of which the critics scramble to show like every day — the track and vocals together make one of the year's irresistible and redolent songs. "More of that," as we like to say.

what if content is sedimented form?

Van Dyke Parks, describing compositional methods during the Smile sessions:

Brian sang: "da da da da da da da da dah." I wrote "Columnaded ruins domino." I've lived to regret it for the majority of my adult life. Now, I'd like to enjoy it justly.