jane dark's sugarhigh!

best law & order episode ever

Pakistan Police Attack Lawyers at Protest

While trying to ignore the slavering banalities of the sovereignty-theory gang (hey look! that obvious thing we keep pointing out as if it were a revelation: still true!), one notes that this could not get any more embarrassing for the administration, given that Pakistan is now distinctly less democratic than Iran.

Moreover Musharraf has now demonstrably outstripped the supposed sins of Hugo Chavez, meaning that if the U.S. doesn't take action againt Pakistan, there will be no justification for opposing Venezuelan socialism. Which means, one imagines, that anti-Chavez activity will have to be even more covert. Seriously, he may be the big loser of this martial law, given that the Allende bullet now seems like the only workable solution for capitalismpanik.

ratatouille

Wow, Pixar really is the new Hollywood! In the sense that the films are consistently diverting and one must entirely discount the ideological payload and the last fifteen minutes in order not to experience them as exactly the shittiest thing that culture can foist on itself (in the truly insane postlude here, the figure of the intellectual — the critic — ends by confronting his true peasant origins, admitting that intellectual life is a parasitic sham except insofar as it on rare occasion valorizes natural genius sprung from the earth, and then ends by abandoning criticism for the true and authentic peasant life of a tuxedo'd finance entrepreneur).

Up until that moment, we have a different story: the swiftly-becoming-par-for-the-course Brad Bird deal about how true genius sprung from the soil can't be held down, and eventually the world's need for same will trump its need for a confabulated egalité (note to self: is film critique of French Revolution much as Incredibles was critique of cultural revolution?) Bird, perhaps after a thorough reading of Appadurai, seems to believe that the antidote to crass capitalism (the "frozen dinnering" of the deceased great chef's recipes) is, well, uncrass capitalism (see snooty entrepreneur, above).

Which is to say: it doesn't get any more incoherent than this. It's a tangled web.

And on this tangled web, which must be kept in view lest it finally entangle us all, it's a decent few minutes watching a cute animated rat hop about, and seeing how the plot mechanics will be cranked given the particularities of this input. Strictly Mickey Mouse.

ocean's 13

Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker game whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside and out with scrawled post horns. "I'm averaging a 99.375 percent return, fellas," he heard him say. The others, strangers, looked at him, some blank, some annoyed. That's averaging it out, over 23 years, he went on, trying to smile. Always just that little percent on the wrong side of breaking even. Twenty-three years. I'll never get ahead of it. Why don't I quit?" Nobody answering. — The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Nobody needing to answer, it being all too plain.

The house always wins, after all; the games are rigged. Not in the sense that they're cheats, but that the rules of the game say that the player will inevitably put in more than he or she gets paid out. Exactitude of bookkeeping isn't needed to clarify this knowledge; it merely reveals the margins. The only way not to lose is to quit.

But of course you can't quit, under threat of starvation and homelessness We're not talking about gambling, after all; that serves as merely as the most transparent metaphor for the structure of surplus value. For that is, finally, the rigged game you can't quit: labor itself, the only necessary rule of which is that it always returns less than you put in.

This and nothing else explains the development of that subgenre of the caper film which specializes in ripping off the casino, for which the modern locus is Bob le flambeur. It gets most directly at the pleasure of the crime whose victim is work itself; one might say that Oceans 11-13 are closer in spirit to Eisenstein's Strike! than they are to The Sting, much less a standard-issue crime film.

Ocean's 13 is generally flabby; for wit, the best it can do is Hollywood stardom metajokes, as when, caper completed, George Clooney suggests that Brad Pitt take some time off between "jobs" to start a family, have a couple kids — and Brad rejoins that Clooney should try to keep the weight off between gigs so he doesn't have to fight his way back into shape each time. That's one way the film has of knowing itself.

But not the only one. In the most ludicrous of the silly subplots, first Casey Affleck and then Scott Caan fall in with — what's that you say? — striking workers at a Mexican factory. The sharpest of ironies is that it turns out that the strikers' demands for annual salary increase — all of them, in total — can be met by what a Clooney makes in 45 minutes. But the automatic sympathy of the heisters for the strikers is the film's only moment of actual thought, on the verge of knowing what it's about.

24) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
23) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
22) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
21) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
20) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
19) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
18) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
17) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

global cities: seeing there

The Global Cities show at the Tate Modern endeavors to take the measure (especially the measure of change) of ten cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, LA, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Tokyo, by way of understanding something (but what?) about the ongoing process of urbanization, especially insofar as it might describe the general motion of humanity toward the future.

Much of the exhibit presents itself most immediately as "information" rather than traditional "art" (though there are some thrills often considered to fall into the latter category, some unfamiliar Andreas Gursky photos not the least of 'em). The data is organized by five categories taken to be critically instructive about the situations: size, speed, form, density, diversity. Some of these are revelatory, as in the 3D contour maps of urban density. Dude, Cairo is serious.

But for the most part the show isn't about these things. It's about graphicalization of data as a problem — data that in their implications and scope threaten to overwhelm understanding — and about rhetorics of graphicalization. In thus reveals exactly the horizon of "information art," generally sacrificing the sublimity of what's been called elsewhere "the data sublime" on the pyre of comprehensibility. Perhaps this is a virtue, the opposite number to Fredric Jameson's postmodern art: the art which finally fails to articulate the complex space of late capitalism. At the same time, a museum isn't a library, and shouldn't be. Nor should it be a mortuary with a conceptual veneer and an awesome foyer, which is what the Tate is, for the most part.

The question, then, of capturing both the information and the experience of late modernity, of global cap and life in the ultropolis — of the existential conjuncture of collective and monadic — remains open, even as the Tate show closes it rather mildly. This goes again to gesture at the greatness of Gursky (to whom we shall not link as his affect is lost on these little screens), and the fundamental divide between him and Jeff Wall, who has of late supplanted him as the international photo-hero. Wall is brilliantly self-reflexive, a visual theorist of the social structure of visuality. But finally he speaks to the individual looking at (or for) the singular. Gursky's best efforts are exactly toward capturing the conjuncture, the both/and, the singular eye peering after the always-escaping affect of the world system.

evolution: five paragraph essay

It seems inevitable he will have to run for President at some point. There's just something so...pure about Michael Bloomberg.

Extraordinary wealth among national leaders has likely always been with us. The collusion of wealth and image mastery with the modern media environment takes an important step with John F. Kennedy's televised debates with Nixon en route to the White House, but reaches a new intensity with the ascent of a media figurehead to the Presidency in 1981. The telltale sign of this ongoing intensification was Ross Perot, who appeared in 1992 as a retrogressive test to determine whether unalloyed cash — money as such — could still bid for the job.

After that signal rebuke to mere money, the new logic was extended even further in the laboratory of Italy's Second Republic, wherein staggering wealth and media power (rather than mere prowess and access) were synthesized in the avian body of Silvio Berlusconi.

But from intensification to purification can be a more subtle leap than we imagine. This is the true achievement of Mike Bloomberg, in whose existence the historic accommodation closes upon itself as both set of facts and as ideological space. Not only does he possess Perotesque wealth beyond the realm of mere tactics, strategic wealth, but his media empire is about money: "Bloomberg L.P. is the largest financial news and data company in the world."

In this sense his herald was Steve Forbes, but Bloomberg achieves a far greater clarity; his company sells information about money largely to financial institutions, and before its founding he worked for Salomon Brothers, the largest issuer/trader of bonds in the country, and the firm that pioneered the shift to entirely derivative-based trading. It is no secret that the position of politics lags several years behind that of economics; surely the time has come for a true son of Spectacular Capital to assume the position.

"no"

Of all the films that end in horror, only this can compare to Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: a ten-minute short about a person being forced to return to work by the very union reps and friends she believed had promised something else entirely. A French short (here with annoying German subtitles), it's called in English, Return to Work at the Wonder Factory, 10 June '68.

weltsystemangst

Monday is a great day of the week to be living in China. There's something nicely easygoing about it. You've got at least a good 13 hours on the United States; you can catch up on work, fill people's inboxes for their Monday morning, and feel generally virtuous about being so productive when back at home they're still lazing around at the end of a Sunday.

This remarkable passage begins a Slate "diary" by Deborah Fallows, written from Shanghai. The weeklong travel journal takes as its opening gambit the consideration of how it feels to be a good worker. It might be understood as a sort of meditation of a maxim of Adorno's — "Every Sunday is too little Sunday" — but with the values reversed. Adorno wrote:

The consciousness of the unfreedom of all existence, which the pressure of the demands of commerce, and thus unfreedom itself, does not allow to appear, emerges first in the intermezzo of freedom. The nostalgie du dimanche is not a longing for the working week, but for the state of being emancipated from it; Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled; like the English one, every Sunday is too little Sunday. The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

It turns out that, in Shanghai, Sundays are satisfying — exactly because every Sunday is too much Sunday, and allows one better to keep up with (and, for a phantasmal moment, race ahead of) "the pressure of the demands of commerce." (Here we can't help but recall the Soviet science fiction novel translated as Monday Begins on Saturday).

The caricature of Marxist lit-crit's discoveries — that all writing these days (a couple centuries worth of days) is in some way about work — seems no longer caricatural, but merely quaint: why bother reading for the drama of labor, as opposed to, say, the emotional life of the characters, when these have become one and the same? Moreover, given that this confluence has not just perfected itself but fled the subtext for the text — rendering the concept of, say "the political unconscious" all but moot — why do we need literary criticism at all, anymore? In this passage we find an achieved position of such ideological purity that ideological analysis can be retired.

If any curiosity survives in Fallows' text, it's the seeming lack of specificity. After all, the diary is presumably somehow about Shanghai, cosmopolitan center of the new China. For the purposes of her unfolding of the conditions of her sense of wellbeing, it would seem that any spot in the time zone would do: Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Perth. The solution to this polite puzzle comes swiftly; the above-quoted passage is merely the first half of the first paragraph of the first day's report. It completes itself thus:

But as the end of the day approaches, and no one in the United States is awake yet, a bit of anxiety can set it. The camp counselor in me wants to cry out, "OK, gang, up and at 'em! There are 1.3 billion Chinese who are already a day ahead of you!"

If there is any figure of speech in the entire paragraph, it's the term, "camp counselor." For surely she means foreman, or manager, or factory whistle. But of course she can name everything but her specific job; to do that would be to see it as something limited, something she occasionally is not.

That one displacement aside, the motion of the thinking remains extraordinarily clear about its location. For not only does she identify herself and her happiness perfectly with her fate as pure labor (and isn't happiness, these days, always based on the success of that identification?), but she swiftly moves to identify her specific labor with its general place within, and contribution to, the world economy.

And this is the truly revelatory move — revelatory not in the least, again, because of how consciously and unproblematically it happens. This is why the report comes from China, and it's not simply nationalism in some abstract, patriotic form. One finds oneself in Shanghai, the laboratory and showroom floor of China's race toward becoming the leading regime of accumulation on the face of the globe. Every detail of Shanghai speaks of it, of the race forward; the pockets within the city of of foot-dragging tradition, in their charming difference, speak with equal force of the same race. These details, the sensuous here and now of it, serve to orient you in Shanghai no more and or less than they orient you to your place in the space of flows, the world economy. This is what it means to be a "traveler." To be a world citizen, albeit a world citizen of the managerial class, tied to the currency of the United States.

The anxiety of having to pay the rent, having to show up for work on Monday, is now only a start. There is a new anxiety into which that anxiety now hemorrhages. It's no longer enough to find relief in being always at work; that sense fades over the long Sunday. One must place that work and experience its sufficiency within the space of flows, within the interlocking, competing and colluding organizations of interstatal politics and transnational capital. And this knowledge comes with a price: weltsystemangst, "world system anxiety."

It would not be unreasonable to suggest that this sensation, this happiness that is always melting and resolving itself into weltsystemangst, is an echo of 2001, of the hole punched in the United States' horizon of sight so that it must look uneasily across the map — a view mostly banished after 1989. Indeed, Deborah Fallows' motion from "nicely easygoing" to "a bit of anxiety" begins to narrate something like weltsystemaffekt from the position of the United States over the years 1989-present, ending in this new feeling, this tomorrow-yesterday, this new Sunday of the world.

neoliberalismo: some questions

A suggestive essay in the current NLR regarding a recent national election, including an incidental list ways in which subjects of other countries (in this case Mexico) express their conclusion that voting might not achieve the changes they believe in. When was the last time you blocked a road? Seized a plaza?

Meanwhile, there's also an efficient summary of what it means to be as well a subject of the United States, even when one is a Mexican citizen, as in the case of

...the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, signed in 1993. The treaty eliminated duties on a broad range of us goods, and opened Mexico’s markets to foreign products, ownership and, notably, agribusiness—destroying Mexican small farmers, who could not compete with heavily subsidized American crops. The exodus from rural areas grew not only toward the United States, but also to Mexico City and the surrounding metropolitan area, to the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo and other places where a living could be eked out through construction work or subsistence trade in the informal economy. In the northern border regions, two million of the unemployed found precarious, badly paid work in the maquiladoras, where transnational corporations profited from NAFTA's lax labour provisions and climate of corporate impunity.

How does your voting practice relate to this history?

can't argue with that

why pirates?

Why must it be the case that, at this historical conjuncture, the figure of the pirate multiplies itself through cultural space? Needless to say, there is no way to answer this question without at the same time taking up the question of empire, and the current forms it requires.

step up

Step Up adopts what we've called elsewhere the "Flashdance trope" of cultural miscegenation with considerable rigor: the female high culturist has, as usual, a dead parent and a problematic audition coming up, and her personal and professional problems must be resolved via the encouter with a male practitioner of a popular/non-white form.

The persistence of this trope speaks of two particular anxieties. One, obviously, is the fear of miscegenation itself, such that instead of actually, you know, happening, it's displaced into the cultural sphere. The other concerns the anxiety about how cultural forms which originally meant to signal autonomous identity must be recuperated into the white center, to be less threatening and more marketable.

But the center cannot hold — if we've learned anything from the ascendency of hip-hop into a quasi-universal cultural form, it's that. This might be explained in a variety of overlapping ways: as an actual demographic shift; as an image of globalization's indifference to any regime beyond capitalism itself; as the exhaustion of cultural whiteness in general. As a result, the idea of "recuperation" across ethnically/racially identifiable lines has become almost meaningless; basically, everyone's black now, except for the Aryan Nation and hipsters, two sides of one coin. And the movie knows this perfectly well. The ballet dancer actually dances more like someone in Janet Jackson's corps de funk — perhaps because that's what the actress in question was doing a couple years ago. And the film's street dancer, without much hue and cry, is without much hue: he's superduper white — which means, miracle de dieu, that the high culture chick and the street culture dude can actually make it, rather than having a brief encounter in traffic.

Indeed, this film's contribution to the genre (which turns out to be, in the same stroke, its annihilation) is to deliver the unproblematic wigger hero. He's neither an object of ridicule nor a villain; he's just the movie's lead black guy, and he just happens to be white. The movie, moreover, identifies this motion toward white black kids as ongoing, onrushing: while the film's only way to have an actual, pointedly white guy is to make him British, the wigger's younger sister turns out, in an otherwise-inexplicable aside, to be even more of a street-dancing b-girl than he is. The point is explicit: we are ever more closely approaching the moment when black/hip-hop culture is entirely naturalized as culture itself.

That's not to say that all conflicts have been somehow resolved by globalization's subsumption of cultural difference into a series of specious conveniences within a finally homogenous system. Having removed both the scrim of racial/ethnic difference and its interruption of the love story's easy progress, the film (and the logic of globalization it symptomtizes) is left with unadorned class difference, which, though it is almost the only conflict in the film beyond who will get what job in the end (these may indeed be seen as single conflict negotiated across different stages), remains peculiarly non-conflictual.

This may be because the film, while shot from the camera's point of view, nonetheless assumes everything to be understood form the perspective of its fancy people. Because there's no issue of protecting cultural identity, there's no reason — right? — for the poor kids to have any resistance to becoming rich kids. The film's wager is that dramas of cultural identity, now overcome, must cede the territory to class mobility porn. Perhaps that is "the camera's point of view" in Hollywood cinema?

the fragile

More frequently than seems imaginable, one hears people — poets, even — denounce literary critics with a grounding in political economy as so many rigid Party men ("the good Joe in browns," was it?); ditto the urge to equivocate deconstruction with moral relativism, with its apparently inevitable slide toward fascism, yawn. We distantly remember this game from Intro to Empty Rhetoric: "1, 2, 3 Hitler," it was called. Since there's no sane analogy between dictators and theorists, we might assume the purveyors of such are drooling morons, hoping for whatever charge they imagine is to be gotten from shouting "Stalin!" or "Hitler!" in a crowded auditorium.

And yet, how much fear it must require even to pretend that people who make accounts of things are the source of your domination! It's a fear that must in some way be respected, or at least grasped for its compelling hysteria: as when a long-bound man turns his fury on the person trying (perhaps futilely) to strike off his shackles and shrieks, "Stop hitting me!" Or as when someone with a mortgage they can't quite afford, and a job at which they keep staying late, decides to decry utopian thinking, knee-jerk Marxism, and etc.

We can all agree that almost all the attempts to counter power, by ideas or other means, are doomed to fail. Nonetheless, to fantasize them as your oppression, to lash out at them, is little but a clinging at the pant-leg of your actual boss, a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of capital...

walk, drift, etc.

Last week, the estimable Lisa Robertson happened upon the recent reissue of Michele Bernstein's Tous les chevaux du roi and, by way of her temporary online journal, translated a couple passages just for fun and our good fortune, starting with this three-way chat:

—What do you do anyways? I don’t really know .
—Reification, Gilles replied.
—It’s serious work, I added.
—Yes, he said.
—I see, Carole said with admiration. It’s very serious work with thick books and a lot of papers on a big table.
—No, Gilles said. I walk. Principally I walk.

Bernstein's roman a clef of early Situationist history, mostly of her relationship with Guy Debord (to whom she was funder, wife, and procuress), has never been translated — in English, on par with funeral orations of Bossuet, the book is notable for its absence.

And yet the book contains one of the most-famous and most-translated passages in French literature since Baudelaire. In 1966, students at the University of Strasbourg put out two pamphlets that would play a substantial role of the chain of history leading directly to the events of May '68. The latter was called "On the Poverty of Student Life." The former, "The Return of the Durutti Column," was a celebrated early example of what would eventually make Jim Behrle's blog possible: comic strips with new text written into the bubbles, blanks and balloons.

Somewhere in the middle of the comic, two cowboys (Pancho and Cisco) have a conversation on horseback — the very conversation from Bernstein that Lisa Robertson first translates. In the intervening forty years, the passage has appeared in English over and over, every time the Debord or the SI program is up for discussion (most notably the Greil Marcus article for Artforum, "The Cowboy Philosopher" and his following book, Lipstick Traces). Rod Smith quotes it in this interview. It's the last line of the bilingual French/English poem mentioned in this note by Juliana Spahr. And so on — the language is everywhere, including in the name of the Factory records band Durutti Column.

But what language? Robertston, in her translation, has made a quite peculiar (if not entirely unprecedented) choice to translate the celebrated punchline, Non, je me promène. Principalement je me promène, as "I walk. Principally I walk." This gets much of the line's self-ironizing tenor just right, after the big build-up about reification and the weightiness of theory — its deflationary quality, and its reminder that philosophy must be lived in the quotidian, not applied from above.

Still, it's an oddly flatfooted choice. This phrase is not meant simply to deflate theory, but to redirect it. Se promener is not the easy way to say "to walk," after all (marcher), though it does have that secondary meaning. It also has the flippant sense one hears in English when telling someone to buzz off, "go take a walk." Still, the choice by Bernstein is surely meant to invoke the Surrealist tradition ("the perpetual promenade in the midst of forbidden zones," as Breton decribed it in 1930). It must also have to do with SI practices — and, as surely as they recommended détournement of comic strips, their other program was the dérive, the drift through the city as a critical act. Given that there's no verb form of dérive, se promener is often taken as such. Indeed, the most-common translation of the last line, by far, is "I drift. Mainly I drift."

But that isn't quite perfect either — there are only imperfect translations. Robertson's version is useful because it makes this clear (in addition to looping the passage back to her own title). What does it mean to propose, as a fundamental activity, an action for which there is no verb? To what extent does the historical pressure of this passage — the way in which it exists un- and overtranslated at the same time, celebrated and unknown, presabsent — index the extent to which a new language is needed, not for infinitely subtle parsing, but for the most basic considerations? It is here that poetry and philosophy pass closest to each other...

excursive notes

• Best use principle: remarkable that the site, with its internal vistas, endless balconies and catwalks, bunkerlike pavilions, irregular outcroppings and overdetermined lines-of-sight, hasn't been consecrated to an ongoing paintball tournament.

• Another way to pose the situation: there are more cafés than there are great paintings.

• "Based on the example paintings, I want to go to the fuckin' niveau supérieur of the East."

• Compare to the Alamo: "race war Disneyland."

• Title of a section of the John Heartfield exhibit: "Battle of Images in Magazines." Possible reasons this couldn't be title for culture in general: none.

• "Passive appropriation may simply be another name for culture."

the da vinci code

There is nothing about the scene of the museum visit which is not preparation for shopping (the daily itinerary of the culture tourist, ambling from the Carrousel du Louvre to the Galeries Lafayette, assures us of this). After queueing to get in, one enters the grand gallery and surveys the goods. Perhaps you've come to see some piece in particular, perhaps you're wandering; something captures the eye. You stand before it, contemplate, discern, deliberate. Your mind, as practiced as a fingertip reading Braille, runs itself over the surface of an imagined life which could accomodate such objects. You evaluate, make a judgment. All the while, a seemingly unsatisfiable cupidity builds in you. That's the basic problem with the Louvre, the sense of loss which makes it all so poignant: you can't buy that shit.

The flagship Apple Store has opened in the center of Manhattan, at the southeast corner of Central Park. If one recalls an open plaza there, between 58th and 59th at the foot of palaces, decorated with a fountain or two, fear not. The store is literally cavernous, for it's almost entirely submerged — an irony, in that this underworld seems meant for the people who float above the surface of the globe, cosmopolites whose digital cameras store images of Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Paris. Nothing marks the plaza but for a gleaming glass portal: a cube, joisted by geometry and chrome, empty but for a hanging sculptural logo. Inside, a spiral stair winds down to the business level, around the column of an open-platform elevator.

On the day the store opened, and the next and the next, the line to get in stretched the length of the plaza and around the corner, corraled by metal crowd control barriers.

If one has not been to France, or seen The Da Vinci Code (which opened on the same day as the Apple Store and opens and closes at the Louvre), we here at jane dark's sugarhigh! have prepared these visual aids for understanding Apple's semiotic system:

Here's the geometric glass entry portal...

...with the queue along the fountain-bedecked plaza in the center of the metropolis...

...awaiting the spiral stair/platform elevator that carries clients down to the action...

...and here's the plaza at night, with glass portal illuminated...

...while here's how it looks quand il pleut.

Apple, with its doxology of aesthetics-first, MoMAlicious industrial design, is the ideal candidate for this project. That's not to say the likeness of museum and store is a new one; after all, the already-condemned underground mall in the heart of Paris pointedly named its longest promenade La Grande Galerie, after the infinite hallway in the Louvre hung with Renaissance paintings (the very run in which The Da Vinci Code begins). The Louvre itself, understanding the condition of its captive crowd, has installed its own underground mall on the path from museum hall to Metro. Consider the cheek-by-jowldom of boutiques and galleries in the 19th-cenury arcades, or the overcome descriptions of the first huge department stores, as Stendhal syndrome leapt into the agora. This correlation cannot be said to have been discovered in the first place, any more than the freezing point of water can be discovered. It can merely be named. It's the expression of a general rule of the era, a basic relation; each specific case educates us in how the rule is followed.

What we might admire about the Apple Store is not the perfection of its likeness, but how that perfection seeks to overcome similitude, to finally collapse the museum and the luxury boutique into a single episode, one which doesn't risk the client getting lost in the museum until the shops have closed, which returns the aura of the singular painting to the singularish piece of couture — an episode in which you can buy that shit, and victory is assured.

glass and irony

One supposes that Washington, District of Columbia, is least ironic of districts simply because it requires an incomprehensible avoidance of self-reflection to work for, in, or around the government and not notice you are a dupe executing a devastating business plan and calling it good works. Thus the cafe called Breadline serving the lunchtime needs of the laborers at the World Bank, deep within the vast volume of which we imagined was preserved the entirety of the Bretton Woods.

The inevitable encounter on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

further notes on cities

Is a city wall a quantity or a quality?

If one walks from the heart of Paris (the geographical center is here) toward one of the poorer banlieues — north to St-Denis, say — one will not necessarily pass any clear marking when one has left the city proper, clambering over the memory of a wall. That is, unless one passes through a last remnant of the 1845 wall, born with a price on its head. The city has had many walls, rising and falling as civic boundaries, and the needs for defense, for tolls and imposts, have changed; the 1860 expansion didn't come with ramparts, and the last wall was gone by 1925.

Against this absence, an experience: the northward stroll. If one pays attention, there are qualitative shifts as one leaves the center for the periphery: the tall buildings get taller, their designs more modern even as their physical condition grows more decrepit. The amount of sun that falls on the pavement decreases slowly, at about the same rate as the price of a coffee. The value of appearance changes, block by block. The maintenance of the downtown as a museum-city gives way to a more contemporary daily life — though this may be inaccurate, as who is to say whether the urge for preservationist ecologies is less modern than apartment towers or hardware stores? Either way, the tourist economy cedes pride of place to other forms of life (though not entirely, by any means).

But there is another way to quantify this radial stroll: one might rather note the steadily increasing percentage of darker skin, a geometric progression at least. This is the kind of quantity that is often experienced as a quality — difference rather than differential, often a difference charged and problematic.

The differentials of each quarter, the ratios, are calculable, knowable; this is the point. It's a set of quantities that describe one's departure from the Paris of postcards to the Paris of the news. And one of these quantities maps onto the city wall: a differential, a skin-tone palette, that means one has crossed a limit. However, it is not experienced as a figure, but as a feeling, a sense of place that poses as an abstraction and is exactly what is left of the material of the city wall.

Perhaps this is what certain feelings are: the traces of calculations that can no longer be made, or that one wishes not to make. Certainly this describes something about the experience of excess; certainly this informs the seemingly mystical complexity of modern markets. One suspects further that critical moments in history are defined by a welter of conversions between quantity and quality.

Meanwhile, one could do worse than to imagine what it would be like for another, differently-colored, to walk from St-Denis inward, toward downtown, quarter by quarter and block by block.

further notes on cities

"Psychogeographical zones" and "ambience" are necessary abstractions — or, not abstractions, but qualitative terms when the quantitative finally won't suffice. And there is a way within these ideas to understand the city as a not-unsubtle instrument of self-detection.

Ambling around a city which is specifically unfamiliar but filled with legibilities that thus feel familiar — a North American city for one who has spent years in North American cities — one can realize certain things measure of response to certain regions, neighborhoods, zones.

That is to say, when one comes to the neighborhood never-before-seen and feels at first an ease, a satisfaction...proceeding to the sense, the distant certainty that this is likely the place in which one would live if one lived in this pleasant city, one has discovered far less about the neighborhood than about oneself, about how one's tastes and pleasures and self-regards have become fixed.

Life is not on the side of the mute acceptance of this, alas.

soul music quiz

yeah the big boss man he likes to crack that whip,
I ain't nothin' but a number on his timecard slip.
I give him 40 hours and a piece of my soul,
Puts me somewhere at the botttom of his totem pole —

In the preceding Toby Keith lyric, specifically about the experience of wage labor, the word "soul" signifies which of the following concepts:

a) The immortal portion of a human being
b) The seat of the emotions, feelings, or sentiments; the emotional part of man's nature
c) A sense of ethnic pride among Black people and especially African Americans, expressed in areas such as language, social customs, religion, and music
d) Surplus value

Followup question: to what extent might the answer all of the above serve as a provisional concatenation of the ideas present in the idea of soul music?

explication du texte

Today's New York Times writes:

....That clause makes all the difference: if workers strike in the United States, they risk losing their jobs, but strikers in France do not fear for their jobs, regardless of whether they are union members. [1]

But most important, French unions have continued to play a leading role far beyond wage negotiations, fighting to shape a sort of workers' paradise [4] and amassing entitlements for the broader population along the way. It is primarily because of the strength of the unions that all workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks of vacation, affordable health care and a 35-hour week. [5]

This is an astonishing bit of journalism; one could spend a day meditating on the whiplash shifts between "fact" and "opinion," or more pointedly, the material and immaterial. Sentence [1] provides the all-important material explanation of why French workers feel able to strike; immediately, the article nervously suggests that they are a sort of docile bunch ("willing populace") who pursue their goals out of a kind of nostalgic abstraction — certainly not out of (just to pull something out of the blue) their own interests in how daily life is lived.

The next paragraph returns to some facts of labor, mystifying them at the same time. While noting factually that employees can join a strike without being part of the union and not fear for thier jobs, the article can't bring itself to note that this is true exactly because previous generations have "put pressure on the government." It then suggests [3] that the loss of pay in return for not working is somehow a strikingly insufficient punishment ("all they lose") — as if there were naturally some ethical dimension to showing up for one's wage job, some divine right that exists in the relation between employer and employed beyond wage negotiations.

With stunning indifference to its own rhetoric, the article in the very next sentence claims that, should the workers believe in some right beyond, whoops!, "wage negotiations," [4] they must be Communists ("workers' paradise": not the sublest code, sir). This villlainous spectre, when forced to appear in material form in the final sentence [5], turns out to be something like the basic protections that every worker in the world would hope for, and lacks only because their capacity to struggle for them has been systematically broken.

The article just barely stops short of saying that French workers, because of their myopic attachment to "entitlements" (health care is an entitlement, apparently. Can one take seriously a single word of anyone who talks like that?) are worse off and less productive than they are in a country without such roadblocks. Perhaps this hesitancy stems from the Times' recollection that this isn't actually the case.

Here at sugarhigh!, we should be clear: we find modern labor unions to be a revolutionary force only insofar as they mediate revolutions in capitalist production; their historical task is to make sure that increasing pressure on workers — to live less and produce more — is cushioned so that there won't be any substantial overturnings of the great apple-cart. We recall well the slow entry and swift exit of the CGT during France's last great unrest (all of which is why we believe, optimistically, that when Josh Corey writes of a union for poets, he means something far more like collectivity).

That said, it would be an error to suppose that the current labor action in France can be understood purely as a defense of the status quo, a maintenance of "entitlements" already in place. This is what the papers here and in France have endeavored to suggest, repeatedly, over the last week — including the Times, when it isn't paradoxically concocting its nostalgic anxiety about communism. Here are three reasons why not:

• The current issue does not concern some abstracted feeling that one is secure in one's job, a vague sensation that makes the cherries taste sweeter. Everyone (including the Times) admits that it is exactly and specifically the protection from unfair termination that allows workers to have any say in their own labor conditions — both now and in the future. The CPE (the law against which the current strikes are set) is part of an explicit removal of this protection, and thus a crippling blow to the possibility of any postive changes for laborers.

• The current unrest is part of a larger historical moment, which includes last autumn's riots in France no more more than the current debate about immigration and "guest-workers" in the United States — a moment in which the terms of the relationships between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised are being restructured. Each seemingly individual and local skirmish takes its place within an increasingly global confrontation; the rendering of any given struggle as irrelevant or insubstantial serves particular ends.

• It's a bit of nonsense, isn't it? By the same logic, the American resistance to the Townshend Act in the late 1760s was "a defense of the status quo," as was the Boston Tea Party. New taxes had been levied, and the colonists wished them to be unlevied — to return to the status quo, eh? This entire rhetoric is transparently absurd.

We are not suggesting these events are the beginnings of a revolution; likely, they will turn out to have been a systemic adjustment of labor relations as late capitalism seeks out a sleeker body to march across continents. But we remember well that no overturning comes from a single moment of athletic heroism. If the histories of the 1760s in the American colonies, the 1780s in France, the 1940s in India, or the 1980s in the Soviet bloc teach us anything, it is that — even as onlookers inevitably remark on their pointlessness — there must be quite a bit of calisthenics in the public square before any great weights are lifted, or thrown down.

house for mr. is-was

We are sympathetic with what we take to be our fair colleague's basic desire found herein: that, if one is to be thinking about something, it's better to know extensive and intensive stuff about it. An informed critic...etc, whether it be regarding literature or political economy.

Nonetheless: hmm. We would no more gloss "bourgeois," e.g., as a term of "19th century sociology" than we would gloss "Oedipal" as a term of 20th century psychoanalysis. While these may be the moments in which the idea has been most revelatorily described, the human relations expressed by the terms have been with us quite a while longer — and still obtain. As of this moment, here in this world, "bourgeois" is no more a nostalgia or an archaicism than is, say, "poverty," or "empire." But we are sympathetic again with the desire to put the idea in the past.

What would it mean to suggest, in France in 1785, that a peasant ought have knowledge of statecraft to speak about the King, about the condition and experience of being his subject — an experience that permeated daily life? We should certainly imagine that any subject of the King would be both entitled (har har) and qualified to express her opinion on the matter, and even to take up arms to change conditions; surely a theorized knowledge of Machiavelli's texts wasn't required?

And finally, what of those who do the endless discursive work in service of capitalist chic — which is to say, almost everyone, almost every day? One suspects they too lack the appropriate technical knowledge — yet this ignorance goes unremarked and unregistered, as does most such ignorance in support of domination. Do they need less rhetorical policing?

algebrazeera

The concept of reverse snobbery is every bit as bankrupt as the idea of reverse racism: a rhetorical device with no analytic base. It cannot be practiced as it cannot describe actual conditions. To imagine that snobbery can simply be conceived of "in reverse" is to imagine that the antagonism between the classes, and the forces available to prosecute that antagonism, are equivocal — and that these antagonistic forces could be reversed simply through choice.

There could be no greater misunderstanding of the basic idea of social class than that present in the term.

upright

1) regarding Steve Evans' formerly-serialized and soon-to-be-Baffled essay on Poetry Foundation and the apparitions of the fiscal imaginary in contemporary poetry, we note this passage from Ted Kooser's seemingly-unironically-titled The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice For Beginning Poets. Regarding unconventional grammar, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, typographic devices, or "any unusual shape in the way the poem is laid out on the page," the Poet Laureate advises, Don't be afraid to use the following devices, but give them a cost-benefit analysis.

2) If that's is supposed to funny, we'd prefer a somewhat more knowing rube's take on the economics of advice, free melody included! File under "game recognize game."

3) We are particularly bemused by Kooser's concerns about funny-shaped poems; he recommends one squint at a draft so thoroughly that it becomes pure shape, and then measure it as geostructure; is it about to fall over? Or does it stand solid and dependable? This urge to spirit poetry away from the realm of idea, to make it verifiable from the perspective of the craftsman-laborer—to render language as having the same relation to physics as do joists and drywall, columns and roofs—is a powerful one, to be sure. How are poems even to be considered as things if they don't conform to the logic of the most commonly desirable things? And how will we experience ourselves appropriately as virtuous craftsmen and laborers, rather than layabouts and leeches?

4) As one loves the foursquare prairie home, the common thing par excellance, the populist/individualist iteration of the forum and the very ideal of both concrete and abstract stability—one must hate certain kinds of poems as one must hate ruins, for their failure to be things. A ruin is not a negative thing. First it is obviously not a thing.

5) In other notes, have we mentioned the excellence of new hyphy track "18 Dummy," by The Federation? And in general sung the wonders of Rick Rock?

6) If we could actually do anything beyond the abstract realm of the affect worker—if we could actually manufact things—we would make the world a better place, possibly by wildcrafting designer ringtones for our friends. Under current conditions, the economy at the edge of the economy is a place where sweetness pools.

7) Having a big comeback around sugarhigh! world headquarters: "Wichita Lineman," Glen Campbell.

8) The possibility explored in the aforementioned Evans essay is one that is everywhere sullenly disavowed: that turns in poetic style could be explicitly (which is to say, not causally) connected to the styles of political regimes, even if many of the poets involved fancy themselves apolitical or even voted against the incumbent. Moreover, the call from Dana Gioia, Ted Kooser, the doyens of Poetry and the Poetry Foundation, for a return to a well-wrought poetic is not a new cry; surely it resounded in the France of Mallarmé-Dreyfus, the America of Ginsberg-McCarthy. If this moment is haunted, it's not a new ghost. Nor is the naming of the ghost a new fact; here's one appellation, written half-a-centtury ago:

...anything hybrid provokes the strongest rejection. The aesthetic condemnation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination, verified by social psychology, to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it. Hitler's empire put this theorem to the test: The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure the roof rested on columns.

matters of degree

Short version of long post: take your relativism to the moon. Like Martha Stewart, James Frey did it for the money. To let him off the hook because we should be paying attention to worse misdeeds won't fly. Nothing will fly until he admits he did it to get your money, that this is his relation to both truth and art. Truth and art don't get better until we confront that unequivocally. The language of therapy that he and Oprah invoke with equally relentless ease is a perfect description of what such language is for: an alibi for profit. If we're worried that we're going to run out of fury and need to allocate with care, we're not angry enough.

[short addenda for struggling readers: this note isn't in the logical form of premises and conclusions though it's interesting if you need that to engage. To experience e.g. the Frey case as an exception in the realm of language abuse rather than a rule is to play along. We fight out of optimism. ]

serial carnage and the rise of Ron Slate

Steve Evans' five-part (or three, depending on how you measure) analysis of Poetry Magazine's huge bequest and the rise of the Poetry Foundation, to be printed in full in The Baffler, can be found online—in order—here, here, and here. Explicating the social logic that speaks through characters like Dana Gioia and John Barr with such clarity seems exactly what arts journalism could aspire to: historicized art criticism, or material aesthetics.