Ineradicable difference, to a CEO, is just a smelly guy on the bus, to the rest of us

Progression through unlearning makes every idiot with a mic seek out comparisons





many of which make a man want to eat away all memory and all resonance . . . .








Potential never paid bills, never could look the long run in the face. Drive did some things, but it didn't turn one round ball into another, one stage of grief into an incipient stage of triumph. "World's greatest, undisputed" - ironically it means that when the end comes, there really is no point in carrying on the conversation.











Every search for the new savior kneels down before the swift na-na of hindsight. I'm not talking about Chuck D's soundtrack for Denzel's basketball movie - I'm talking about a player who came up bearing the ersatz traits of the thing we all missed more than we could say, and ended being just another PAC-10 player of whom Hubie Brown might say, "There's some talent there, yes . . . but not the game." And that is just late 90s nostalgia. Dont get me started on Jayson Williams/Bobby Hurley Duke point guard cursedness, unless you are willing to countenance the notion that the distributor for a West Point man is always already vulnerable. Goodness gracious me.


























New eras make old highlights more luminous, or is that just a function of old eyes making new light out of old images?

Eat what's on your plate

graffiti in Miami

Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''

What Ari Fleischer and Scott McLellan wake up to at the 4 am nighsweat time


1. For the second time in five years, I have booked a flight departing at 6 am, having thought I was booking a flight departing at 6 pm. Perhaps a reason I have only booked three flights in the last five years. Fuck me running.

2. Here is the person behind the series, "The Wire." Am I suggesting that this is worth minutes of your life? I am. Do I know you? Not in the Biblical sense, no, but I think he has things to say that you should hear.







3. Cant Stop Wont Stop
Out Stealing Horses
God's Pocket
I am not Jackson Pollock


What are the books on which the cup of coffee precariously sits?





4.
"It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme — I am tempted to say evil — genius . . . It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I’m a little startled myself, but it’s been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares."


What NY Times Critic A.O. Scott, with whom my friend Scott wants to be entombed, says about Johnny Depp's new joint, Sweeney Todd?

Core principles are those without which coherence of self is necessarily compromised

Suppositions

1. There is currently a 23 year old graduate of an Ivy League university, with a stellar resume and a banging GPA, to whom the task of assessing Chelsea Clinton’s record as a financial consultant has been given. Whom employs the said 23 year old is an open question – there are probably six or seven instances of the genus currently opining about the task on Facebook, and the salaries of each individual tasked with this specific research objective, when combined, possibly dwarfs the average income earned by Americans by a factor of at least four (but maybe not). How to fix America – take the $$ proferred to people who represent and are paid by the people who seek to lead, apply it to the national debt, subtract by a factor of seven times the craziness of Mardi Gras last year, and add the average number of kilowatt hours recorded on a combine owned by an Iowa farmer who is a card-carrying member of the Ethanol Is Good Consortium and who owns at least 3000 acres of fertile corn-hospitable land with which to butter his (or her) bread.
2. There is currently a 55 year old mother of three who lives in or near the Quad Cities and who can summon a precinct captain to her house in less than an hour (weekday, evening hours) with so much as an aleatory doubt about her chosen candidate’s electability.
3. Dan Grable is a prize endorsement for any candidate worth his or her salt.

Cult/Sport/Lit/Heart Hybridity

If you don't have a sport or a sport spectator moment that either tore you in half or
consummated some essential part of your being for a moment, then you may doubt that there is an area of overlap within which aesthetics and athletics fuse. This is basically some of what's going on behind Billups's new thing, which is here and which may tax your patience but stick with it . . .

end of year and all that pop n jazz

Here’s the requisite Broken Social Scene pick, which sounds resentful but is not; more evidence of their having done something. “All My Friends” who did ecstasy out in the meadow when the corn had just planted . . . staring into the bonfire and slamming miller lites until the heart stopped its worrisome beating . . . and sliding through every class with just enough effort to hear the hints the teacher gave that allowed for exemplary grades (b/c you’re not dumb) . . . but we didn’t have facepaint or suits. We had ford accords and gravel roads. I would argue that is not a distinction without a difference, but nor is it a completely delusional identification – each to their own obsolescence (and sometimes obsolescence is a good thing – feel me?).






Well, yes, Feist, you are precious, and I cannot deny that. So many primary colors. And the offspring they make. I thoroughly, unequivocally enjoy this. Which is ‘cause I’m old. See 1 2 3 4. And (I’m looking again) is it all one shot – so to speak, given the likelihood of possible alterations? Yes I do believe so.


And here is health “heaven” – who knew so much drama resides in airborne ski possibilities?





One thing punk rock does is make your relatives believe the end is near. On that ground, MIA is punk rock – and if after watching the vid, you don’t want to go to India, you (I assert) are immune to the temptation adventure poses (assuming you, like me, have never entered Southeast Asia):




whoa prinzhorn dance school – I am such a sucker for bass lines – and then you go English on me, looking all proper and like – plus images of labor (sawing, screwing, and burning???). “Beeswax, beeswax” – that could be nothing or else a secret invocation that everything is about to be over. nice maul, nice file, nice hammer, nice mini-ax. E.P. Thompson is thrumming in his dear Britsh grave – and let’s be honest: british accents make it all better. Here you go.



economy of movement. Work it out.




and to the contrary, music composed by an Austin TX band can have resonance across cultures, vis a vis a yellow malleable toy-like avatar of the song it seeks to commemorate.




OH – WUH, OOH!

Cause your style is like dying in my sleep - I don't feel it

1)

The cold war epithet "real politik" - - - -> = "war on terrorism's "real moral"


Maybe it just comes from an extended session perusing old West Wing scenes on youtube but I have this resurgent sense that we've glossed over the significance of a discussion of torture, but I'd rather ignore it because addressing it would pull me into a morass of conceptual Doublethink, the likes of which I'd rather get caught up in. So, in time-honored fashion, I resort to the block quote, the origin of which should be clear from the use of footnotes and syntactical OCD:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such
thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard
the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims
but as democratic martyrs, "sacrifices on the altar of freedom"?* In
other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability
to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus,
that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices
in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of
our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

n still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every
few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or
thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a
democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without
subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer
to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because
the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high
price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of
the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned
about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between
Franklin's time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national
conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of
(a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and
protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected
leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure
the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo,
Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive
Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the
Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment
that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and
property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate
on whether they're worth it? Was there no such debate because we're
not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually
become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider
whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

FOOTNOTES:
1. Given the strict Gramm-Rudmanewque space limit here, let's just
please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes—an
open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist
10, pluralism, due process, transparency ... the whole democratic
roil.

2. (This phrase is Lincoln's, more or less)

2) I had a dream recently involving a steeply terraced classroom (think upper deck Comiskey, which always gave me the willies) with a computer at each spot, black screen, cordless mouse, and all the students were simply playing with their mouses, having no discernible effect on the blackness of the screen. I entered through the side, and realized I was supposed to be teaching something. But walking to the front, in front of the podium, didn't seem possible. The students were almost grotesquely diverse - every kind of skin color, hair color, style, etc - though they all seemed to be between 18 and 24, or thereabouts. Except they were very small, such that none could touch the floor with their feet. I think it may have a nightmare, as the staring/watching them continued for a long time, and the anxiety re: what I should be doing seemed to be directly proportional to the time I spent watching. Take that and run a 5K with it, if you want.


3) A case for sluttishness, corroborated with scripture

Probably not good to check out at work or in a classroom with lots of 15 year olds

but still (fake blood + prosthetic arm-based assemblage of weapons + rampant over the top violence)

Being confused is so much more admirable than being sullen

It’s right to say that a song you can’t get away from inflicts a certain kind of punishment on you, so that you can neither escape, assimilate, or reject whatever hold it aims to have. Good art – the kind that punctures your skein of normalcy and lifts you above the everyday functionality of feeding yourself, answering to the body’s execratory functions, and maintaining whatever degree of fidelity to the expected thresholds of self-presentation in the early 21st century (hygiene, small-talk, answering the phone) – makes promises it cannot keep and makes you feel like its shortcoming is somehow your fault. This is part of the genius of Eminem’s “Stan” – it lets the air out of the dream that a fan’s absolute identification with an artist offers recoupable returns.
For the past two days, whenever time and technology allow it, I’ve listened to “The President’s Dead” by a band called Okkervil River. I have an addictive personality; sometimes I’ll read a book cover to cover, and cover to cover again. Likewise with songs/albums: I’ve had the same CD playing in my car since September, though that’s partially the result of the CD player being very selective in what CDs it will allow to be played; when I was teaching, I listened to the last Sufjan Stevens album from the time I got home to the time I went to bed for two weeks. Other examples (Wallace’s “good old neon,” “usual suspects” at 15, cosmological constants first year in college, Two Gallants for endless walks through stupid streets for the entire second half of August, Les Savy Five’s “Rage in the Plague Age” last week, etc) reinforce my susceptibility to being caught up in the thing itself, working with each new exposure to unearth a newly resonant moment that calls into question whatever notion of the larger whole I had conceived. “The President’s Dead” came alive to me when I first heard the “rat-tat-tat” entrance of the snare drum, effectively ending the acoustic guitar/narrative folk strain of the song’s first part while enacting the “three shots” line. This is an intentionally incendiary song, and though I’ve grown less enamored with being incendiary for incendiary’s sake, I think it works. Have a listen.