Fragment: Action Figures 2

The great events -
they are not our loudest hours
but rather, our stillest of hours.
Through the fury
the earth revolves inaudibly
silence seeping like a pregnant moon
saturating a secret valley
blank meadows opening to cold white light
flooding the valley, a beatification -
Power, turned gracious,
descends into the visible

(kindness, the final self-conquest of the powerful)


My stillest hour speaks in a whisper
the stillest of sounds which brings on the storm
and goes forth as a shadow leading the way.
Great events rarely roar
as cannons over killing fields -
When the noise and smoke clears
very little has happened.
Of little consequence
are mummified cityscapes
and statues thrown down in mud.

Mayday!

Posting will slow to a crawl here for a bit. We're moving into our new house in a week or so, and we're busy painting and all that good stuff before we move in. The pace should pick up 'round about the end of June or early July. In the meantime, allow me to annoy you with another playlist:

In Rotation - Late Spring

Black Dice – Repo

Unknown Instructors – The Master's Voice

J Dilla – Donuts

Gnarls Barkley – The Odd Couple

Al Green – Let's Stay Together

Giant Sand – Stromasfull

Boredoms – Super ae

Masayuki Takayanagi/New Directions Unit – Mass Hysterism in Another Situation

Max Roach – We Insist!: Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite

Darkspace – Dark Space III

Sonic Youth – Live at the Continental Club Texas 1986

Dimitri Shostakovich - Symphony No. 7

Mahler - Symphony No. 8 in E flat - "Symphony of a Thousand"

Birthday Party - Mutiny/The Bad Seed

Harry Partch - Delusion of the Fury

Einsturzende Neubauten - Strategies Against Architecture

Doom - Special Herbs Vol. 9 & 10

Napalm Death - Mentally Murdered

Dicks - "Hate the Police" and Kill from the Heart

The Germs - Lexicon Devil 7"

Flipper - early 7"'s

The Mekons - Retreat from Memphis

Ween - The Pod

Until next time, stay beautiful, Ponyboy.

The Jukeboxes of Clarksville, Pt. 3

Welcome to Moe's!

This is the story of a man who woke up one morning with a song stuck in his head. A classic tune about feeling good, sharing the love and doing your own thing. His “thing” happened to be food. Southwestern fare, with a special appreciation for the form and function of a tortilla. He experimented with fresh ingredients and had an appropriate name for each creation. He opened a restaurant, and made it known loud and clear that no matter how many times a day he had to say it, everyone who came through the door would feel welcome. And if you stuck around long enough, you’d probably hear that song that helped make a man, a legend. -- from the Moe's Southwest Grill website

Perched on the corner of a strip mall, Moe's Southwest Grill gives you two walls of windows instead of just one. The spacious feel is accentuated by the open "industrial style" ceiling in place of the usual dropped acoustic tile ceiling. The walls are covered with commercial counterfeits of “outsider art”, fake Southwestern geegaws, and pseudo-quaint coinages such as “If you don't have fun saying guacamole, you're probably not saying it right”. The menu on the wall tags their burritos with names such as Triple Lindy, Joey Bag of Donuts, Art Vandalay, and so on. Their tacos go by names such as the Overachiever and The Funk Meister. As the door swings open & you breach the threshold, every employee in the joint yells “WELCOME TO MOE’S!” at you. You imagine the ones who don’t get fired. You immediately become more than a little annoyed with the tool who came up with that idea. You immediately become more than a little annoyed with Moe's faux feel-good 60's hipster/hippie-isms.

The typical Moe's burrito isn't exactly haute cuisine, or even particularly memorable, but at least it (seemingly) isn't the same evil processed shit you encounter at a burger joint, or Taco Bell. Moe's seems to be at least a faltering step in the right direction of real food with fresh ingredients. As such, Moe's flaunts the assumption of a kind of base-level superiority, which happens to eerily echo the assumptions of base-level superiority the Boomer generation itself has. These assumptions manifest as an easy-going hubris, which is not the less annoying for its good nature.

The playlist at Moe's is classic rock, natch. It would be virtually indistinguishable from a normal over-the-air classic rock station if it had adverts and announcers. The playlist generally eschews the rowdy side of rock (light on the biker rock) in favor of the more mainstream hippie mainstays: The Byrds, Jim Croce, "Cat's in the Cradle", "And I Love Her", etc. It also is not afraid to stray outward to such touchpoints as James Brown, Frank Sinatra, Big Band, the Bee Gees, INXS (?!), Ray Charles, and so on. Like most any classic rock station, if you are a fan of rock music of any kind, and you listen long enough, something will play that you like. Taken singly, most of the songs are just fine. Taken as a whole, and taken as part of the hipster/hippie context, the playlist is annoying.

Moe's burritos are just dandy, all things considered. I even applauded when they took a step back from the "all things good for you" aesthetic and added pulled pork to the menu (not a bold move, considering swine's position in the sacred foodie pantheon). The thing is, Moe's is not selling burritos, Moe's is selling the sixties. You know, the sixties that is FUCKING EVERYWHERE in the media these days, the sixties that is politely waiting for The Great Generation (WW II) to die off to finally have a full monopoly of the American landscape. Indeed, Moe's is selling the sixties, Dennis Hopper is selling the sixties on behalf of some hedge fund, Viagra is selling the sixties, every bank and insurance company, EVERYBODY is selling us the sixties. And why is everybody trying to sell us the sixties? Because almost every single Boomer is completely convinced of the moral, intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, even physical superiority of the New Great Generation. And being totally, irrevocably convinced of the superiority of the New Great Generation, all they have to do to sell us their great ideas and concepts is to let us know that they are coming from THE SIXTIES.

The sixties were dying a slow toxic death in the mid-70's when the capitalists started to get involved . . . or rather, when the "revolutionaries" decided to become capitalists. The selling of the sixties began around that time, when the salesmen decided that a little hair of the sixties dog would cure that seventies hangover. The selling began in earnest when the New Great Generation self-analyzed their guilt over being capitalists almost into oblivion (almost! They still are just guilty enough to have to rationalize everything they sell by pointing to its inherent goodness, which of course is owed to its being a product of their own imaginations/toils, which means it derives its goodness from the Boomer's own inherent goodness). It started with The Beatles, the Summer of Love, tie-dye, rock -n- roll (not the same as The Beatles), and sex, and eventually evolved into the mask of total superiority that we have to deal with today. Perhaps most annoyingly they sell the sixties as youth culture, and expect it to be EVERYBODY ELSE'S youth culture as well . . . repackaged, degraded simulacra of the events that were more myth than reality to begin with. They expect their hippie-isms to be hip . . . and that's not just wrong, that's pathetic. Everyone is entitled to play with their juvenile identities as much as they wish, but ultimately, a tie-dye shirt is as defective a cultural marker as a Playboy bunny or a Nike swoosh.

I have to admit that I, too, am a fan of the sixties. I love loud guitars and feedback. I love crazy, insistent drums and singers who believe what they say matters. I love bangs. I love sunglasses. I love left-wing politics. I love all those black power free jazz guys (and even a few gals) pushing every limit thrown in front of them, including good sense. I love fast, loud cars driven in a homicidal/suicidal manner. I love the saturation of sex. I love wacked-out Marxist European intellectuals who actually believe revolution is imminent. I love wacked-out European intellectuals who think that Marx has long been passé. And yes, the sixties do mark the point that America began to awaken from its parochial slumber (a process still in its infancy, unfortunately). Without the sixties, we would not see a generation of the most socially conservative, fundamentalist Christians now coming into power that care almost as much for environmental and poverty issues as they do about eliminating abortion and gay rights. Above all, I love the sixties for the idea that you can CHANGE THE WORLD.

Yet it's clear that such monumental turmoil pulls much in its wake. The sixties are about narcissism as much as they are about anything else. There is something about "newly-won freedom" that devolves from wonder, power and excitement on down to hedonism to bottom out in a kind of solipsistic dissolution. The grand victories in civil rights lead everyone to see themselves in some way as a repressed minority so that they may personally share in the "rights" revolution, so that they too belong. Today, the civil rights battle for people repressed because of race, sex, religion, nationality, income, and sexual preference has to share media time with pathetic degraded civil rights-styled nonsense such as "airline passengers' bill of rights" and "consumers' bill of rights". It is a tribute to the leveling effect of the "everything is everything" sixties fake equality mindset that mainstream news media can equate the complaints of consumers with the Bill of Rights completely without irony. Ultimately, the legacy of the sixties is massive and ambivalent, unlike the unambiguously hip goodness its shills present to us with brain dead smiles.

And so the violent tumult of an entire decade gets degraded like faulty mimeographs into small empty talismans of commercialism. I like Moe's burritos just fine. I could switch up my choices enough so that I could eat there several times a week and not get tired of the food. Their trademark salsas are actually pretty damn good in spite of the ridiculous names. I like most of the music that is played over the speakers. And indeed, unlike the corporate fast food along the
Veteran's Parkway/Lewis and Clark Parkway mall corridor, this food doesn't seem specifically designed to kill me (even if it is still a long jog away from being healthy). But, the New Great Generation's sales job gives me indigestion. That, and the fact that some poor sucker could be called to account for not yelling "Welcome to Moe's" every time that damn door swings open.

One Month

We've only got just over a month left in Butchertown. On one hand, we can't wait to move. On the other, this has been a very interesting place. It deserves a tribute, and indeed it will get one . . . eventually.


In Rotation

Boris - Absolutego and Amplifier Worship
Masayuki Takanayagi/Kaoru Abe - Mass Projection
Millionaires - Bling Bling Bling
Pauline Oliveros - Deep Listening
The Goslings - Grandeur of Hair
Tommy Johnson - "Canned Heat Blues"
Spacemen 3 - Dreamweapon
Neil Young - On the Beach
Various Artists - The Crime Scene
OST - Godzilla Vol. I (1954 - 1979)
Ravel - Daphnis and Chloe
Kurt Vile - Constant Hitmaker and God is Saying This to You
Rob Bayne - Billionaire Plays Guitar
Lightning Bolt - Hypermagic Mountain
Bukka White - The Complete Bukka White
Latent Chaos - Cafe of Onlyness
Various Artists - Harmonica Blues
Various Artists - The Sound of the Swamp: Best of Excello Vol. 1
Bassholes - When My Blue Moon Turns Red Again
Johnny Cash - American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around
Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique


Headin' into derby weekend . . . and I'm out.

The Death of Thought: Common Sense

I have learned that to be right and useful, one must accept a continuing divergence between approved belief - what I have elsewhere called conventional wisdom - and the reality. And in the end, not surprisingly, it is the reality that counts.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"Common sense" is so called because it is (supposedly) truth that is known and accepted by most everyone. Common sense makes an appearance on both sides of the culture wars, but is most frequently cited by cultural conservatives in a bid for (or assumption of) populist acceptance. Wherever common sense appears, it must be resisted: common sense is the most virulent of anti-intellectualisms. Common sense is the death of rational thought.

Common sense is invoked to avoid thinking. Common sense is an intellectual shortcut: any "truth" it expounds is an unexamined truth, at least at the point it exists as common sense. The more one's moral and intellectual makeup depends on common sense, the less one is personally involved in the moral and intellectual process.

Ideally, we would develop morally and intellectually first from personal experience, and secondly from our interfaces with the ideas of others. It is important to understand that moral and intellectual development is a process - one would hope a never ending process - as opposed to a nirvana-esque state of enlightenment we hope to achieve. Every day we have experiences, and we struggle (one hopes it's a struggle, anyway) to put the experiences into the context of the moral and intellectual framework of our lives. We do the same with the ideas and values of others as we encounter them. These experiences and ideas are the things we "know" and the things we "believe". As we come to understand moral and intellectual development as a process, we continually question the things we "know" and "believe" in the context of new and ever-changing information. Our ideas and values are subject to constant and never-ending scrutiny. As unexamined "truth", common sense is the enemy of evolutionary thought. I'm not so naive as to believe that life completely innocent of assumption is possible; but the more life is examined, the more new truth comes into focus. This is the "truth process", an evolutionary process that we, as rational beings, owe allegiance.

* * * * *

The truth process always requires new information to continue. Lack of new information leads to the end of the process. New information only arises in a break with the known: it is only at this break (Badiou's "event") we can re-contextualize our world, only at this break that we can examine what we know in a new light. A muscle develops by breaking through its sheathing in a continual process of injury and renewal; the intellect and its double, morality, develop in exactly the same way.

The truth process requires two seemingly contradictory things at the same time: fanatical devotion to what we know as well as the fanatical devotion to questioning what we know. All truth must be hard-earned in this way. Anything less than both a radical questioning and a radical allegiance undermines the truth process . . . throws it out of balance, if you will.

Common sense can take the form of radical allegiance, but it is never (as we've seen) a radical questioning. As surely as it is a way to avoid thinking, it is also a way to avoid the impact of the break, the catastrophe of the event. Common sense is the unbroken sheathing that imprisons and atrophies the muscle of the moral intellect.

* * * * *

I've consciously dialed back my rhetoric for this little rant, lest it become political in nature. While it's true that conservatives most consistently evoke common sense (Galbraith's "conventional wisdom" is exactly the same thing), the intellectual poverty exists beyond party or philosophical allegiances . . . as surely as the concept of tax cuts as economic stimulus is ridiculous, so is the altruistic model of foreign aid. The curse of common sense exists anyplace where too many people hold too many unexamined truths, whatever those truths may be.

REJECT COMMON SENSE!

Texas Wants to Secede?

And someone wants to stop them? Why?

Columbine

I'm here today not to write about Columbine, but to tell you why I'm not . . . which, at the end of the day, amounts to the same thing.

I've been making notes on Columbine, Oklahoma City, Iraq, and Afghanistan for a while now. They usually reach out toward Foucault and Baudrillard, among others. Yesterday, I sat down on a rainy day to watch some basketball & dig through my notes, so I could have this post done on the 10th anniversary of the Columbine massacre.

As I rumbled through my notes, the Lakers were destroying a good Jazz team on TV. It seemed that every ad break was dedicated to Oprah's 10th Anniversary of Columbine Special. Sprinkled in were various mentions of other memorials on news shows and the like. I was beginning to feel like I was part of the gold rush in a way I didn't intend. The word "exploitation" was on the tip of my tongue.

I'm not criticizing Oprah here: the nation expects its intrusive and controlling but kind and well meaning auntie to address the anniversary that still is a source of grief and confusion. And if the daily news on April 20th, 2009 didn't memorialize the Columbine massacre, then something would be amiss. Without having read the book in question, I am willing to assume that the gentleman who wrote the book that Oprah built her show around is well meaning and intelligent, a man who values truth and insight above his own personal reputation, which he is staking on Columbine.

But somewhere today, someone will point to Columbine in an attempt to further an agenda. Someone will say "look at Columbine" when what they really mean is "look at me". Someone will talk of martyrs, someone will talk of monsters, and neither will add to the greater understanding of humanity. Someone on Fox News will say "If the security guards at Columbine had guns . . . ", and someone at CNN will say "If guns were outlawed . . . " and both will be ignoring the point. The point is this: 10 years ago, 15 kids died at a high school in Colorado.

Somewhere between sober memorials, Oprah's typically grandiose attempts to be the world's psychic savior, and blithering idiots on cable news shows, there is a line. The line is fuzzy and unclear, and I'm not sure where it is, but it does exist. I also feel I know just where in this scheme I fall.

I can assure you that my intentions are good; but at the same time, I can't help but feel I'm scratching at a wound needlessly by posting on this anniversary. I believe what I have to say about Columbine (and Iraq and Oklahoma City and Afghanistan) is worth saying . . . but I'm not going to say it today.

The chance of anyone with a personal connection to Columbine reading this is virtually nil, but I have always approached this blog as being fully in the public sphere, even if few sort through the noise to find it. As a public (if obscure) author, it would be irresponsible of me to exploit this anniversary for my purposes. Anything I have to say on April 20, 2009, will be equally valid June 12th, 2009. I will post my essay in the future.

Instead, allow me to light a candle. This song, "Columbine", is by Rob Bayne, a songwriter and friend of mine. It is far more appropriate than a philosophical rant. Please listen to it.

07 - Columbine.mp3