Calling

He'd spent most of the past eight years in this confessional. The last to repent before him, some poor woman who carried the stench of congealed sausage fat smeared on brown paper, had trailed away from this cozy, curtained sanctuary months ago. The smell, an hour later. Actually, he was glad. For, you see, he could no longer answer the call of a God so great, he himself being so small. The first time he could not answer happened while staged on the alter. Standing, the flock kneeling before him, his hands just flaked away and his shoulders bolted across the room, fixed to the walls, lead beams bearing the full pull of the Earth, such that he surely could never handle the wine again, or the bread again, the blood and the body. Then his soul bled itself and scarred down the middle at exactly the moment when two other souls should have been joined in matrimony. Weeks later, his eyes froze, their last tears icing the mummy's silence on his lips, so that he could offer no comfort to the dying. And, now? He could no longer forgive, because all was forgiven. Now he could only, need only, give thanks!

Is there another kind of advertising?

Read this Washington Post article about the rainbow Oreo. Read it in a dry monotone voice.

About "The Kids in the Hall" TV show

Re-watching this series, I'm reminded it wasn't that funny. But the show's not-being-funny is an acceptable risk--acceptable because its value for me lie in its ethos. "The Kids in the Hall" cast consisted of comedic performers more so than comedy actors; they were creatives rather than laugh-getters, and their schtick was absurdity. Any given sketch might (1) focus on the orthodoxy of their having to have a premise or be funny or be likeable or act famous, (2) have no premise and instead start in the middle of a scene, or (3) be a monologue. "The Kids in the Hall" was more like "Monty Python" than "Saturday Night Live", but shared properties of both, combining them and re-interpreting them as something pretty unique. Some credit for the show's willingness to take risks belongs undoubtedly to Lorne Michaels. But despite this, it doesn't make for a lot of entertaining television.

Notes

• I can only watch in very small doses.

Billy Corgan on Billy Corgan and music today

Billy Corgan has caught a little hell for talking shit about Radiohead. But now, having read what he said in this interview, I think folks have misunderstood him. Here is the controversial part (parentheses mine):

From ’89 on I’ve had people tell me who I am. And they pick my personality as if it’s a one or two-dimensional thing, and I’m more like a tetrahedron. I can’t think of any people outside of Weird Al Yankovic who have both embraced and pissed on Rock more than I have. Obviously there’s a level of reverence, but there’s also a level of intelligence to even know what to piss on. ‘Cause I’m not pissing on Rainbow. I’m not pissing on Deep Purple. But I’ll piss on fuckin’ Radiohead, because of all this pomposity. This value system that says Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) is more valuable than Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple). Not in the world I grew up in, buddy. Not in the world I grew up in. 

So I find myself defending things. Is Ritchie Blackmore a better guitar player than me and Jonny Greenwood? Yes. Have we all made contributions? Yes. I’m not attacking that. I’m attacking the pomposity that says this is more valuable than that. I’m sick of that.

I don't think Corgan is attacking Radiohead. He's using them as an example of a popular band that critics deify while trashing other artists, himself in particular. The "pomposity" is the pompousness of critics who fawn over select bands and citicize those whom its safe to criticize. Corgan's predictably irreverent response would be to "piss on fuckin’ Radiohead" because no one else will--not because Radiohead deserves to be pissed on.

In answering a different question, Corgan expands on this:

Look, we’re all insecure in our own ways, most of us. You’ve got a Facebook with a few hundred friends. If you do something truly radical, are you ready to withstand the forty negative comments? Most people aren’t. So they’re getting peer pressured at levels they don’t even realize. It’s what you don’t say. 

It’s like the government spying on us. Right? Now it becomes about what we don’t say. The same thing with culture. I’m just willing to say it, and deal with the forty negative comments.

To the extent that anything can be interesting, Corgan sort of can be because he's a bit of a paradox. He's trying to be a rock star but he thinks we have none, can have none, and that it's pointless and vain. As he did during the 90's early alt-rock scene, he's the champion of zeroes and outcasts because he is not accepted as cool (anymore); but he's also the antithesis of that guy because he makes a spectacle of himself by dating porn whores, shaving his head, saying inflammatory crap and whatnot. This paradox is him now.

He approaches all this later in this same interview:

And the funny thing is that I’ve been playing with conceptual identities all along. And I’ve watched each turn, as I’ve adapted to each cultural identity, how I’m attacked for not being this or that, or too much of this or too little of that. Meanwhile the real me is standing behind it all noting where the deflector shield works and where it doesn’t. And what gets through. Now I’m actually strong enough where I don’t need a mask. I’m just myself.

And then he brings this back to the original point--that he gets criticized unfairly (unfair because the playing field isn't even):

Well what I’m saying is rather than be celebrated as a radical who’s continually subverted the system and turned his back on much greater commercial realities than I’ve embraced, I’m celebrated as this fucking weirdo who just won’t go away!

Is he an ass? Oh yeah. And maybe he's wrong, too, but he might as well be understood before he gets shit on for being so.

Motivated

About an article indirectly about authors and their texts

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a sort-of interesting article titled "The Unabomber's Pen Pal" that is about a college professor trying to teach the anti-technology ideas espoused by Ted Kaczynski among others (but especially by him). This professor seeks to remove from the remote Montana cabin and the remote mind of its terrorist author the ideas captured in Kaczynski's manifesto and resituate them in the academy. Apparently it often turns out that exploring the ideas on their own merit takes a backseat to discussing the practicality and ethics of doing so.

Within contemporary literary theory, can the text be removed from its author? How did the author get "into" the text in the first place?

And should he be removed? Is this a special kind of work? A unique case?

Kaczynski lived his ideology and practiced his philosophy. In one sense, by removing the author from the text, the professor is attempting to protect the text, give it viability in the marketplace of ideas. But at the same time, without its author, the text is deprived of the life Kaczynski lived in its manifestation--the life it advocates for, the revolution it endorses: all that is locked away, isolated, imprisoned so as not to threaten its academic life.

To wit, Kaczynski is first locked away so as not to threaten society; then he is locked away a second time so as not to threaten his own ideas. Indeed, the text is freed the moment its author is imprisoned.

"Kaczynski" is now an abstraction of the man who attacked society by sending bombs through the mail while hidden in a remote Montana cabin. When the name is attributed to the text, "Kaczynski" appears in faded print in its margins, and can be found scratched in between the lines, where it adds or invokes a certain character in the work. This character says, Yes, these words are dangerous, these words are of consequence to you and to the establishment. These are fighting words.

This is not to say you can't or shouldn't remove the author from his text (in a sense I'm all for it). It's just that, given the current practice of (critical) literary theory, if you try, you might expect the text to change. After all, the fact that the professor consciously has to remove the author, and that the Chronicle wrote about his trying to do so, shows current theory's unrelenting emphasis and reliance on the author function.

About Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 by Michel Foucault

Foucault lectured at the Collège de France for several semesters. This opportunity allowed him to continue and share his research, his hypotheses and conclusions. In this lecture series, Foucault traces the origin and evolution of the modern concept of government and the assemblage of techniques, collectively called security, it uses in managing the population. Foucault shows that the question of how the sovereign should rule the territory and its inhabitants became a question of what technique of leadership would do given the new phenomenon called "population.

I first read this in March 2012 but am returning to it now to take notes while I read. This edition (and others in the series) is awesome because the editors include valuable additions of their own, Foucault's notes, and material from the Collège.

About the the film "Aguirre: The Wrath of God"

We pick up as Pizarro leads his Spanish conquistadors, their attachés and family, holy men, and slaves out of the Andes into the Amazon in search of cities of gold. When the jungle gets too rough, the respected leader sends a detachment ahead. Second-in-command of that group is the ferociously intense Lope de Aguirre, who quickly takes over when obstacles mount. Pushing into a land that's already hostile and serene, beautiful and unforgiving, Aguirre's disturbed mannerisms and incommunicable disposition renders the journey all the more oppressive and surreal; Aguirre, reanimated through actor Klaus Kinski, lopes and lunges, all fragmented postures and twisted body, never moving in a straight line, physically impending on his surroundings from round about.

Kinski, who was actually mad by most accounts, really is fascinating to watch. This film is an artistic success and widely considered one of the best ever, with lots of credit going to director Werner Herzog. The opening scenes of the expedition sneaking through the Andes are some of the most awesome I've seen on film. The end is pretty stunning, too.

About the jobs report

For a couple years now, every month has opened news-wise with reaction to the so-called "jobs report" or "jobs numbers", which indicate whether employment has eeked up, down, or stayed the same. This month's coverage includes the very predictable article "Bleak jobs report spells trouble for Obama re-election" via Reuters. Sure, most of the jobs report-related news refers to its impact on the election (as opposed to its impact on common welfare or anything else). No surprise there--we're going for the story.

More interestingly, the jobs report is a ritual now. For the press and its readers, the numbers stir the election season waters. But that is what you read on the surface. Systematically speaking, the the report is more importantly a function of security. It shows the Labor Department keeping tabs on employment--the extent to which the time of the populace is productively occupied with wealth generation; and through the report we live a shared experience, relating to each other on economic terms, as subjects of the economy, as economic constructs built into the economy--that complicated system of freedom and security-minded, neoliberal artificial market constructions.

Fluctuations are almost reassuring in this sense. The reporter asks, What will the Fed do? The economist answers, What can the Fed do?

Nobody does anything without first consulting the overall trend in the numbers. Has it been going down for six months? or up for six months? This discussion--and here the other mechanisms of security kick in--feeds an even larger discourse on the economy, composes and comprises its truths, truths which are repeated, amplified, and re-enforced via media in the minds of the economic subject. Too much bad news and the economic subject becomes electoral subject and modifies the leadership; and/or leadership modifies rates or removes barriers to commerce or flushes sectors with cash to stimulate commerce; tariffs are raised or lowered; immigration is encouraged or denied and on and on. Fluctuation and its many counter and co-fluctuations are part of a healthy, secured system. After all, there will always be something. What matters to the economic technocrat is not the something but how the various mechanisms of security relate within the "reality" of an economy prone to fluctuate.

(The real mother this time though is Europe, so I hear. And therein lies the way out.)