RIP Jeff Hanneman (1964-2013)

Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman died last week. Helped invent thrash, wrote some of the best songs in that genre, and played swooping, crazy-barbed solos.

about "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs

The sleeve and press around Dry calls it a memoir, but the book reads more like fiction. Burroughs aptly boosts his addiction-oriented narrative with wit and crisp prose. Result, the pages turn quickly.

In first person, Burroughs opens the tale fessing up to the professional lapses that opened the door to rehab. But his stay there is given short treatment--too short, because much of the remaining three-fifths of the memoir dote on high-schoolish accounts of doomed and/or ambiguous relationships with other men. Nevertheless, Dry is a fun, fast read, thanks to Burrough's style and real-gay charm.

about selections from "Critical Essays on Michel Foucault"

This collection of essays opens with philosopher Gilles Deleuze rephrasing and re-articulating Foucault's concept of power. There is little new ground here, but the essay is a good opener. The first real bright spot in this collection is "Foucault's Oriental Subtext", in which Uta Liebman Schaub identifies Eastern influences in Foucault's work. Primarily she sees the obliteration of the self in the remedy to Western systems' ceaseless quest to isolate and peg the self, and to tie this knowable self to an identity, as described by Foucault.

The essay "Foucault's Art of Seeing" by John Rajchman opens with Foucault's startling idea that seeing--vision--"structures thought in advance". The visual representation of thought, of how people have seen their world and then accordingly made sense of it, is tied to their age, their time. So seeing yields different concepts and ways of thinking about a given subject. For example, in the classical age, people grouped plants by their character. Now scientists group them primarily by their surface traits.

Foucault took an interest in how concepts of visualization become embedded in institutional practices, and how ethical and moral judgements of things and people changed with those concepts. It is hard to imagine now that people asked different questions in the past; we tend to think we've always been "logical", that being logical is part of our nature. But being "logical" used to be a moral exercise.

Finally, Rajchman explains how, for Foucault and his philosophical-critical descendents, thinking is a dangerous act. I found this section of Rajchman's essay confusing; is it dangerous because it's always situated and political? because it's tied to moral and ethical consequences? because we, merely by thinking of things, may unknowingly reinforce or change ways of conceiving? Whatever the answer, the aim on the other side of that danger, what Foucault pursued, is a world that is not yet visible.

In "Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault's Post-Auschwitz Ethic", James W. Bernauer addresses Foucault's critics who charge the intellectual giant with advocating an amoral aestheticism. Bernauer begins his defense by recognizing Foucault's resistance to the scientifically-minded life style that presupposes we are knowable and, therefore, decipherable (and, as a consequence, subject to be judged against norms). He seemed to champion humans as sexual, primarily, and so he probed how sexuality came to be thought of as a moral experience. The modern age and its States conceive of citizens as life to be kept alive; Foucault conceived of man as desire.

That power that conceives of us as human souls in a life or death struggle categorizes us, marks our individuality, attaches us to an identity, subjectifies us, and imposes its truth on us. The sciences--the currently dominant producers and venue of true knowledge--"direct both the cognitive enterprise and the technologies for human self-relation". Foucault examined how people "became anxious about this or that," and urges us not to look so hard at what we hope to achieve, but rather what struggles we face.

Again, Foucault's ultimate goal was freedom. He knew there was no escaping knowledge-power-self relations for good, but he also thought that no "configuration" (of thought and power?) should be thought unchangeable.

about "The One: The Life and Music of James Brown" by RJ Smith

Through the ups and downs, James Brown commanded an audience. RJ Smith depicts this singular artist's flight out of poverty on the heels of Little Richard, his celebrity-identity bridging the civil rights movement and beyond, and his persistent stumble through the late-stage hard times.

Brown was born, barely, into extreme poverty, and grew up motherless, at the mercy of a hardscrabble father. His affinity for music and singing and his seemingly innate start quality got him followers and fellow musicians from early on. During the first half of his career, James Brown busted ass, working musicians into the tightest band alive, and wielding that band as his own, personal instrument. Year-round, he left it all on the stage.

For different, complicated reasons, some black celebrities' identities are tied to the politics of America's larger black community. Brown's did, but he was wildly inconsistent, veering from black power advocate to Nixon-endorsing spokesman. Brown was mixed up and he was his own man--a complicated soul who gave himself to the public.

Inexplicably--almost--after Brown turned 50 years old, he found himself with money problems, then, after more than half a lifetime working hard and sober, Brown started using PCP. Trouble chased him the rest of his life. Brown died in 2006, still troubled, still a star.


Note: In an afterword, RJ Smith reveals the small gang of thieves most responsible for Brown's financial ruin.

one of many things about Camus' "The Stranger"

(aka "The Outsider" or "L’Étranger")

Albert Camus' The Stranger begins with the main character, Meursault, attending to his mother's funeral. He resumes his life the day after the funeral, but quite soon kills a man in cold blood, apparently, and stands trial. It is not so much his murderous act, but rather his earlier callousness and inexplicable behavior after his mother's death that are used as evidence to convict him.

It's boilerplate to say Camus' The Stranger depicts a brand of existentialism. But even so, Meursault is not readily understood, though, oddly enough, he's completely relatable. Maybe this is because he also personifies another philosophy--one we all have but hate to admit to, a way of life that does not always seem conventionally noble: Pragmatism. 

The novella first casts pragmatism as universal, a view everyone adopts at one time or another.* Then, pragmatism, in all its beauty and brutishness, is contrasted with and convicted by lofty, often unrealistic ideals like nobility and justice.

Here are examples of how pragmatism is depicted as a quite ordinary mode of life, as universal: In accepting his mother's death, Meursault says, "The funeral will bring it home to me, put an official seal on it, so to speak ... " (p. 2). When he arrives at the retirement home chapel, the caretaker is too busy to greet him right away; then, when he arrives, Meursault immediately asks to see mother's body, but the caretaker has already rested the lid on the coffin. When asked, Meursault declines to have the lid removed for viewing. Here, the "official seal" is already on, and he need not see the body for repeated closure. His not viewing the body is later deemed criminal. But, meanwhile, the warden denies the other retirement home residents access to much of the ceremony because death, he says, puts them "in a nervous state for two or three days. Which means, of course, extra work and worry for our staff" (p. 4). The whole sequence goes on like this, Meursault just going through motions and the staff joining him and cutting corners of their own. In this way pragmatism is first cast as universal--everyone seeks their own convenience much of the time.

When retold in the courtroom, it is Meursault's behavior, not everyone else's, that is reexamined--reexamined out of context. And behavior that was previously all too human is on second thought deemed inhumane.

* Pragmatism may be easily confused with, and, in a sense, interchangeable with selfishness.

Notes: 

• On the matter of mourning: Meursault doesn't give much sign of mourning for his mother. But the novel shows that mourning is usually centered on oneself rather than the deceased--you mourn your own loss, not the death of the other. For example, when an elderly woman cries at the wake, the caretaker explains, "She was devoted to your mother. She says your mother was her only friend in the world, and now she's all alone" (p. 12). This is the only person who cries throughout. Compare this scene to one later in the novella in which Meursault's neighbor loses his dog and suffers for it; on the suggestion that the pound might euthanize the mutt, the neighbor, Salamano, is quoted as saying, "'They won't really take him from me, will they, Monsieur Meursault? Surely they wouldn't do a thing like that. If they do, I don't know what will become of me'" (p. 50). Then, after Meursault and Salamano return to their respective rooms, we hear Meursault thinking, "Through the wall there came to me a little wheezing sound, and I guessed that he (Salamano) was weeping. For some reason, I don't know what, I began thinking of mother" (p. 50). And, on the astonishing final page, Meursault speaks again of this mourning, judging it so: "With death so near, Mother have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her" (p. 154). 

• The murder is still a bit of a mystery, though not entirely. 

A favorite line:

On leaving another neighbor's apartment drunk on wine:

After closing the door behind me I lingered for some moments on the landing. The whole building was quiet as the grave, a dank, dark smell rising from the well hole of the stairs. I could hear nothing but the blood throbbing in my ears, and for a while I stood still, listening to it. Then the dog began to moan in old Salamano's room, and, through the sleep-bound house the little plaintive sound rose slowly, like a flower growing out of the silence and the darkness (p. 42).

about the film "The Master"

Who is the master? And who can live without serving a master?

In the 2012 film The Master, Freddie Quell—a character brought into curdled life by the singular Joaquin Phoenix—drifts and crashes from one moment to the next, his troubled life being one corrosive improvisation. Quell is a haunted World War II vet with no aim beyond staying intoxicated and self-destructing.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a philosophical movement known as "The Cause." His critics charge that Dodd improvises his philosophy from moment to moment, that he is a fraud. But his followers see an enlightened, intense visionary.

Quell is tortured, intense, rough, gaunt, uneducated, drawn to poisons and pain; Dodd is composed, graceful, educated, well-dressed, plump, and drawn to the spotlight. When the film debuted, critics wondered, What, if anything, does the film say? say about our talk of freedom and our readiness to serve a master? about the inevitable disappointment that comes with looking up to someone? about faith? belief?

Maybe Dodd serves more than one master: he serves his audience's expectations, his wife, his vanity and ego. He is intrigued by Phoenix, drawn by his intensity and desperation. Each man is fed and inspired by the interest and attention of the other; each man is the other's project, and each can take the other to the next improvised step, wherever it may lead.

The Master is fantastic, unorthodox, beautiful, grimy, and searing.


Note:
The Master was written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams.

about American Idol

This umpteenth season is very slowly announcing our newest idol--a woman: probably a woman named Kree.

The show American Idol puts contestants through a few rounds of singing talent and performance competitions. Then the finale crowns a winner--presumably, the best talent and performer who is an American idol. Whether you are watching from the show's judge's panel or from home, you judge the contestant, their talent, their look.

If a contestant sings well but looks unconventional, she can pass the first round. But then comes the problem: you have to be believable; the audience must think you are believable as a pop star, a pop idol. And that believability, no matter your personal preferences, depends on your preconceptions of what a pop star is.

The believability is an extension of the theater of the show--the anticipation, the suspense, the competition, the deployment of sincerity, pain, disadvantage (as advantage), hopes, and dreams and effort. As theater, the contestant has her part, and the momentum of the show's theatricality inevitably leads to a climax demanding the idol be selected.

The selected contestant, the winner, is an idol before she even wins. She is merely crowned by the finale. The judges often claim that this is "a singing competition". No, it certainly isn't that simple. And that the show employs a democratic element makes no difference at all.



Notes:
Nicki Minaj is probably a better judge than she's given credit for being. Unless she is given a lot of credit for this. I wouldn't really know.

about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard believed his contemporaries took faith for granted. In Fear and Trembling, he tries to better understand faith by examining the Biblical story of God calling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. This is a brief dialectic that problematizes and praises faith.

Abraham, a favorite of God, was an old man before he finally had a child. Through Isaac, his first born son, Abraham was to populate the nations. But God called on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. Abraham prepared his belongings and took his son Isaac on a three-day journey there to do as God asked. Isaac asked why his father was not bringing a lamb to the sacrifice and Abraham answered that God would provide. Upon reaching Moriah, Abraham binds Isaac and draws the knife. At the last minute, Abraham is told by an angel not to follow through with the sacrifice. Ultimately a ram caught up in some nearby bushes serves as the sacrifice.

How could Abraham live with himself? How could he ever look at Isaac again, knowing he had been a moment away from killing him? Why would God ask this of his favorite, Abraham? It's a troubling story to say the least. But Kierkegaard unfolds it carefully, and convincingly makes the case that this is a paradoxical story of heroism, not depravity.

Spring

  -Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.



Note:
First read this in eighth grade.

about how everyone is so nice

When you move somewhere new, you might find a lot of the people there are nice. This is because you are more likely to ask people for help and information and, naturally, they oblige best they can. Where you're from, you rarely had to ask people for help because you knew the area, the weather patterns and expectations, the laws and ordinances, and so on. So people there were just people you had to share the city with. Your new neighbors are people you try to get along with.

about 2012 films: I see black people

At the Oscars, Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor.

Both the films "Lincoln" and "Django Unchained" concern African American slavery in the US--an issue that in ways big and small plagues the US still. But "Lincoln" portrays and conveys black people differently--I think with a greater truth, the kind of truth only realized in art.

How so?

"Lincoln" doesn't have any main black characters. It has hardly any black people at all. Sure, it's about that President at a specific moment, and not about slaves. But what and who is Lincoln? Why do we honor him today? States' rights were at stake, but the civil war was fought over slavery, and that is Lincoln's legacy.

All during the film, black people are peripheral, somewhere on the edges, rarely seen, rarely on screen. And aside from gentle scenes of dialog at the beginning and end of the film, they are never confronted. Their captivity and freedom is debated with a little input from those most affected.

But though they are invisible, black Americans are everywhere in the themes and culture and gravity of the moments being enacted. They are the thing referred to but never spoken of; they are exchangeed but never valued. They are marginalized in the film, reflecting their existence in America, and the racially collective experience of their existence here for some time.


Notes:
* The only other film I saw is "Flight".


(Also, the President now is black.)

about "Knockmestiff" by Donald Ray Pollock

Now abandoned according to Wikipedia, Knockemstiff is the name of the small Ohio town where Donald Ray Pollock grew up. As he did with his subsequent book, The Devil All the Time, Pollock uses the area as the setting for a string of stories depicting a special kind of depravity considered unique to Appalachian parts steeped in extreme poverty. But whereas religion was a common theme in The Devil All the Time, here, drugs fuel and, alternately, dull much of the pain. Another difference is that The Devil All the Time is a more traditional novel, while Knockmestiff is a collection of shorts with very loose connections but no collective arc.

Pollock's favorite word is "rotten", and this repeated word choice attests to his laser focus on depravity. While this focus has to date permeated and made visceral his clear, true-to-life prose, I wonder now if he can tell a story outside a thoroughly rotted town. As a reader, Knockmestiff isn't necessarily the kind of place you want to come visit again and again. And again.


Note:

• In his dedication at the end of the Knockmestiff, Pollock apologizes for running down the town so thoroughly, and stresses that people there are generous and not monsters.

Make sure you hear the national anthem.

“When you're good at something, you'll tell everyone. When you're great at something, they'll tell you.”
    ―Walter Payton

(coming from behind in the Super Bowl)

Michael Jordan might be a jerk and competitive to a fault, but the man knows greatness, and he knows how time distorts the collective memory of greatness. Here is a wonderful excerpt from a new ESPN "Outside the Lines" profile of professional basketball's greatest ever at age 50:

Over the next seven hours, all of it spent watching one basketball game after another, he's (Jordan) again pulled inward, on a Tilt-a-Whirl of emotion, mostly shades of anger, from active screaming to a slow, silent burn. He transforms from a businessman returning from the office -- Honey, I'm home! -- to a man on fire. The first sparks come from a "SportsCenter" debate, one of those impossible, vaguely ridiculous arguments that can, of course, never be won: Who's a better quarterback, Joe Montana or Tom Brady?

"I can't wait to hear this conversation," he says.

He stretches his legs out on the ottoman, wearing sweats and socks, and as one of the guys on television argues for Brady, Jordan laughs.

"They're gonna say Brady because they don't remember Montana," he says. "Isn't that amazing?"

Aging means losing things, and not just eyesight and flexibility. It means watching the accomplishments of your youth be diminished, maybe in your own eyes through perspective, maybe in the eyes of others through cultural amnesia. Most people live anonymous lives, and when they grow old and die, any record of their existence is blown away. They're forgotten, some more slowly than others, but eventually it happens to virtually everyone. Yet for the few people in each generation who reach the very pinnacle of fame and achievement, a mirage flickers: immortality. They come to believe in it. Even after Jordan is gone, he knows people will remember him. Here lies the greatest basketball player of all time. That's his epitaph. When he walked off the court for the last time, he must have believed that nothing could ever diminish what he'd done. That knowledge would be his shield against aging.

There's a fable about returning Roman generals who rode in victory parades through the streets of the capital; a slave stood behind them, whispering in their ears, "All glory is fleeting." Nobody does that for professional athletes. Jordan couldn't have known that the closest he'd get to immortality was during that final walk off the court, the one symbolically preserved in the print in his office. All that can happen in the days and years that follow is for the shining monument he built to be chipped away, eroded. Maybe he realizes that now. Maybe he doesn't. But when he sees Joe Montana joined on the mountaintop by the next generation, he has to realize that someday his picture will be on a screen next to LeBron James as people argue about who was better.

The debaters announce the results of an Internet poll, and 925,000 people voted. There was a tie: 50 percent said Montana and 50 percent said Brady. It doesn't matter that Montana never lost a Super Bowl or that, unlike Brady, he never faded on the biggest stage. Questions of legacy, of greatness, are weighted in favor of youth. Time itself is on Brady's side, for now.

Jordan shakes his head.

"That doesn't make any sense," he says.

That's good writing, and a compelling anecdote, considering it's about a guy sitting, watching TV. And what it says is so Goddamn true.


Notes:

Speaking of basketball and greatness, as the annual stupid NBA All-Star game approaches, let's remember the only rendition of the national anthem that ever mattered: Marvin Gaye at the 1983 game:

about the State of the Union address, 12 February 2013

Fervent Obama critics cast him as, among other things, un-American for transforming the country into something it has never been and was never meant to be. If he was that, he would be a revolutionary. Of all the policies and ideas he has articulated, somehow his State of the Union invocation of citizenship sounded unprecedented, like little else I've heard from Washington for at least the last 25 years. The concept of citizenship he speaks of goes beyond one's residence in a country; it is the duties and responsibilities that come with being a member of a community.

No, in these addresses we are usually referred to as taxpayers, consumers, or, simply (and vaguely) Americans.

Obama called out our citizenship as an argument for the big Federal socio-economic policies of a social democracy. Here is the key relevant excerpt from his State of the Union address, delivered 12 February 2013:

We may do different jobs, and wear different uniforms, and hold different views than the person beside us. But as Americans, we all share the same proud title:

We are citizens. It’s a word that doesn’t just describe our nationality or legal status. It describes the way we’re made. It describes what we believe. It captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations; that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others; and that well into our third century as a nation, it remains the task of us all, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the next great chapter in our American story.

Notes:
The above quote came at the conclusion of Obama's argument for more restrictive gun control laws, and at the conclusion to his entire address. Many pundits complimented the gun control-related content of his speech--here it is:

... Overwhelming majorities of Americans – Americans who believe in the 2nd Amendment – have come together around commonsense reform – like background checks that will make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun. Senators of both parties are working together on tough new laws to prevent anyone from buying guns for resale to criminals. Police chiefs are asking our help to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets, because they are tired of being outgunned.

Each of these proposals deserves a vote in Congress. If you want to vote no, that’s your choice. But these proposals deserve a vote ...

One of those we lost was a young girl named Hadiya Pendleton. She was 15 years old. She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss ...

Hadiya’s parents, Nate and Cleo, are in this chamber tonight, along with more than two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence. They deserve a vote.

Gabby Giffords deserves a vote.

The families of Newtown deserve a vote.

The families of Aurora deserve a vote.

The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence – they deserve a simple vote.

Warfighter

Warfighter. What does it mean? Who is a warfighter? What is a warfighter?

Circa WWII America, people often spoke of soldiers with admiration, depicting competent men of bravery, or, alternately, innocent sons away in foreign lands. Then, during early 1990's military campaigns in the Persian Gulf, speakers urged the public to "Support our troops". Now, the US Department of Defense introduced into use the term warfighter.

Using the term warfighter shifts the emphasis from the soldier's service to his time in combat. So a veteran is not a warfighter; a soldier is not necessarily a warfighter; and a warfighter is not necessarily a soldier from one of the branches of the US armed forces.

Soldiers have already become somewhat ubiquitous--we see them honored routinely on television and at sporting and political events. Finding yourself in public in the presence of a soldier in uniform is not unusual. Using the term warfighter takes that a step further; it normalizes the condition of war. If a soldier (or contractor) is overseas, he is at war. His presence is war. He is present in war. He is war.



 

"Islands" by The XX

how they missed Joe

Note:
But Frank Gore did throw the awesomest stiff-arm:

sometimes, but today here's pictures

Her Anxiety

  - by W.B.Yeats

Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter at the best
Into some lesser thing. 
Prove that I lie.

Such body lovers have,
Such exacting breath,
That they touch or sigh.
Every touch they give,
Love is nearer death. 
Prove that I lie.

to say it's nothing, really

Clouds tumbled overhead, an ash avalanche, a silent disaster film, while she, the money-counter, stationed herself bedside, gazing upon the ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds arranged on the comforter, catching dull the morning light like eyes of dead children arranged before the killer. Her husband made noise in the kitchen: microwave beeping, plates knocking. She knew he hungered always for her fear and submission, but tomorrow she would serve him his death. She will pay the hitman tonight.