Racing around to come up behind you again

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

    ―Ecclesiastes 9:11

All fight for right

When reporters cover events as complicated as the current situation in Syria, they make it palatable and sensible by framing it in a story. This obvious but oft-forgotten point matters because such coverage shapes opinions, affecting policy and outcomes.

The story or narrative for Syria is something like Good Guys fight Repressive Bad Guys for freedom. The CNN article "Faces of the Free Syrian Army" gives us an example of the formalized making of this conflict's Good Guy via humanizing coverage that makes his struggle familiar and gives him voice:

"I go to war for my family, for my country," Amin said. "Because (Assad) has killed everyone. He killed my cousin. He destroyed my village. He destroyed my home."

Indeed, that sucks. Instant sympathy for him and his struggle.

This article is also notable for using the word "bivouacked", which means to take temporary refuge in a military encampment of tents and make-ready shelters vulnerable to enemy fire.

Note:

• I guess you can't see faces in this picture though. 

information

When I pass through, without fail I catch her engaged in conversations so dull you could trust a depressed, slight-wristed teenaged girl to leave them alone. Remote facts input via phones plugged into NPR or some trivia podcast, briefly unbothered in her database mind, at the first opportunity, and often before that, find a second life output as one of many banalities confidently shared for everyone's sake.

Apples, Oranges

The thought piece titled "The Joke's on You" argues that the popularity of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert among progressives "is not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues." The author of the piece attempts to build his argument by citing many examples of the satirists cozying up to the establishment and passing on opportunities to challenge power.

The obvious rebuttal to this critique is that Stewart and Colbert simply aren't trying to be progressive, radical comedic performers like Bill Hicks. The author recognizes this objection:

Fans will find this assessment offensive. Stewart and Colbert, they will argue, are comedians, offering late-night entertainment in the vein of David Letterman or Jay Leno, but with a topical twist. To expect them to do anything more than make us laugh is unfair. Besides, Stewart and Colbert do play a vital civic role—they’re a dependable news source for their mostly young viewers, and de facto watchdogs against media hype and political hypocrisy.

But this rebuttal is never addressed. Instead, the author spends the next four pages offering examples of how Stewart and Colbert do nothing to effectively further progressivist causes.

Not addressing the rebuttal makes the whole argument moot. Such thought pieces, which are all the rage now, should be approached skeptically because often their premises, reasoning, and/or conclusions are weak.

Notes:

• The line "Fans will find this assessment offensive"--fandom has nothing to do with questioning the argument offered. But rhetorically the author makes a good move because it subtly casts those who disagree as lackey's for the famed satirists.

Communication breakdown

It is well known that a whole train of thought can pass through one's mind in a flash in the form of some kind of feeling, without being translated into human language, let alone into writing ... Because many of our feelings, put into ordinary words, would appear quite implausible, would they not? That is why they are never revealed, but remain locked up within us.

  -from "A Disgraceful Affair" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

About the film "Wings of Desire"

This Wim Wenders directed film follows a spirit who's tired of the spiritual and yearns for physical existence. The spirit is an angel named Damiel, and his journeys with his companion, Cassiel, expose the isolation inherent in the human condition. But, moreover, Damiel's particular existential crisis gently urges us to appreciate the little things and decide for ourselves that life matters.

The angels can hear people's thoughts, so thinking makes up most of the film's dialog. I enjoyed Cassiel's going to the library where he finds other angels listening to books being narrated in people's minds as they read. There he finds an old man whom he follows, is drawn to perhaps because the aged traveler is so enduring and purposeful, who self-identifies as a storyteller, an indispensable part of humanity.

Meanwhile, Damiel wanders into a low-budget children's circus whose star performer is a beautiful, unfulfilled trapeze artist named Marion. He falls for her, lusts for her, and is spellbound by her poetically lonely train of thought. They share a yearning.

Damiel brings Cassiel to that night's circus performance, which is to be the last of the year. But as Damiel absorbs the show, Cassiel sees how deeply his companion feels the need to live. Afterwards Damiel confesses as much. Marion, while celebrating at the circus staff's after-party, pauses and, in her thoughts, appreciates being alive. Hearing this, Damiel's heart breaks.

So he resolves to become real, and when an empty piece of body armor crashes onto his head, Damiel wakes in a vacant lot, apparently knocked unconscious after being dropped from Heaven--a helicopter hovering overhead. To be human is to be vulnerable, so he pawns his rickety old armor and finds Marion at a night club. There, they each taste of the wine from the bar and she asks him to join her in a life of consequence, to live as if they are setting new precedents for future generations.

The story inverts the usual paradigm: instead of man imagining and chronicling heaven as the grand but remote paradise, the angels imagine and chronicle man as the simple and immediate body, and they do so in ways that elevate man without pretending he’s a miracle. This inversion is sacrilegious, but it does no harm.

The viewing audience watches the angels watch the people. When a scene calls for your sympathy and you feel that sympathy, you feel the sympathy of the angels, you see Earth through the angels’ eyes. For example, in one scene we peek in on a small family and find a young man alone in his bedroom, sulking and brooding over how nobody knows he’s alive, but then we learn his dad is sitting alone in front of the TV and worrying about his son’s future while mom sits alone in the kitchen doing the same.

Notes

• Peter Falk of course is really charming in this, single-handedly keeping a good chunk of the film interesting. ("Columbo" is one of the best series ever.)
• Cassiel urges someone to his shoes correctly--using a double knot.

Rest in Paradise, Andy Griffith

I've probably seen every episode of "The Andy Griffith Show" and the best is "Opie's Hobo Friend" with guest star Buddy Ebsen, the next best is "Opie and the Bully".

About secularized religion

As the Church fell into crisis in the 17th century, an emerging secular governmentality assumed custodial rights over life and population issues previously managed by the Church. With this, the modern State evolved, giving rise to politics. Like medicine and science, politics grows and takes more and more things into its body of knowledge, even religion, which itself is now highly politicized (it has been before now, but in different ways). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was developed in the context of this politics, and has been linked to it since the beginning as evident in the religion's history, a story of battling for political contention.

Taking this story on a tangent, on June 30 this year, a modest group of Mormons gathered to renounce their membership in the LDS Church using methods that conflate the political with the religious: their gathering was personal ceremony and political protest; they waved a "Declaration of Independence from Mormonism" and offered letters of resignation, seeking "freedom" as they gathered at Ensign Peak like Brigham Young did with his followers in 1847; they sacrificed church-bound relationships with their community, yearning to receive those same relationships in return, renewed as social and business ties; their reasons for quitting included Church teachings that are "made up", that conflict with science, that conflict with history, that veil racism and promote intolerance, and that are inconsistent.

Anyway, this story sort of stuck out like this.

The Higgs

The physics almost-news about the Higgs boson is simultaneously the most interesting and most boring thing going right now. Maybe this narrative conflict will resolve itself in a nice anti-climax.

About "A Very Easy Death" by Simone De Beauvoir

In A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir chronicles her dying, bedridden mother's last few weeks, and through writing reconciles the difficulties of the relationship they shared. This doesn't feel quite like grieving; it's more like making sense of something elusive and mysterious, sketching the likeness of a stranger who passes in the dark. Sadness is a gentle undercurrent, never threatening to pull us under. Likewise, de Beauvoir's distaste for the medicalized experience of death is rather clear, but this is no polemic.

For an intellectual known more for her political and philosophical works--topics given to lofty abstraction--I was interested to read this very human and immediate, emotional work.

Note:

• In her telling, de Beauvoir's mother was dying, suffering death, for weeks. At the moment of passing, there was a brief, choked struggle by the patient. After the official pronouncement of death, the nurse called it an easy death, wanting de Beauvoir to take comfort in its brevity.
  
  
  
  

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.)

About blurring the line between establishment and anti-establishment

The CBS News article "In Texas, a rising conservative star takes on the establishment" covers the Congressional primary race between two poll-leading conservative candidates in Texas: David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz. The article calls Cruz the anti-establishment candidate. Compared to Dewhurst, most people would be. But Cruz, according to the article,

has racked up considerable support from high-profile conservatives in his bid for the Republican nomination. Last Thursday, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave Cruz his backing, citing what he called his "wow factor." Earlier this month, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin endorsed Cruz, as has Texas Rep. Ron Paul, S.C. Sen. Jim DeMint, and Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey. In the Washington Post, George Will called him "a candidate as good as it gets".

The son of Cuban refugees, Cruz attended Princeton, Harvard Law School, and then clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

If George Will gives him the thumbs up, he's establishment. If he also attended Princeton and Harvard Law School, clerked for a sitting Supreme Court Justice, and has the support of two (former) Presidential candidates, then the label "anti-establishment" really doesn't fit.