Cosas

1.

New logo for Guardian business blog

2. Mahmoud Ahmed live in Amsterdam, 1987

For the last few years I've had an MP3 of 20 minutes of a Mahmoud Ahmed concert floating around my computer. I originally got it from the sadly-defunct Benn loxo du taccu blog, and never knew much about its origins, except that it was broadcast on Dutch radio. I recently unearthed it again after being disappointed with the comparatively low energy of the "Live in Paris" CD from 1994. The Paris concert is not bad, but it seems so uninspired compared with the pure fire that is this Amsterdam show. Looking around the internet today I was incredibly pleased to happen upon a video of one of the songs from the Benn loxo recording:



Only after finding the video did I discover the date of the recording. I previously thought it was from the 90s. Looking at the video again, the poster says this was from a concert of the Adei Ababa Ensemble, featuring other famous Ethiopian singers, such as Tilahun Gessesse.
In honor of Mahmoud, and of Benn loxo as well, I'm re-upping the original recording here. If anyone has more tracks from this show, please get in touch!

Mahmoud Ahmed - Live in Amsterdam, 1987 (MP3, 29.7 mb)


3. Kebad Kenya

In these sad days it is incredibly revitalizing to see a casual, intelligent, non-academic/non-professional blog devoted to an underread and underrated writer such as Hans Henny Jahnn. The Kebad Kenya blog, run by Will from 50 Watts, is a great little thing indeed.

Schlehe

Just found another very nice Workshop video which was uploaded to YouTube this summer. This song is from 1997's Meiguiweisheng Xiang.

Unemployed satirists

"Satire ends at the very point where hatred of the world's abuses becomes irrelevant. This point is reached when absurdity gains control of that plane of experience at which men, throughout the ages, have formed their idea of order and normality [...] When Hitler came to power, Karl Kraus realized that it was the end of his satirical world. In 1919 he said of The Last Days of Mankind that its satirical inventions and exaggerations were mere quotations of what was said and done. Hitler's Germany reversed the situation: her words and deeds merely quoted, and by quoting exaggerated beyond belief, the satirist's inventions."
Eric Heller, from The Dear Purchase (Bowes & Bowes, 1971), p. 259

Below are three examples from contemporary culture that show a similar tendency to that described by Heller: what would have previously been satirical commentary on a particular event or cultural tendency (the mourning of the death of a billionaire technocrat, the insularity of academic political correctness, or the commodification of anti-capitalist discourse) is produced now as sincere expression by the would-be cultural target. Like Kraus during WWII, today's satirists are out of a job.

1. "Steve Nagata, right, holds an Apple iPad displaying an image of a candle as he takes part in a vigil outside the company's store in the Ginza district of Tokyo on Oct. 6, 2011."

2. Fat Studies 2012 PCA Call for Papers (via Good Jobbb Jr.)

3. Tote bag worn by a graduate student at my university.

Perloff on the intellectual first-person plural

LINK: Marjorie Perloff, From PMLA, September 1997 issue, commissioned for roundtable on "Intellectuals"
Though this little piece dates from 15 years ago, its general diagnosis of the economic and institutional position of the intellectual rings true today. Perloff is one of the few academics today who is both willing and able to offer a valid critique of the institutional and disciplinary blockades to critical thought in American universities.

The assignment from PMLA was to write a 1000-word letter on "the notion of the intellectual in the twenty-first century"-- a letter that should be "double spaced and . . . avoid using the universal ungrounded 'we'."

That says it all, doesn't it? For what function can the intellectual have in a world that prescribes double-spacing but doesn't permit the use of the first-person plural? [...]  

The loss of this "we" is the sign that there is no longer a generic intellectual class to which "you" or "I" or "one" might belong. The causes of this large-scale transformation are manifold: the end of the cold war and, with it, of an effective international Left, the dominance of money over the old class formations coupled with an often militant identity politics that creates smaller and smaller micro-units defining the individual's place, and the increasing commodification and media-ization of society, which prompts even a scholarly journal like PMLA to resort to sound-bytes like the one I am writing. But perhaps the greatest threat to the intellectual life is that of the institution, whether the university, the foundation, the professional organization, or the government arts agency, that supposedly fosters it. 

In "The Intellectual Field: A World Apart" (1985), Pierre Bourdieu characterizes intellectuals as "a dominated fraction of the dominant class. They are dominant in so far as they hold the power and privileges conferred by the possession of cultural capital . . . but . . . dominated in their relations with those who hold political and economic power." Intellectuals "remain loyal to the bourgeois order," because it is, after all, the bourgeois order that confers upon them whatever power they have. What this means in practice, is that, in late twentieth-century culture, institutional intellectuals may profess any number of "radical" ideas but are curiously passive vis-à-vis the system itself--that is, the basic university structure with its conferral of advanced degrees, grading and certification of students, and "peer review" of scholarly materials for the purpose of tenure or promotion decisions. [...]

Perloff has said that she doesn't want to write a book on method: I find this regrettable, as her work represents the revitalization of a certain critical spirit lacking from current academic discourse. Her rigorous, historical approach is undistorted by fashionable trends in theory, and she remains always ready to actually criticize—i.e. to praise certain works and denounce others, the original "task of the critic" which very few critics seem interested in today. I always find her work reinvigorating.
More Perloffian material here and here.

The same place the fly got smashed

From the heady days of this past summer: "In Tempelhof this evening, as far in the middle as was possible to go, blinded by the sun, I angle my neck and all I can see is a blue expanse. I am moved by music recorded in Dayton, Ohio. I think thus, that there are too many possibilities for emotional experience for there to be a god."
My clip-on shades provided the perfect protection from the fields of shimmering gold. I had fought and ended up alone, and this was my solace. I worshiped the passing minutes, not knowing whence they came or where they would lead. I no longer know exactly what I meant, but I think it had to do with an inverted tribute to Kierkegaard, a mis-reading in which the parallel levels of ethical experience find expression today (in these sad days) as fleeting emotional vibes. "Don't need no God,"sadly. Need music and something to drink during a sunny vision, wherein ethics disguises itself as emotion passing for a solitary aesthetic experience.
"Organize my world," my world's pointless and ecstatic—worthless and exotic—mirthless and erotic. Very simple and therefore spiritual—very difficult and therefore satisfying—very hard and therefore cathartic—very easy and therefore disappointing—none of the above, and always different.

Nowadays: Preparing to fight, negotiating concessions between my own convictions and my desire to avoid annoyances and/or threats to my material well-being. At this point I am only interested in the next two and a half years, and am content to let the later future work itself out in due time. This allows me to follow my personal vision of φιλοσοφία, and what could be of greater importance than that? What is a job compared with a text. A text is eternal and gives itself to the world. I asked: what does it mean to be ambitious? He said: "I want my work to be important." Why? There are texts, and they are there to be read. Can one/should one desire anything more than to to read a text? Read it for the world, if it is there to be read. You shouldn't expect anything else from a textual institution. Your work can and therefore must be faceless, it is the text which should become important.
A job is only important insofar as it puts food on the table, but this isn't what you consider valuable.
I am only beginning my thirtieth year, but I feel far too old to have guidance forced upon me. "No need to get all caught up / in society's stipulations..." I used to be a member of the freak generation, and now I'm doing all I can to avoid being a middle-aged child! The freaks certainly don't have a monopoly on middle-aged infancy, that's certain. It is a vast social ill: "Capitalism makes a fool of you, every time."
I dropped my tool, which made a loud clanging sound as it struck the floor: "I did it on purpose." Wait while I retrieve it...

Here goes: Though it came as a disappointment, she felt it simultaneously as a relief. It became apparent to her that the career she had begun working towards was an ignoble one: or rather, in order to be successful in such a career (in these sad days), one would have to go about it in an ignoble way. This was not always the case! Many things were not always the case, but whose fault is it that they are now such a case? When will things return to how they were? Each decade is worse in its own way.
"You as a person have got to think fast"—less in order to process information quicker, but to calculate the necessary tactical approach which allows you to avoid annoyances and/or threats to your physical well-being. Leave her alone, let her conclude: "I as a fly was smashed at this very spot two and a half years ago. My story lives on..."

Grossman on Die Linke

There's a pretty good English-language roundup of recent developments in Die Linke by Victor Grossman at the Monthly Review.

LINK: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/grossman291011.html

Grossman sees reason to be optimistic after 96.9% of party representatives ratified a formal statement of their party program in Erfurt last month. It must also be considered a positive to have Oskar Lafontaine back in action after a period of convalescence following his fight against cancer. Apart from Gregor Gysi, I feel like only Lafontaine has the charisma, rhetorical skill and star-power to return Die Linke to visibility on a national level. (German-speakers: Das Herz schlägt links!)

Das dreißigste Jahr

"If I had not immersed myself in books, in stories and legends, in newspapers, in reports, if everything communicable had not grown up in me, I should have been a non-entity [ein Nichts], a collection of uncomprehended events. (And that might have been a good thing, then I should have thought of something new.) That I can see, that I can hear, are things I don't deserve, but my feelings, those I truly deserve, these herons over white beaches, these wanderers by night, the hungry vagabonds that take my heart as their highroad. I wish I could call out to all those who believe in their unique brains and the hard currency of their thoughts: be of good faith! But they have been taken out of circulation, these coins that you jingle, you simply don't know it yet. Withdraw them from currency along with the images of death's heads and eagles which they bear. Admit that it's all over with the land of Greece and the land of Buddha, with enlightenment and alchemy. Admit that you are merely living in a country furnished by the ancients, that your views are only rented, the pictures of your world hired..."

Adapted from Michael Bullock's translation, Holmes & Meier, 1987.