George Grosz @ 50 Watts

>>>Twenty-One Book Covers by George Grosz @ 50 Watts

Es ist ziemlich bekannt, daß zwischen dem Proletariat und der Bourgeoisie gegenwärtig Krieg herrscht. [...] Es geschieht Unrecht von Seiten der Bourgeoisie, aber es geschieht überall Unrecht. Sie, George Grosz, und ich sind gegen Unrecht (wie alle Welt), aber wir hätten weniger dagegen, wenn vom Proletariat aus Unrecht getan werden könnte.

It is fairly well-known that, at present, war reigns between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. [...] There are injustices committed by the bourgeoisie, but there are injustices committed everywhere. You, George Grosz, and I stand against injustice (like the whole world), but we are less in objection when injustices may be committed by the proletariat.

–Bertolt Brecht, Foreword to Trommeln in der Nacht, 1926.

Edvard Munch at the Centre Pompidou (Against Curators, pt. 1)

The Edvard Munch exhibition currently showing at the Centre Pompidou, "Edvard Munch: L'Oeil Moderne", collects paintings, drawings, and photographs from the middle and later stages of the Norwegian painter’s career. In the exhibit program, the curators declare their intent to offer viewers a new view of Munch which highlights his modernity (fair enough, although it seems like a bit of a straw-man argument to say the Munch is generally considered otherwise), by illustrating the ways in which his work concerns itself with the major questions of 20th-century modernity, such as intermediality, self-representation, and the reproducibility of the work of art. As H. and I moved through the exhibit admiring Munch’s works, we constantly came up against a blockade of human bodies, gathered around what one thought would have been a Munch painting, but was actually a large block of text printed in French and poorly-translated English at the entrance to each room of the exhibition. While I was content at first to just ignore the texts, which at first glance seemed to offer nothing of substance or import, and form my own conclusions from the developments of Munch’s style easily observable in the paintings when one is aware of their historical succession, I was eventually forced to take a serious look at the wall texts, as the selection of paintings in the individual rooms ceased to have any recognizable ordered affinities. For example, the room entitled “Rayonnements” informed the viewer that “Munch was part of a generation of artists for whom the imaginary was marked by a culture of radiation.” I forget exactly which paintings were gathered in this room, but I know there was one of his striking paintings of the sun, while other works portrayed geometric circles, and there may have also been some experimental photographs.

Edvard Munch, "The Sun" (1916)

I was certain, however, that none of the works collected in the room had anything to do with radiation, or a "culture of rays," and were more obviously products of Munch’s life-long involvement with questions of light and form, which are indeed the same questions that guide the work of every painter in the early-20th century. Observing the perplexed, searching faces of my fellow exhibition-viewers, I felt with renewed clarity a sentiment that I’ve often had in the past few years, namely that the art world is suffocating under the malignant influence of the curator.
I’ve seen numerous art exhibitions of contemporary as well as older artworks, whose entire conceptual organization rests on a half-baked, hare-brained conceptual framework designed by a curator. Although designed to emphasize certain aesthetic trends in a group of artworks, these curatorial concepts constantly impose their own pop-philosophical concept onto a collection of unwilling participants, uncomfortably forcing a reading which has very little to do with either the artwork or the artist who created it. Not content with traditional curatorial themes such as “good works of art from a certain region/period”, “works of art of a certain kind from a certain artist”, or “works of art from artists who knew each other,” today’s curators attempt to construct impressive-sounding conceptual frameworks on which to hang works of art, as one hangs decorative baubles on a Christmas tree. The result is not only misguided, but misguiding. The basic aesthetic qualities of an artwork, often obvious to even the least informed of art viewers, are misrepresented through the funhouse mirror of the curator’s theoretical approach. Worse still, the pseudo-intellectualism of such theories can convince the viewer that he or she doesn’t actually understand the work of art in question, since they don’t quite see how the work relates to question of the ontological subjectivity of the body in its (post)colonial state of inverted reflexivity. I should really start a scrapbook of some of the explanatory texts written by curators to explain their curatorial intent; among them there are, without a doubt, examples of some of the worst-written and least-helpful writing produced in the past decades.
Such curators are undoubtedly products of academia, and are in the worst-case scenario failed artists themselves. Today's curators are individuals who come of age within the milieu of art and art history, who want to be part of a creative action within the art world, while lacking either the talent or the courage to make art themselves. They content themselves with a destructive act of theoretical framing which is designed, by the way, to promote simplistic art while ignoring works of complexity or mysterious beauty, since works which lend themselves to the most simple, uncomplicated interpretations are precisely those which fit most easily within the curator's theoretical framework. Furthermore, it is not only the representation of existing works of art which suffers from the curatorial menace: young artists are coerced into creating simplistic works of art based on easily-legible, untroubled and untroubling concepts, so that they may be included in exhibitions, the most prestigious of which always seem to be curated by complete fools.
While the Pompidou’s Munch exhibit is not so egregious in its theoretical indulgences, it still produces some clangers. For example, pointing out that, while Munch is considered an introspective painter, “his painting is very taken up with the outside world.” What’s this, an introspective painter that paints pictures of the outside world? Quel paradoxe modern! It’s also stated that Munch’s habit of painting self-portraits is a “perfect response to the Norwegian Bohemian literary agenda that was in place at the end of the 19th century.” True, only such a historical situation could lead a painter to do something as unconventional as paint a picture of himself! I now see that Munch was, indeed, truly modern! Thanks, curators!

Chris Marker's Junkopia (1981)

Here's a nice little Marker short that I didn't know existed until now. It's a film about the Albany Bulb, a former landfill on a peninsula that juts out into the SF Bay from Berkeley. From the 60s onwards, the Bulb has been used as a refuge for large urban art/art brut installations, including some impressive architectural creations. I remember being led here when I was last in San Francisco, while on tour with Dreamhouse in 2004. There is a very strong homeless community that lives there now, but it also seems to be a popular place for dogwalking. Marker's film captures the otherworldly atmosphere of the place, which contrasts here richly with the traces of 1980's America that sneak in. As usual, the soundtrack credited to Michel Krasna (aka Marker himself) is great as well.

Schiller you old fool

Lying on the couch, thinking about Schiller. From the poem "Die Götter Griechenlands" (1788):

Da die Götter menschlicher noch waren, waren Menschen göttlicher.

[When the gods were still human-like, humans were more god-like.] 

Staring at the Apollonian head above, I reflect on the line's meaning, and the beauty of Schiller's idea. In his 18th-century Christian/Enlightenment society, the idea of the divine has become abstracted to such an extent as to be only conceivable as a nebulous authoritarian force or a cloudy philosophical concept. When gods took human-form, like the one depicted on the poster above, humans would compare themselves to deities, and be more likely to imitate their actions.
Suddenly I realize the extent of the mistake Winckelmann makes in excluding the Dionysian from his vision of Greece, conceiving of a purely Apollonian, noble, balanced divinity. What does it mean for a person to become more god-like? More like Apollo, or more like Dionysus? More like Athena, or more like Hera? The Greek gods are human, all too human, and it is only with the advent of the Christian tradition that imitation of divinity can be seen as a good thing. Schiller, you old fool, your critique of Christian theology is based on a mistaken image of Greek divinity which is based on Christian divinity itself!
The beauty of the idea falls apart in my hands, but luckily I am able to turn to Lessing, from the Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel (1756):

Der mitleidigste Mensch ist der beste Mensch.

[The most sympathetic person is the best person.] 

Now this is an idea whose beauty withstands a moment's reflection.

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.

Protest is not in itself a good thing

Protest is not in itself a good thing. A protest that accomplishes nothing is a failure. Some might say that any protest accomplishes something by drawing attention to certain issues, perhaps even affecting public policy by making demands on politicians. This may be true, but it still stands that the success of a protest needs to be judged by its concrete effects.
This is one problem with the Occupy movement. While I am sincerely excited about the potential of such a widespread outpouring of anger against the power of business and money in government, I have a hard time whole-heartedly taking part in their protest actions. There are two reasons for my ambivalence, both concerned with the democratic ideals upon which the protests operate.
Firstly, the protesters often seem too enthusiastic about the bare act of protesting: they see it as a good thing in itself, separated from its effectiveness or even from the beliefs expressed. Their most popular chant expresses this ideal: "Show me what democracy looks like -- This is what democracy looks like!" For me this is equivalent to chanting "Protest! Protest! Protest!" Protest is not and has never been about fighting for the right to protest. It is about the expression of a specific qualm held by a group of people. I would gladly and wholeheartedly chant along with "Tax the rich!" or "Nationalized health care now!"; these chants express actions rather than ideals, and agitate towards a specific policy change. We don't need to fight for our right to protest: our democratic government guarantees us this right, occasional police brutality notwithstanding. But the right to protest is meaningless without the possibility of producing tangible results.
Secondly, there is not enough of a clear emphasis on issues of class. To say "We are the 99%" is to sketch out a system of two classes: the ultra-rich and everyone else. This is simply insufficient to describe the system that needs to be radically reformed. Declaring the solidarity of the 99% is to declare the solidarity of the working-classes and those living in poverty with the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie. This is obviously not fair to the lower classes. 99% leaves too much leeway for extreme economic equality. When the protesters chant "The people united will never be defeated," who counts among this people? The "American People" is myth, a PR stunt used daily by politicians to gain votes. There is no American People; but there are certainly American classes. As it stands now, the unification of the ultra-rich with the politicians is looking pretty undefeatable. Marx wasn't speaking of "the people" nor of "the 99%." It is the working classes who need to unite in class warfare against their class enemies: the bourgeoisie as well as the ultra-rich.

Gass on Poetry/Philosophy

"I have a distrust—not so much from Wittgenstein as a natural bent of mind—a very Wittgensteinian distrust of philosophical pronouncements, the difficulty of getting anywhere in the subject, so that the suspicion about ideas is very great. But the notion that literature was going to give them to me I never really had. For example, Rilke, I suppose my favorite writer really, and in the best sense a profound writer, is full of shit. I mean his ideas as nonsensical. As philosophical notions I have no respect for them at all, but as poetic notions they are absolutely beautiful. This is one of the reasons I am really a Heidegger hater, because Heidegger gets most of his ideas from Rilke and does not have the sense to see that this is great poetry. He projects it into religion, and I have an immense mistrust of that."

William Gass in conversation with G.A.M. Janssens in 1979. From Conversations with William H. Gass (University of Mississippi Press, 2003).

 This is a pretty good summation of a basic problem that can arise when literature and philosophy are undertaken in close proximity. A couple caveats:
1) I am not as ready as Gass to separate philosophical feasibility with poetic beauty, and I happen to find Rilke full of shit as a poet as well as as a philosopher. I think it is healthy to have a distrust of literary pronouncements (especially profound ones) as well as philosophical pronouncements.
2) Heidegger got most of his ideas from Husserl, not Rilke, but it was indeed the literary, Rilkean spirit of his approach that led him to make such a botch of phenomenology.

Politics

"When it comes to deciding whether we should make war, kill so many men, condemn so many Spaniards to death, it is a single man who decides, and an interested party at that; it ought to be an impartial third party."

Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971)

Unchained - The Happy Stirrup (2007)

Here is the last work of my solo noise band, Unchained (ex-Knifestorm, etc.), entitled The Happy Stirrup, and self-released on CDR in 2007. Of all the solo releases I've done, today I am most satisfied with this one. It was the first time I worked with other musicians for something I considered "solo" work: the songs are constructed from the practice tapes of two bands I was playing in at the time, Gateway Evening Colours (with Alex Farrill on drums and Brian House on bass) and Innnocent Delights (with Miles Huston on drums and vocals and Sam Mehran on keyboard and guitar). In both bands I was playing guitar through a no-input mixer setup (Behringer Eurorack mixer, Boss compression/sustain pedal, Boss digital delay, Rat Distortion pedal, Roland volume pedal, and sometimes a Boss octave pedal). Gateway Evening Colours was working on a kind of deep blues/country-rock noise-wall sound, very minimal and 'jammy'. Innocent Delights was less rock-ish, more free, psychedelic sounding. The majority of the songs consist of loops cut from GEC and ID practice tapes, cut and pasted with a computer wave editor, and also EQ'd and tweaked on a computer. While the source tapes were collective efforts, the editing process was my own solipsistic endeavor. However, I still feel that the collective spirit is audible here, and I think it is for this reason that this recording sounds better to my ears than others which were wholly created in an artistic solitary confinement of sorts.
The first song, "Falsini Fop or Blade" is my fake collaboration with Franco Falsini of Sensations Fix, one of my all-time favorite musicians. This was no real collaboration: instead, I created loops from his Cold Nose solo album, played these through my mixer setup, and played guitar and sang over them. Though Falsini had recorded his part three decades before I added my own part, I still felt that the result was enough of a collaboration to create a fake band, Faux Batard (named after a Sensations Fix song), which supposedly had myself and Falsini as members. This is perhaps the most "noise" song of the album, and also comes the closest out of any recording I've ever done to replicating the sound of my live shows as Unchained.
"Spetters" (named after the Verhoeven film), "The Happy Stirrup" (named after a line from a famous translation) and "Suncanal" are all based on practice tapes of Gateway Evening Colours. With these, as well as the Innocent Delights tracks, I wanted to focus on the golden moments of group improvisation, when things suddenly come together into a song form that seems planned, though it isn't. What I wanted to do was isolate these moments, and cut and paste them into a larger composition: in other words, to force an element of postmortem compositional order onto small moments of improvisational magic. It was this combination of the non-control of group improvisation with the hyper-control of cutting and pasting alone on a wave editor that intrigued me. The GEC tracks are marked by more laid-back grooves, more Grateful Dead where the ID tracks are more free-noise.
Innocent Delights was short-lived. "Crystal Drops of Quilmes" and "Licking Tides" were the only recordings that resulted from our collaboration. We jammed 3 or 4 times, and played once live (the massive show for the opening of The Redemption Center in Brooklyn). Miles used to be in Dreamhouse, with whom I did a US tour in 2004, and now helps run the gallery Know More Games. Sam is now getting some recognition as Outer Limits Recordings. These recordings were also improvised, even Miles's vocals. I'm don't think he's actually singing real words, just like sketches for future words—which makes it even funnier when they are looped by me. Instead of developing compositions through the act of improvising, here the improvisations themselves become the compositions.
I made about 70 or 80 copies of this CDR. If anyone is interested in re-releasing it, please get in touch.

Unchained - The Happy Stirrup (2007, CDR)
1. Falsini Fop or Blade
2. Spetters
3. Crystal Drops of Quilmes
4. The Happy Stirrup
5. Suncanal
6. Licking Tides

********
UPDATE: The Happy Stirrup will be reissued as a double LP (w/ bonus tracks) by New Images Ltd., hopefully by late May. More info here: http://newimagesltd.tumblr.com/

Pro-Blog

Though I ‘look at’ Twitter (one can hardly call it reading) and have even ‘tweeted’ a couple times, and while I often get ‘very important information’ (EPL transfer deadline-day, etc.) faster by Twitter than conventional news sources, I think its an inherently flawed method of communication, one which is leading internet society down a very annoying path. The reason for this is very simple: Twitter is designed to be a mouthpiece for snark (for those of you lucky enough to not be familiar with the concept, it’s a self-explanatory portmanteau of “snide” and “remark”). Being limited to 140 characters, Twitter users can either send a short bit of compacted information (sometimes useful, more often useless), or a poorly thought-out attempt at an aphorism—i.e. a snarky one-liner, something which can only be uttered with an air of smug self-satisfaction. I have to clarify: these are not aphorisms. They are not even aphoristic. I have yet to read a good aphorism on Twitter. Aphorisms are perfect jewels of wit and intellect, labored-over and re-written, not shat out on the train to work.
(Karl Kraus: “One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.”)
The gravest dysfunction becomes apparent when one wishes to comment on something someone else has said. My main problem with Twitter is that one cannot reply to messages in any meaningful manner. The only choice is to write a return @ message, which most users have difficulty following. Furthermore, one's commentary is restricted in form: one is compelled to reply in turn with a snarky one-liner, and we should have all learned in third grade that no meaningful conversation can take place when one is limited only to snarky one-liners. The internet is a magnificent medium for interpersonal communication, and I find it really depressing to see its standards of dialogue deteriorate into a mess of fractured, half-baked, smug, thoughtless, and closed-minded snark. Why, why, why? This is not merely the “dumbing-down” of the internet, its the transformation of the internet into a big, spoiled child.
(Twitter users: if you’d like to defend Twitter in the comments below please limit yourselves to 140 characters or less).

Different Prizes pt. 2

Replying to a previous post, Brandon (The Enthusiast) writes:

I've been thinking more and more on those prizes— those "external goods" dangling around here and New York, that seem to keep working their way further and further inward— and it makes me really stick closer to that Internal Good.

I hadn’t considered the issue precisely as Brandon has portrayed it here: for me, I was thinking of Doc in the Boston Aquarium (from Robert Kramer’s Route One USA) musing on the “different prizes” of the culture that strays from the standard ideal of bourgeois America. In Doc’s (and my) original conception, prizes are differentiated between cultural norms, and it is in some sense the burden of those who have devoted their lives to a particular culture that they may only strive towards their culturally-determined prizes. Different pathways lead to different prizes, neither are objectively worth more. Doc’s goal in this little pep-talk is to remind the non-bourgeois individual, whose heart is heavy when he catches a glimpse of the comfortable, domestic life from which he has opted out (I use the masculine, because it seems likely that Doc is directing his talk self-ward, or possibly at director Kramer), that his choice of a different path also brings with it certain opportunities, its own lonely, precarious, yet noble prizes as well.
Brandon’s conception of the “external good” versus the “inner good” considers the situation from within a single cultural milieu, separating the prizes of an endeavor itself (in the university, the love of learning, the φιλοσοφία) from those which stem from the social and economic factors which affect those who partake in said endeavor (the cushy jobs, salaries, stipends, wine and cheese receptions, esteem of peers, cultural capital, etc.).
I’m sure Brandon is thinking also of the art world in NYC, where the actual artworks on the walls are often the least important things at a gallery opening—and are duly ignored by the majority of the socializing crowd. Artworks are sold not for their aesthetic value, but for the current position of the artist/gallery on the market. This position is always determined 90% by pure marketing, 10% by the quality of the artist’s oeuvre as a whole (although there’s no accounting for taste), and 0% by the quality of the work in question. No one would deny this, I think. (And if I sound bitter, it’s because I am: Chelsea is an absolute shit-show these days).
In the academy, the situation is different, and perhaps much more naive (which is not necessarily a bad thing: cynical collaboration is sometimes much worse). It is, in fact, pounded into the heads of incoming students that they are here to learn, to enrich their minds, to become better people. The motto "non scholae sed vitae discimus" (we learn not for school, but for life) provides the cover for what is at heart a training in docility and discipline, picking up enough cultural capital along the way to clear the path towards the highest-paid positions of bourgeois society. The ones who really get fooled return to the fray, and let themselves be trained to do such training, navigating an intricate obstacle course of groveling and pedantic ostentation, ending up with tenure in middle America. The first thing thrown aboard is this ideal of learning for life—the pure encounter between living man and printed word—rather than for school. Unlike the art world insularity, which is openly accepted, the academy never acknowledges the fact that it operates as an enclosed economy, that learning occurs as a stepping stone not towards enlightenment, but towards academic success—the key which (supposedly) unlocks the reservoirs of capital.
All this what I’ve just said is pure Übertreibung (exaggeration), yet to quote Thomas Bernhard, “ohne Übertreibung kann man gar nichts sagen.”
At any rate, I think its important to point out that there are certain ‘prizes’ in the academic world which have naught to do with the “inner good” of the literary experience, and everything to do with the sociological function of the university in present-day capitalistic society. Unlike the art-world, which (for better or for worse) accepts its new role (however ironically), the academy naively presumes idealism where there is only cynicism.

Trikitixa Zoom (1991) / Faruaji (1987)

I would be extremely grateful if anyone could help me find the following two albums:

Kepa Junkera - Trikitixa Zoom (1991, Euskal Herria)


La Ciapa Rusa - Faruaji (1987, Italy)

Cosas

>>>Ernst Tugendhat interview (from 4 years ago) @ signandsight

Villa Tugendhat, Brno.

Here [in Germany] there's a lot of bragging in universities. In England and the USA, people have a different way of addressing you, particularly with me, because my style of thinking is rather Anglo-Saxon. Many German colleagues have it easier in America because there people think, oh, that's some German profundity that's so profound that it can't be understood anyway. [...]

As far as the behavioural sciences are concerned, I think that people are too rash in looking for analogies – for example between human morals and animal altruism. That is what Konrad Lorenz, among others, did. As for brain research, I think it's rather crazy what's going on today. [...] They can only find out what types of processes are going on in which parts of the brain. But then those professors of brain physiology appear and present theories about the nonexistence of human freedom. And those theories are only based on the fact that they see themselves as scientists and believe in determinism.

>>>Philippe Meyer on France @ French Politics

Un pays qui prend Bernard Tapie pour un entrepreneur, Bernard-Henri Lévy pour un philosophe, Jacques Attali pour un penseur, Claire Chazal pour une journaliste, Alain Minc pour un économiste, etc. ne peut s'étonner d'avoir Nicolas Sarkozy comme président de la République.

(And in related news, Michel Serres thinks that at this particular junction in history we need to figure out if Astérix was a fascist.)

>>>Autumn's coming @ The Trad

>>>Edwin Fischer 78s @ 78 toeren klassiek